Page 23 of Single Pucking Orc

He shot her a grin that she almost returned. “Mildred Prescott is coming Thursday to look at the house, and there's another visit on the calendar three weeks after that. I put them both on the calendar. Twice. I found a pediatrician. Apparently you have to check whether they take half-orc kids, which I didn’t know. First appointment’s Friday morning. I called the attorney back about the paternity test, which they’ll also do at the doctor’s appointment. And I spent forty minutes on hold with the insurance company and got her added to my policy, which was its own hell because they didn’t have a box to check for daughter I learned about yesterday, so.”

Nora looked at him. She looked at him for slightly too long, and she knew it was slightly too long, and she couldn’t stop, because this was not the report she’d expected. She’d expected I meant to call the daycare, but and I figured I’d sort it out later. She’d expected a male who arranged his life the way her mother did—in bright improvised bursts that somebody else had to manage. She had a whole speech ready for that male. She’d been sharpening it since he left.

Instead he’d made a list. He’d found the doctor who took half-orc kids. He’d thought about the eleven p.m. flights from Montreal.

“That’s—” She reset. “That’s actually organized.”

“You sound betrayed.”

“I feel a little betrayed, yes.”

“Sorry, not sorry.” He grinned, and it was the real one, a little tired at the edges. “Thank you, Nora. Genuinely. You saved me this morning. Three hours, one time, like I said. I mean it, you’re off the hook. Deb’s got a whole system, apparently. And there’s an app⁠—”

“There’s an app?”

“There’s an app.” He was already backing towards his door, Charlie’s fists still in his beard, and the diaper bag hooked over one massive shoulder like it had always been part of his kit. “Go do your books. Bill me for the blanket.”

She shut the door behind him and stood in the hall. Her house was exactly as it always was except the cushions were still in their nest on the office floor. The bottle was still on the dish rack. The place was quiet in the way she’d spent four years and a considerable amount of effort creating, but this morning the quiet was louder than usual.

Then she went and reconciled the Broken Stick’s account, which had a discrepancy of eleven dollars and forty cents. She found it in under an hour. And that should have been that.

It was the burp cloth’s fault.

She found it at 6:40 that evening, wedged half under her office armchair, a small pink square with cartoon rabbits on it. She stood there holding it in the doorway of the room where she’d spent the whole afternoon not getting Green Mountain Landscaping’s quarterly done. She kept thinking about the interviews at four and four-forty-five. She kept wondering whether he’d picked the right one and whether it was any of her business, even though she knew it wasn’t. That was, more or less, the point of the life she’d built.

She could keep the burp cloth until tomorrow. That was the sane move. It was a burp cloth. It was not an emergency. She could put it on her desk and give it back at the next handoff, if there even was a next handoff, which there wasn’t going to be, because she was off the hook.

She was walking across the lawn before she’d finished the argument.

His porch light was on. The front window looked straight through the entry hall into the open living area at the back of the house. Even though the room was cluttered with half-opened boxes, it looked warm and comfortable, glowing gold in the lamplight. She wasn’t spying. The curtains were open, so this was simply information the universe was offering. She raised her hand to knock and then didn’t, because of what she was looking at.

Rognar was cooking.

He’d found the kitchen, apparently, in the twenty-four hours since Charlie had rearranged his life. He was standing at the stove in a soft grey T-shirt with the sleeves straining across his massive biceps, stirring something that steamed. His hair was all the way down now, dark and loose past his shoulders, and Charlie was tucked against his chest in some kind of wrap contraption. She was fast asleep with just her head visible and one tiny green fist curled under her chin.

He swayed, the small automatic sway of a male who’d learned in a day and a night that if he stopped moving the cloud came in. So he kept moving, stirring the pot and murmuring something down at the top of his daughter’s head. The whole picture—the enormous male being quiet and careful, the sleeping baby, the steam, the soft golden light, the T-shirt—all of it did something to her hormones that she was going to have to have a serious talk with herself about.

Her response was hot and immediate and entirely without her permission. Her practical, organized, four-clients-closing brain went briefly and completely offline. She stood on his porch in the dark holding a square of rabbits and watched Rognar Stonebreaker being tender. The argument she’d been having with herself for the past year, the one where he was charming and useless and exactly the kind of male she’d built a stable life specifically to avoid, suddenly developed a serious flaw.

This is a problem, she thought, clearly. This is a genuine problem.

That was when he looked up and caught her.

She saw the exact moment he registered not just that she was there, but how she was standing there and what she’d been looking at and what it had been doing to her. The tiredness fell away from him, and something far more dangerous took its place. He didn’t stop swaying. He didn’t stop stirring. He just looked at her through the window with a knowledge that she would have given a great deal for him not to have. Then he crossed to the door and opened it one-handed, the baby still asleep on his chest, and leaned against the frame.

“Evening, neighbor,” he said quietly, so as not to wake Charlie.

“You left a burp cloth.” She held it up. “Under the chair. It has rabbits on it. I’m returning it. That’s the reason I’m here.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It is.”

“Sure.” He took it from her, and his fingers were so warm where they brushed against hers that she jumped. He tucked the cloth into the waistband of his sweatpants without looking down, still watching her. “How long were you standing out there?”

“I wasn’t standing anywhere. I walked up, I knocked⁠—”

“You didn’t knock.”