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“I have a board hearing in twelve days to save this library.” My voice is coming out too fast and too loud, and I don’t care one bit. “The county thinks it’s obsolete, and I haven’t even written the petition yet. I met you fifty minutes ago. You sat on the alphabet rug and yelled turn the page in a voice that should be illegal, and now I’m on my own ladder with my glasses off and I’m soaked through. You have the worst timing of any male on either planet. No. I have things to do.”
I stop because I’m out of air.
He’s smiling and looks delighted. Delighted, after all that.
“Yes,” he says.
Oh God, the universe gave me a sexy idiot. “Yes what?”
“Yes to the timing. It is terrible.” His voice has gone rough. “Say the rest of it.”
“There’s more?”
“You are thinking more. I want to hear it.”
I stand on the fourth rung and blink at him. Nobody has ever said that to me like it was a good thing, and I want to tell him exactly what I’m thinking in graphic detail. I’m not that crazy, so I go with the safe version.
“The pamphlet on the orcs said I would feel a pull. It undersold it.”
“Yes.” His eyes travel down my body and back up, and my panties get wetter.
The information said an orc’s sense of smell is forty times stronger than a human’s. He can smell exactly how much it undersold it.
I blush furiously and blurt out, “So now what?”
“Now I come every day.”
He means the library. I think. I can’t be around him every day. I’ll end up fucking him in some dark corner. I grasp for straws.
“You can’t read.”
“You can.”
He takes his hand off the rail and steps back so there’s room for me to come down. On the floor he’s a foot and a half taller than me, and somehow, that’s worse.
Then his voice changes. It goes slow and even, like he’s reciting something, and I realize the storyteller is telling a story, and it’s about me.
“‘No, absolutely not,’ said the keeper of eleven thousand stories, from the top of her ladder, and the orc who could not read one of them said yes.”
I didn’t see that coming. I bite the inside of my cheek so he won’t see it. “Don’t.”
His eyes twinkle. “It is a good beginning.”
“That’s not how it went.”
“It is how it will be told. I am Yorrel Emberhold, the best storyteller on all of Gorrath Venn.”
“And the most modest. I’m Paige Sutton. And now I have work to do.”
I put my glasses back on. My hands are shaking, I’m wet enough that I’m going to have to think about how I sit for the rest of the day, and there’s an orc in my reading room who is delighted with me.
I slide past him and go to the returns cart and ignore him as I wheel it to the front of the library. He follows me and continues to the door.
Before he leaves, he turns and grins. “I will be back after I find food.”
I open my mouth to tell him not to come back and then close it. Am I going to ban him from the library because being around him makes me want to fuck him and I’m accidentally now his intended mate?
My “okay” is high-pitched and undignified.
