Page 51 of My Orc Package Deal

Two months of my tea water already being hot when I stumbled into the kitchen, and teaching Jay how to skate on rollerblades, and listening to Milo jamming in the sunroom with his new father.

Two months of Korrad.

The sob that came out of me wasn’t dignified. It was the full-body ugly kind, because I was thinking about an hour ago—one hour ago I had been standing in this same hallway, flushed and humming, and the biggest problem I had was that I’d accidentally moaned out loud thinking about my husband.

One hour ago, I had been so happy I hadn’t even identified it as happiness. That was how good it was. It didn’t register as a thing to protect.

I had been keeping score for weeks. I had known—I knew—that it wasn’t balanced, that I’d been taking more than I gave, that I was stealing from Korrad, that eventually the math would catch up. I’d told myself to stop, told myself Korrad didn’t see it that way, told myself to just let it be good.

Lies.

Here was the tally, final and official, delivered by a man in a suit on a Friday afternoon.

Korrad—my husband—was going to come home, and he was going to look at me, and for the first time in two months, he wasn’t going to see his wife. He was going to see what I actually was: A woman who’d walked into his life trailing her own wreckage, who’d kissed him and shared his home and let herself fall, and hadn’t once told him the truth.

He was going to think about Sharra—beautiful, devastating Sharra, who he still loved, who he had never stopped loving, because orcs Mated for life—and he was going to understand exactly what he’d traded her for.

A headache with a loan shark.

I couldn’t bear it.

Twenty minutes ago, I had been thinking about this evening, about having him to myself, about finally, maybe, beginning to even up the score. I had been so goddamn sure I was about to start giving something back.

Now I wanted to disappear before he got home.

I curled up on my side and pulled my knees to my chest and held myself there, because there was no one else to do it, and sobbed.

Chapter Eleven

Korrad

I picked up lo mein and eggrolls from Number One China on the way home. I mean, I’d planned on doing it all along, but that was before… Before. Now, instead of thinking about protein for a long night of pleasuring my wife, I’d figured she’d want carbs…and maybe some wine.

The house was quiet, so I walked softly into the kitchen to deposit the bags.

“Kesha?” I called softly, expanding my senses.

Ah, there she was—I could hear her soft, hiccupy breathing from the living room. I kicked off my boots and padded in there in my socks... to find my wife asleep on the couch.

It didn’t look like a pleasant sleep. There were tear tracks on her cheeks and wet splotches on the couch pillows.

She’d cried herself to sleep.

I stood there, staring down at her in confusion.

Earlier, after the doorbell had rung, I’d felt her fear and panic and came running to protect her. I hadn’t understood why she’d reacted so strongly to Smalls, but once I realized this was a legal matter, I forced my Kteer—and my claws—to stand down. This could be solved with money, not violence, as much as I wanted to punish the male who’d frightened my Kesha.

Why had she been so upset? Debt wasn’t unusual, although after ten minutes with Smalls, I had a pretty good idea how predatory Northstar’s lending practices were. My wife was smart; she wouldn’t have gone to them or signed their terms if she hadn’t been desperate.

Would she explain why?

Did it matter?

“Kesha?” I murmured again, kneeling beside the couch. She didn’t stir.

I glanced out of the large picture window toward the backyard. Dark clouds had rolled past while I was at the bank—Aswan’s Mate had been willing to keep the place open a bit longer so I could discuss the situation with Smalls in private—and cooled the evening air down a bit. I suppose I’d been longer than expected; Kesha might have been asleep for two hours by this point.

She was exhausted, and I tried not to let my Kteer feel smug about the fact she’d gotten little sleep last night.