Page 45 of Grumpy Pucking Orc
Ozar smiled fondly. “I never had her skill at making blades, but she showed me how to use metal to create small creatures for amusement and decoration. On her name-day one year, I gifted her a tiny bird I’d forged. Her name was Gruexal, which is what the little bird is called in our language.”
Gruexal. I wondered if they were like the chickadees that visited my backyard feeder. It seemed odd for a tall and muscular woman to be named after a tiny bird, but I imagined as a baby it had seemed fitting.
“That’s such a wonderful gift for your mother.” It wasn’t a surprise that Ozar was so thoughtful when it came to gifts. He’d gone to such lengths to make tonight special. He’d given me a Starbuck’s gift card, and he barely knew me. I did love my coffee, so his guess had been correct. I bit back a smile, thinking of how he had presented me his teeth in an engagement ring box. For such a large, intimidating guy, he was sweet, sensitive, and funny. Even his grumpy side was endearing.
Reaching up, Ozar took my hands in his. His eyes were serious as they met mine.
“I came here hoping to find a bride, Jordan. We are compatible with humans and can have orclets with them. I hoped to somehow find a human woman, wed her, and have the family I never could have back home.”
My heart ached for Ozar. I grieved for his mother and the others who’d died of this horrible illness. And I absolutely understood why he had chosen to come here. Companionship. Partnership. Love. Creating a life together, a family.
He wanted commitment. He wanted to settle down. And while I’d thought those things would never happen for me, I found myself wanting the same. With Ozar.
“Does that bother you, Jordan?” He let go of my hand to take a lock of my hair in his fingers, weaving it between them. “That I want a bride? A family?”
I snuggled against his chest as he played with my hair. “It’s not so different than what we humans want.”
“But what doyouwant?” he pressed.
“I…I don’t know.” I hesitated, biting back the words my heart wanted to shout to the heavens. It hadn’t even been a week since I’d met this orc. And while everything so far had been hearts and flowers—and a Starbuck’s gift card—there could be a minefield ahead that I never suspected.
“So how many of these children are you thinking?” I lifted my head to smile up at him.
“As many as the mountain gods gift me. As many as my wife agrees to bear for me.”
“That’s not an answer.” I poked him just below his ribs. “How many doyouwant?”
He smiled sheepishly. “Six. It’s a good number, and the players needed for aGhugteam.”
I rolled my eyes. “And you’ll expect your wife to do all the childrearing in addition to cooking and cleaning and sitting by your feet every night?”
I tried to keep my tone light, but Ozar scowled. “Males…menare equal parents. We provide for our families and pamper our wives. We teach our orclets. We provide for their basic care, which involves cleaning and feeding and arguing over bedtimes.”
“Good. My dad was a very involved parent, so I’ve got high expectations.”
“Tell me about him.” Ozar’s voice held a soft nostalgic note that nearly brought tears to my eyes. “Tell me about your family, about growing up as a human child.”
I did. I told him stories of my teacher father, and my mom who’d been a sort of administrative do-all at a local scrapyard. We’d had an ancient car held together mostly by duct tape, and a split-level rancher for our home. Both parents spent most weekends fixing what had broken in either the car or the house, and neither my brother nor I had owned the latest version of any electronic game. But we always had food, and we always were warm. Summer vacations were an excursion to tent camp for a week in a national park, or a week at Aunt Jan and Uncle Mark’s house only a few miles from the Jersey shore, and winter breaks were spent skiing at whatever east coast spot my parents got the best deal at. We weren’t poor, just solidly middle class. And my parents had spent our youth being carefully frugal, which meant that both my brother and I had been able to go to college with only a minimal amount of student loans.
My loans were bigger thanks to the dental doctorate my parents hadn’t budgeted for, but I still was absolutely grateful for their shrewd financialplanning.
I told him how Dad had given me my love of the theater, and my inability to go for a hike without coming home with my pockets full of interesting rocks, how my mom collected old cookbooks and would spring strange side dishes of aspic and mysterious casseroles on us every week or so for dinner. About how she’d gotten me my first car from the salvage yard and secretly worked on it with Dad for months before presenting it to me for my eighteenth birthday.
I must have rambled on for an hour, but Ozar never interrupted. He continued to play with my hair, his breathing rhythmic and his chest rising and falling under my cheek.
Lifting my head, I met his eyes. “Sorry. It’s probably not a great first-date move to give you a not-so-abridged version of my childhood.”
“Courtship is learning about each other,” he said. “Physically and emotionally. These things either bring us closer, or pull us apart, but it’s important to show all of us to each other. Seeing the beauty is easy, but love is about knowing the scars, too.”
I traced the groove in his chest again. “I love your scars, even though how you got this one still scares me.”
He slid me up along his body and kissed me, softly, slowly, with tenderness.
“Now it is your turn. Show meyourscars.” His smile was teasing.
“They aren’t from any battles,” I warned him.
“Are any of them from falling off a cliff as a child?”
