Page 40 of My Orc Contract Husband
If there were children sitting here for breakfast, I’d cut their pancakes up small so they could sop up the syrup as much as they liked. I’d pour them a big glass of orange juice and help them wash their tiny hands, and afterward we would read a book before school…
“So the lady at the bank let me know they had all the information they needed from me, but we’ll have to reapply jointly for a mortgage. Maybe this weekend—Tarkhan?”
I jolted, half-distracted by my imagination. “Yeah! Sounds good.”
Sami was studying me, head cocked to one side. “What were you thinking about?”
Did it matter? We were only going to be married for a year and a day, weren’t we? “Nothing,” I assured her with a half-smile. “Doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t be like that.” Frowning, she put down her fork. “Clearly you were thinking about something distracting.”
Well crap, I didn’t want to alarm her, so I shrugged and told her the truth. “I’ve been thinking lately about something Sakkara said at the wedding. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but being married to you…”
The way she leaned forward, pulling her coffee mug against her chest, looked almost eager. “What is it? What did he say?”
Damn. Well, now I felt a little strange, being the center of her attention.
I bent over my breakfast, wolfing down three links in one bite. But Sami seemed content to wait, and when I looked up, she was still watching me expectantly, most of her plate clear. As I watched, she raised one brow in challenge.
I sighed.
“I…used to have this thought. Plan? I dunno. It was right after we left the research facility in Denver. You know about that?”
When she shook her head, I gave her a condensed history of our arrival in the human world: How the clan elders had, after years of consideration, given into the plan of sending orc males through the veil, but forbidding them from returning. I didn’t tell her how I’d been forced to go, nor how Abydos and his brothers had chosen to follow, but I lingered on Sakkara’s leadership.
“He was the one who decided we ought to reveal ourselves to the human media first, so the government couldn’t hide us away. Abydos, being—well,Abydos…his first interaction with humans was nasty, and we all learned from it. Thanks to Sakkara’s quick thinking, we were scooped up by the scientists instead of the military, and we spent the next year in one of their research facilities.”
Sami, who’d gone back to her meal, paused with her last bite of pancakes suspended inches from her mouth. “Research? Like what?”
I shrugged again, deciding she didn’t need to know about the painful experiments and humiliations we’d endured, not now. “We learned English and about this world, and they learned everything they could about our world.” Although we never told them how to reach it, thank fuck. Even after all that, I slept better at night knowing what was left of my family was safe.
“What happened after that year?” she asked.
“The government realized we needed to integrate, so they gave us hush money and sent us off into the world. Sakkara always had a mind for mathematics, and he helped us invest our money. Most of us have a nice chunk of savings now, thanks to him.”
Sami hummed as she pushed her chair back and picked up her now-empty plate. “But not you.”
I’d been busy admiring the way she moved and now blinked. “What?”
“Riven asked me why you alone of the orcs on this island didn’t have a bunch of money. You didn’t have enough to convince the bank to lend you enough to buy a house.” Her back was to me now as she rinsed her plate. “Did you not invest with the rest of your friends?”
Well, shit. “Not really. I wanted to use my money right away, so I ended up only putting a little of it into savings.” When she scooped up the pancake pan and brought it over to the sink, I blurted, “I can wash that.”
“Don’t be silly.” Sami shot me a grin over her shoulder. “You cooked, I’ll clean. So what did you spend the hush money on? PS I have a million more questions aboutyour time in that place—sounds horrible—but only one thread at a time.”
I had to grin. “Fair enough. Well…” How to explain? “Right before we left the facility, Abydos and I got into a conversation with one of the anthropologists. It was an older woman, Dr. Fairbanks, and we were asking her about her family—children, parents, what’s expected in the human world, that sort of thing.”
“Makes sense, if you were learning about each other.”
“She talked about being raised in the foster care system and not knowing her real parents, and I remember sitting there just flabbergasted. I asked her everything I could think of—she stayed until almost midnight that night just answering my questions and looking up statistics for me.”
Now Sami turned, wiping her hands on a dish towel and propping her hip against the counter. “Did your home not do that sort of thing?”
“In my world, when a kitling’s parents died…” I had to swallow, refusing to think of a parent losing a kitling. “The clan raises the child. He grows up hearing stories of his parents and knowing his place in the world, even if he didn’t know them. The human foster system was such a wide thing, encompassing so many places and children, I couldn’t fathom it. Kitlings are…”
I trailed off, shaking my head.
“What?” she whispered.
