Page 62 of Orc'd & Loaded
Her chef's coat buttons are small. My fingers are not. The first one pops free. The second resists, and I growl low in my throat, a rumble she can feel where we press together.
"Patience," she murmurs. Same thing I learned making the balsamic reduction.
The second button gives. Third. Fourth. The white fabric falls open. Underneath, just a thin cotton tank, and her skin is warm through it, warmer than the cellar, warmer than the kitchen during service. She shivers when my palm spreads across her lower back, and the shiver travels through her body into mine.
I bring my mouth to her throat. Her pulse hammers against my lips. Fast. Steady. The rhythm of someone working a hot line at full capacity. All systems engaged. Nothing held back.
She tips her head back and gives me more of her neck. My tusks graze the tendon that runs from her jaw to her collarbone, and her fingers dig into my shoulders hard enough to leave marks through the shirt.
"Eleven days," I say against her skin.
Her hands stop. She pulls back far enough to see my face.
"What?"
"You asked how long it took." I lean my forehead against hers. Our breath mingles. Chocolate and woodsmoke. "Eleven days. I'd do eleven more."
Her lower lip trembles again. She grabs both suspender straps, one in each fist, bandage and all, and pulls me back in.
We lie on the table for a long time. Not sleeping. The candles burn low, wax pooling in the iron holders, and the tavern settles around us with the quiet creaks and sighs of old wood cooling after a hot day.
Her head rests on me. My heartbeat has slowed to something manageable. Her fingers trace idle patterns across my collarbone, and every few minutes she presses her nose against my shirt and inhales, like she's cataloging the scent profile. Woodsmoke. Roasted spice. Sweat. Whatever combination of those things adds up to me.
"The cauliflower steak," she says.
"Mm."
"You scored the surface in a crosshatch before charring it."
"Deeper char penetration. Saw you do it with a butternut squash through your kitchen window last Tuesday."
Her finger stops tracing. "You've been watching me cook."
"You work in front of a window."
"That's not a denial."
"No. It isn't."
She props her chin on my sternum. The weight of her skull, slight as it is, presses the bone. Her eyes are still bright in the dying candlelight, and a dark strand of hair sticks to the corner of her mouth. I brush it away with my thumb. She catches the thumb between her teeth. Bites once. Releases.
"We're going to destroy that critic tomorrow."
"Bold."
"I mean it." She pushes up to sitting, straddling my waist, and the view from this angle belongs in a painting. Her hair wild. Chef coat hanging open. Cheeks flushed. She looks like someone who has just finished the best service of her life. "Your fire spice, my technique. His palate won't know what hit it."
I fold my arms behind my head. The table protests. "You want to run through the menu?"
"Right now?"
"You have somewhere else to be?"
She grins. Full. Unguarded. No trace of the rigid perfectionist who sprinted across the street to yell at me about smoke ventilation. This version of Solene Rostova sits on an Orc in a wrecked dining room surrounded by cast iron skillets on the floor and doesn't care about a single one of them.
This version is magnificent.
We spend the next hour talking through every course. She slides off the table and finds a stub of chalk in the bar drawer, and we map the entire tasting menu on the slate board behind the taps. Seven courses. Each one a collision of her precision and my fire. Smoked beet carpaccio with charred pistachio dust. A black garlic and truffle consommé. The cauliflower steak as the centerpiece, reconstructed with her plating sensibility and my searing technique.
