Page 21 of Wed to the Orc Captive

I caught my breath again, desperate gasps that sounded too much like sobs.

When I returned to the campfire he had one bowl he was eating from, offered another to me. I took it.

“If you can,” he said, “Tell me what’s bothering you before you decide to start a fight. I’ll try to do this better.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Am I forgiven?”

“Pardon?”

He was staring at me, the ghost of a smile on his mouth. “Am I forgiven?”

“For what?”

He whistled, low. “There’s a list already? Sajahk, this is bad. Three days of marriage and I’m in the hole.” I reached for denials, defense, but he pointed at me. “No, you smiled. I saw that. I’m winning. You forgave me for something.” White teeth shone when he grinned.

Maybe I wouldn’t have to kill him. Maybe I got out of this alive, and he did too. Maybe we reached somewhere safe, and I just disappeared, and he forgot. He spooned soup into his mouth. “Mm. Better than rations.”

It was.

The sun set. He banked the coals and walked us farther into the trees for another place to camp. “We’re far from the road, and the wood was too dry for much smoke,” he said. “But I prefer not to trust the moon when I travel alone.” He didn’t mention that traveling with me was harder than alone would be.

When he was content with a small hollow between banks of trees, he smoothed the ground and started laying out the bedding against the earth wall. “I usually sleep sitting up,” he said. “It’s faster to run if I have to.”

I nodded. The moon had disappeared behind the clouds again, and my vision of his preparations in this already dark space was dim. The breeze was chill, and I shivered. An owl hooted, in the night, and I turned to spot it, cutting across the slightest flash of the sky.

“Alright,” he said. “When you’re ready.”

And I’d lost him. My eyes, already weak, had attuned to the brightest part of the night, and now it was only blackness here. I moved stiffly forwards, searching with my toes, my hands, gasped when I touched the warmth of his skin.

His laugh boomed through the hollow.

“Are you going to just watch me⁠—"

“Why? Is that unkind?” His hands caught my waist, and I forgot how to breathe. “Should I show you where I am, then?” The heat was rising in my face, and he laughed again. And I told myself that this made sense, that while I needed him, I needed him to be happy, that playing the wife meant this too.

He pulled me down, to straddle him, and I yiped in shock, before his hand pressed my cheek. “You’re pretty in the dark,” he said. “But you’d be prettier with less between us.”

There was no one else here. However my breath caught, this was perhaps better, better than barely-closed doors in makeshift prisons, or orc tents near other sweaty bodies, or whatever other place this life could find to get me unclothed. I found the hem of that shift.

His hands brushed over my bare shoulders, down, and his voice hummed deep in his chest. “It is a shame you can’t see this,” he said.

“Why?” I got out.

“Because you’re lovely.”

And that shouldn’t have set my face on fire again, but he laughed, and I knew he could see it. I could feel him against me, though he hadn’t disrobed, the size and the heat of him, and goosebumps prickled across my skin, readiness like fear.

“We could get under the blanket,” I said, all false calm and bravado. Far too calm for someone who was naked in the woods with an orc.

His voice rolled against my ear. “So eager to hide.”

I lifted my chin. “It’s cold.”

He chuckled again, and the blanket snugged around my shoulders. I started climbing off his legs to find space next to him, when he twisted me in and caught me against his side.

And now my face was on fire, now with so much of my skin on his, his arm tight around me, and I was squeezing my eyes shut against the dark, trying to breathe and keep from making a sound. The warmth of his breath huffed against my forehead, rosemary and pine. His hand caught my hip, moved⁠—