The Orc Who Turned the Page

I’m not looking for true love from another planet. I’m just trying to keep the county from closing my library.

I’m the woman everyone asks to tone it down, and I’ve been told so since the fourth grade. Now the county board has decided a small-town library is obsolete, and it would like me to keep my voice down while it votes.

Story hour is the one place nobody tells me to be quiet. So when the newest orc in town walks in halfway through and sits down on the alphabet rug with the four-year-olds, I keep reading.

He’s a storyteller. He carries three hundred years of his clan’s history in his head, and he can’t read a single word of English, so he comes back the next day and asks me to read to him. I’m not expecting the orc bond to fire the first time we stand close enough to touch. One breath of me, and his biology decides.

Then he asks for the next chapter, and the one after that. Yorrel is the first person who has ever asked me for more instead of less.

I’ve spent my whole life being told where to stop. I didn’t expect an orc who can’t read to be the one who says turn the page.

For readers who love: short and spicy fated mates, orc romance, scent bonds that bypass all higher brain function, a librarian who talks too much and an orc who can’t get enough, teaching a seven-foot storyteller to read, monster size difference (everywhere), he-falls-first-and-harder, claiming bites, and the kind of heat the library stacks can’t hide.

Tropes: Fated Mates • Orc Romance • Monster Romance • Small Town Romance • Librarian Heroine • Scent Bond • Size Difference • He Falls First • Claiming Bites

Heat Level: Spicy │ Tone: Light/Funny, Sweet │ Series Type: Interconnected Standalones (Her Small Town Orc, Book 2) │ Ending: HEA │ POV: Single Heroine First Person, Present Tense │ Content: One orc, one heroine. No cheating, no