Page 48 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"Noted," he says. He is still holding the knife out.
I step forward.
My hand is shaking slightly when I reach out, and I take the knife from his palm, wrapping my fingers around the carved handle. It fits there differently than I expect, not awkwardly but substantially, present and purposeful, it settling into my grip like something that knows where it belongs.
"I don't know how to throw a knife," I tell him.
"I will teach you."
"I'm probably terrible at it."
"You will improve."
"What if I throw it at you by accident?"
Something moves through his expression. The warm thing at his edges spreads.
"Then you will have thrown a knife at me," he says, "and I will be deeply impressed by your commitment."
I look down at the knife in my hand, then up at him. He is still on one knee, watching me with those relentless silver eyes, and he is so large that even kneeling he barely has to tilt his head up to meet my gaze, and the suit is immaculate despite the wine incident and the rehearsal dinner and however many hours he has spent tonight being aggressively dapper in service of a contract he just tore up.
"Get up," I say softly.
He rises. Smooth and unhurried, all that enormous mass moving with that quiet, predatory economy that I have been very unsuccessfully not noticing since the moment he walked into the lobby. He straightens to his full height and the night seems to close in around him, the scale of him always slightly astonishing no matter how much time I spend in his proximity.
I tip my head back to look up at him properly.
"I need to tell you something," I say.
He waits.
"I was terrified of this weekend. I don't mean the social performance of it, though that was also genuinely awful. I mean—" I choose the words carefully, because they deserve to be chosen carefully. "I've been running on anxiety and pure stubborn spite for so long that I'd completely forgotten what it felt like to have someone in my corner who actually wanted to be there. Not out of family obligation or politeness or because they were being paid to be." I tighten my grip on the knife handle. "And then you showed up, and you were so completely, aggressively on my side, and I kept telling myself it wasn't realbecause you were on the clock, except it felt real. It felt more real than anything I've had in years."
His jaw tightens. Not anger. The other kind of tightening, the kind that happens when something lands.
"It was real," he says. "From the beginning. I was simply also doing my job."
"Past tense."
"Completely past tense."
The music from inside the venue changes keys, something slower rolling out across the evening, and in the distance a group of guests spills out onto the terrace laughing, but we are far enough back in the car park that no one is paying attention to us, and the night is very quiet in the immediate radius of this enormous, formally dressed Orc who has just offered me his blade and upended every expectation I arrived here with.
I look up at him for a long moment, and then I do the thing I've been stopping myself from doing without the excuse of a watching audience for the first time all weekend.
I reach up, curl my free hand into the lapel of his jacket, and pull him down.
He comes willingly, folding himself toward me with that careful, deliberate gentleness that is somehow more devastating than any amount of force, and I kiss him in the car park with his knife in my right hand and my heels uneven on the tarmac and the distant wedding reception playing something that is technically a love song.
He makes a low sound against my mouth and his hands come up to bracket my face, thumbs tracing the line of my jaw with a precision that feels like reverence, and I stop thinking about anything except the warmth of him and the solid, immovable reality of his presence and the fact that when the weekend ends and we drive away from this venue and this family and this particular sixty-hour disaster, he is coming with me.
Not because I'm paying him.
Because he decided to.
When we finally break apart, I'm breathing unsteadily and he's watching me with a look I've only seen fragments of all weekend, usually in the moments between the performance, when he thought I wasn't looking. It's stripped of the professional calm and the deadpan precision and the elaborate bodyguard posture. It's just him, looking at me, and what's in his face is so straightforward and so enormous and so completely unguarded that it nearly takes my knees out entirely.
"I need to ask you something," I say, when I have approximately recovered the power of speech.
