Page 38 of Single Pucking Orc

“Stop saying you know.”

“I’ll stop saying I know when you stop being right about it.” His arm turned slowly under her hand—not shaking her off, but returning her gesture. His palm came up and her hand slid into it, and his huge fingers closed around hers, the way she’d watched them close around a hockey stick and a mug and his daughter’s head. “If you want to move your hand, this is the part where you’d do it.”

“I don’t want to move my hand.”

“Okay.”

She was the one who moved first. She was aware of standing, aware that she was the one making the move. She came around the corner of the table with her heart doing something disorderly. He watched her come and didn’t move to meet her halfway.

She understood, with a clarity that irritated her, that he was letting her be the one in charge. He was going to let her lead every inch of this, on purpose. That he could hand over control that deliberately was a problem for later.

She stopped in front of him. He looked at her, still seated, which put them nearer to eye level than they had ever been, and she got her first honest study of his face this close. The amber-brown eyes, the beard shorter and neater than she’d realized, the two tusks curving up pale from his lower jaw.

“I’m going to have to think about those,” she said, looking at the tusks.

“Take your time. They’ve been there a while.”

She put her hand to his jaw, sliding her thumb along the beard, and tilted his face, trying to recapture the angle of their previous kiss. He sat there and let her, his hands loose on his thighs. He was waiting for her but something about the waiting made her stomach quiver.

She found the angle, and she kissed him. The other times he’d been leading it. This one was hers, and she had nowhere to be, and she took her time, and somewhere in the taking of her time his restraint stopped being in charge of the room.

His hands came up, one at her waist and one between her shoulder blades. Enormous hands, so hot through her shirt that each finger was a separate source of heat. He tugged her in between his knees. She got a knee up onto the chair beside his hip, then thought better of the chair.

“Counter,” she said, against his mouth.

“There’s a counter,” he agreed, and stood, and the room reorganized.

She was up on the counter before she’d fully decided on it, both his hands around her waist, the cold of the stone through her jeans a shock against all that heat. Then he stepped in, and there was no cold anywhere. He stood between her knees and she had to tip her face up and he had to bend down.

She caught one of his tusks with her lip, just enough to make her notice.

“Sorry,” he murmured. “Tip your head. The other way. There.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“I’ve kissed. I’ve never done a supervised trial.” He drew back a fraction, one hand coming up to move a strand of her hair off her face, patient again. “You want to keep the notes?”

“I want you to stop talking.”

“Now that,” he said, “I have never once been asked.”

She got the angle after that, and with nothing left to manage there was only him. Only his heat and the size of his hands and the low sound he made when her fingers found the back of his neck. His hand slid up under the hem of her shirt, his palm hot on the bare skin of her back, and she gasped into his mouth. She got her hands under his shirt, and there was a great deal of him and all of it ran hot, and she stopped thinking in complete sentences.

“Nora,” he said against her mouth. “Tell me if this is where we’re going or if it isn’t. I can do either. I need to know which one.”

“It’s where we’re going.”

“Thank God.”

His hands went to the buttons of her shirt with the concentration of a male who’d learned this exact fine-motor problem on a great many snap-fastened onesies at two in the morning. She laughed—actually laughed, breathlessly, into his mouth—because he was better at her buttons than she was. He felt her laugh and grinned against her without stopping, and then her shirt was open and he was kissing his way down her throat, and she tipped her head back against the cupboard door and stopped laughing.

It was a lot to take in at once. The sheer overwhelming size of him, and the feel of his body against her everywhere. His mouth was on her collarbone, and then her breasts, and she arched into him with a cry she couldn’t possibly have prevented. He unhooked her bra without looking, and she was half naked on his kitchen counter with an orc the size of her front door and she didn’t want him to stop. His mouth closed over her nipple and she was shaking already and⁠—

The monitor woke up. A single thin cry, then a second, already ramping up. His mouth stopped where it was. Neither of them breathed. And then he groaned and went. He lifted her down off the counter and set her on her feet as if that were part of the same motion as heading for Charlie’s room. He grabbed his shirt off the floor and was gone, the cries already changing pitch as he reached her, hey, hey, I’ve got you, what’s all this⁠—

She stood in the middle of his kitchen and did up her buttons.

The counter had nearly finished her, but it wasn’t the counter that made her hands shake. It was the fact that he’d gone, instantly. She fastened the second button and then the top one, standing in a stranger’s kitchen that was not a stranger’s kitchen anymore.