Page 31 of Romancing the Orc

His magic flares, and a bunch of bananas falls into his waiting hands.

The peels are thicker than I’m used to, and the flesh inside is a pale peach instead of yellow, but they taste even sweeter than the bananas we get in America. I eat two, and Brokk finishes off the rest as we continue to walk.

Next, he finds a coconut palm. A pulse of electricity ripples through the air as he uses his magic. Nothing happens. Another pulse, and Brokk grunts and starts walking again.

“What is it?” I ask.

“The tree said no. It lost many palm fronds in a storm a year ago and is just getting back to full strength. It didn’t make any younglings last year, so it prizes all that it has now.”

“And you couldn’t make it give us a coconut?”

“I could, but why would I?” He glances back over his shoulder, his expression serious. “We’re hungry, but we’re not in danger of starving. We can find another tree.”

My heart pinches. Brokk’s the kind of guy who’ll take out any creep who bothers me but will also not harm an innocent plant. It’s a code of honor like I write for the orc warriors in my books, and like my books, I thought men like this were a fantasy—something too wonderful to ever be true.

But he’s real, and I need to know more about him.

“So what was it like, coming to Earth? I don’t see how you got a job.”

He throws me a bemused grin. “I’m a good worker.”

“I don’t mean like that.” I wave a hand. “I mean all the paperwork. You don’t have a birth certificate or a social security number. Did you magic up something?”

“No, my magic only works on plants.” He moves a wide mat of vines out of the way to make an easy trail for me. We pause for a moment, and one of the vines snakes over to Brokk’s hand, offering up a trumpet-shaped bloom in a gorgeous deep pink. He plucks it and tucks it over my ear. “There. A beautiful flower for my beautiful mate.”

I hook a hand over his shoulder and strain upward on my tiptoes, falling short of my prize. “Come here.”

He smirks and lifts me up, his lips still smiling as they take mine in a kiss that curls my toes.

As we continue through the jungle, he says, “You’re right. I don’t have any of the paperwork you mention. Everything’s handled by Steve.”

“That’s your agent?”

Brokk nods. “He’s the one who found me in Times Square. He bought me dinner, and we talked. Steve asked me about all these papers you mentioned, and when I admitted I didn’t have any, he said not to worry. He took me to an apartment where two other men live and gave me a place to sleep. Then the next day he took me to buy new clothes and booked my first auditions. He signs all the papers.”

“And takes all the money,” I mutter. “I bet this guy goes after illegal immigrants and takes a huge cut of their earnings instead of the ten percent he’s supposed to get. Do you know how much he takes?”

“No, I didn’t care. Your little green pieces of human paper don’t mean anything in Faerie.” Brokk gives a careless shrug. “And Steve allowed me to fit into your world. Orcs don’t have the glamours and spells needed to look human—not like the elf fae—and I’m not sureanyfae know how to do all this human paperwork. Such documents weren’t necessary when we visited Earth over three-hundred years ago. All we needed then was gold.”

“You’re right. I should thank Steve.” I won’t. The guy is probably exactly what I think—someone using other people to make lots of money—but I can’t deny that Brokk didn’t have a lot of options.

Which makes me wonder how we’ll work out the paperwork for the future.

Our future.

“Earth was very confusing at first. Your world has changed so much over the last three centuries, whereas Faerie changed littlein how we live our daily lives. We still heat our cottages with fire. We hunt and farm. We ride unicorns.”

Unicorns? How freaking cool is that?

“But you do all of that with magic, don’t you?” I ask. At his nod, I add, “Which means you never needed to develop technology.”

“True. Added to that is the fact that my ancestors spent those first hundred years rebuilding our civilization.”

“That sounds like quite the tale!” Excitement thrums through me, everything I love about stories and fantasy making me giddy. “I want to know everything!”

Brokk finds another coconut palm, this one able to share its nuts, and we eat and walk while he tells me the story of his world.

When the doors of Faerie slammed closed three-hundred years ago, a goddess took orcs, unicorns, dragons, and other fae from all over Faerie and dropped them into Alarria, an uninhabited realm full of new magic.

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