Page 81 of Protective Pucking Orc

Halfway through his buttons, he stopped. Just stood there in the lamplight, half out of his shirt, staring at the middle distance with a little grin on his lips.

I loved the way he smiled more these days.

“What?”

“She said, night, Dad. You did the voice good.” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t get over it. Dad. Every time she says it, it sits on my chest like—” He pressed a fist to his heart, shorthand for everything too big for either of his languages. “I keep waiting to become accustomed to it.”

“It’s only been three months.”

“It’s been a year,” he said. “That’s the part I can’t hold in my head, dkaar. One year ago, I was sitting in your section pretending I liked eggs that much.”

I laughed out loud. “You ate a ten-egg omelette every other morning. That was pretending?”

“I ate,” he said, with great dignity, climbing into bed, “with purpose. The eggs were a strategy. The eggs worked—look where I am.” He stretched out on his side facing me, one arm crooked under his head, and the whole mattress dipped toward him like the tide going out. “One year from the café to night, Dad.”

“Just in time, too.” I found his free hand and laced my fingers through it. “The adoption cleared with a few months to spare.”

“To spare before what?”

Careful, said the voice in my head, but it was laughing while it said it. Not yet. Let him find it.

“Christmas,” I said, innocent as pie.

He grunted, accepting this, and pulled me in against him, and I went, tucking myself into that space against his chest that fit me so exactly it was ridiculous, like the gods had taken measurements of us both. His hand made a slow pass down my spine. His nose dropped to my hair, because that’s how my husband ends every single day of his life—one long inhale of me, the Kteer taking attendance.

He inhaled.

He paused.

He inhaled again, longer, and his whole body went from bedtime-loose to alert underneath me.

“What?” I said into his chest, already grinning where he couldn’t see it.

“There’s something—” He drew back enough to look at me, nostrils flaring, brow crashing down into that thundercloud of concentration I’d watched him aim at opposing power plays. “Your scent is off.”

“Rude.”

“Not bad,” he said it like I’d accused him of blasphemy. “Never bad, just… Different. It’s been—faint, for days, I thought it was the festival cooking, the smoke, but—” He leaned in and pressed his nose to the curve of my throat, dead serious, conducting an investigation, and I bit down hard on my lip because laughing would ruin the forensics.

He sniffed down to my collarbone. Back up under my jaw. One big hand splayed across my back, holding me still, while three hundred pounds of apex predator sniffed me like a bloodhound in a police procedural.

“It’s warmer,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Rounder. It’s you, but it’s—there’s me in it, which happens, we share a bed, but this isn’t that, this is under your skin, it’s you and me both at once, it’s coming from you, it’s⁠—”

I felt it hit him.

The whole male stopped.

Everything—hands, breath, the low idle of the growl he doesn’t know he does. He pulled back so fast the headboard knocked the wall, and he stared at me, and his eyes were enormous, and his mouth opened, and nothing came out.

My unshakeable husband. The Wall.

Speechless in his marital bed with his hand hovering over my stomach like it had gotten stuck mid-air between asking and knowing.

“There he is,” I said softly. “Took you long enough. I’ve guessed for two weeks, and only because apparently Mate Bonds laugh at IUDs. My OBGYN says it likely came out sometime in the last few months and I never noticed.”

“You—” His voice came out wrecked. “Dkaar. You’re—we’re⁠—”

“Pregnant.” Saying it out loud for the first time cracked my own composure clean in half; my eyes went hot and my grin went wobbly, and I said it again anyway, because it was mine to say, and I’d been hoarding it. “I’m pregnant. You’re smelling your baby, Dakvaar.”