Page 1 of Loved by the Orc (Hidden Hollow #4)

PROLOGUE

HARMONY

“ W hat’s wrong, baby? What happened to make you so upset?” Tark frowned down at me, his bushy black eyebrows pulled low with concern.

“What makes you think I’m upset?” I looked up at him briefly—it was a long way to look. Tark is a full-blooded Orc, which means he’s over eight feet tall. I’m human, and tall for a woman, but the top of my head still barely reaches his elbow.

“You’re here early, for one thing. And I can always tell by the way you hold your mouth—and how tight your voice sounds,” Tark rumbled.

He has this deep, gravely voice that can sound absolutely terrifying when he feels like someone is threatening my safety. But it can also be incredibly soothing when he’s being sweet—which he always is with me.

My boyfriend is one big, green flag, and I’m not just saying that because his skin is literally olive green, (even though it is.) He also has tusks curving up from the teeth in his lower jaw and golden eyes that glow in the dark. He looks absolutely terrifying to be honest—I was so scared I fainted the first time I saw him. But the way he’s so sweet and kind to me, especially when I’m feeling down, is what drew me to him and it’s what I consider to be his defining characteristic.

He was giving me that worried look again and part of me just wanted to melt into his arms. But there was another part—a hard part—that wanted to make it on my own. A part of me that was still afraid to take the comfort I knew he would offer me if I just let my guard down.

“I’m fine,” I said, brushing past him and walking into his living room. I always felt like a kid in a fairytale when I spent time in his house—which is located off of Main Street in the magical town of Hidden Hollow.

All the furniture is too big for me—the chairs are so high I have to clamber onto them and so deep that if I sit all the way back my legs dangle like a little girl’s. The coffee table comes up to my pelvis and I sink into the carpet up to my ankles—it’s extra deep. Also, the fireplace is big enough to roast an entire cow in—not that Tark uses it for that. He’s a vegetarian, if you can believe it.

“Babygirl, please—talk to me,” he rumbled, coming up behind me and putting one massive hand gently on my shoulder. “Come on, what happened?”

I turned to face him.

“Nothing—I told you.”

He frowned and his face was suddenly scary, reminding me that he only showed his sweet side to me.

“Was it that asshole of a human boss again?” he growled and this time his voice had taken on a menacing tone. “Was he bothering you?”

“No,” I said, which was a total lie. It absolutely was my boss, Mr. Irving Price, the Director of Operations at Bentley Pharmaceuticals and my direct supervisor. He’d belittled me in front of several other people in my department that day and called me “stupid, and fat” which was really hard to swallow.

Naturally, on paper, that kind of thing wasn’t allowed at Bentley—at least not according to the HR Department. But in reality, Mr. Price was the CEO’s brother and he could pretty much get away with doing or saying whatever he damn well pleased.

In fact, it was thanks to Mr. Price that I’d found my way to Hidden Hollow in the first place. As I stared up at my Orc boyfriend, I couldn’t help remembering the very first time I’d ever seen him…

It was just another Tuesday at Bentley Pharmaceuticals…which meant that it was just another day of abuse for me. I was supposed to be an administrative assistant but my position was closer to that of office slave. Though maybe it might be more accurate to say I was my boss’s whipping boy. Or girl—you get the idea.

“Miss Ward, come here!”

Just hearing my voice called in that nasty tone made my stomach drop and my heart start thudding unhappily in my chest. I knew I had done something wrong again—or if not, Mr. Price, my boss, would make up something that I had done wrong…some rule I’d never heard of that I had broken or some task he’d never actually assigned me had gone undone and now I was in trouble because of it.

“Yes, Mr. Price?” I asked, hurrying into his office.

My boss was sitting in his high-backed chair, rigid as a poker, as he stared down at a pile of papers on his desk. He was a thin man—my grandma would have called him “skinny as a string bean” and he was going bald up top. Because of this, he wore his hair in a classic comb-over with four skinny strands of dark brown hair scraped over the shiny dome of his skull. He had on reading glasses, which were perched on the very tip of his long, bony nose and his watery blue eyes were glaring angrily at me.

“Miss Ward, what is this?” he demanded, gesturing to the papers on his desk.

“Er…those are the reports you asked for,” I said, wondering what I could have done wrong now. I had stacked them neatly and stapled them in the top middle of each sheet, like he demanded. When I had fi rst started working for him, he’d thrown a fit because I stapled some documents in the top left corner. He demanded that I reprint all of them and “staple them correctly.” Ever since, I’d been careful to get that little detail right.

“These reports,” he said, glaring at me as he held one out. “The Rainard report is on top. And then right under that, the Connor report.”

“Uh…” I shook my head, mystified. “I’m not sure I understand what’s wrong.”

“ Why aren’t they alphabetized?” Mr. Price demanded. “C comes before R in the alphabet—surely even someone as stupid as you knows that, Miss. Ward!”

“Alphabetized?” I repeated, shaking my head. “But Mr. Price, you never said?—”

“I did! I told you the minute you became my secretary that I wanted all the reports alphabetized!” he shouted, his narrow face going red. He began ripping the pages apart and throwing them on the floor around his desk. “How can you not understand such a simple thing? How stupid can you be?”

I felt my face go rigid, turning into a non-threatening, apologetic mask it always becomes when someone shouts at me.

“I…I’m so sorry,” I heard myself say. “I’ll take them back and alphabetize them right now.”

“You’re damn right, you will!” He threw the last of the stack of papers on the floor and rose to his feet. “Get down there and pick those up and get them right,” he commanded, pointing at the papers—some of which he was currently trampling. “I’m going to my meeting. You’d better have them done when I get back.”

And he stalked off, the papers crunching under his shiny, hateful shoes.

Stooping, I began gathering the crumpled paperwork with red cheeks and stinging eyes. I hated myself for making that “sorry face”—for backing down and taking the blame when it wasn’t my fault. My boss had never told me he wanted anything alphabetized before today, but of course now he was gaslighting me and acting like it was a rule I’d always known about that I had broken.

I had spent a long time getting all the documents just right—now I would have to spend even longer fixing the mess he’d made of them. And I knew without asking that any papers that had been trampled and torn by his feet would need to be reprinted and re-stapled—I didn’t dare hand him anything less than a perfect stack of alphabetized reports or he would blow his top again and probably call me “stupid” or an “idiot,” or something even worse.

If you’re wondering why I put up with this abuse, well—it wasn’t by choice. I had signed a contract with Bentley Pharmaceuticals early in my academic career. They had agreed to put me through school and help me become a pharmacist as long as I promised to work for them during school and for two years after. I could take most of my classes online at night and work for them during the day.

It had seemed like a sweetheart deal at the time. I knew people who were drowning in student debt and this way I wouldn’t have to take a single loan—well, unless I quit before the contract said I could. At that point, every single dollar that Bentley had loaned to me would suddenly become due—with ten percent interest—in a single lump sum.

Since I didn’t have an extra hundred thousand dollars just lying around, I couldn’t quit. And my boss, Mr. Price, knew that.

I’d tried to get out from under his thumb several times. But the last time I went to HR, Mrs. Renard, the woman in charge, had asked me bluntly if I just wanted to nullify my contract and pay what I owed the company.

“Of course not!” I exclaimed, feeling all the blood rush from my face when I thought of that much debt suddenly coming down on my head all at once. “I can’t afford to pay everything back like that—if I could, I wouldn’t have signed the contract in the first place!”

“Then it appears you have no choice but to go back to your position,” Mrs. Renard remarked. She had short, iron-gray hair and a stern face like a disapproving principal.

“But…but it’s clear that Mr. Price isn’t happy with my performance!” I exclaimed, trying to think of another way to get away from him. “He’s always calling me ‘stupid’ and ‘lazy’ and ‘ignorant’ and things like that. Surely he’d rather have someone else as his assistant!”

“I’m afraid not,” Mrs. Renard said blandly. “In fact, he’s given you nothing but glowing performance reviews. I have a difficult time believing that he calls you ‘stupid’ when he seems so happy with your work.”

It was at that moment I knew that I was trapped. My boss, Irving Price, was never going to let me go. He liked having someone to shout at and abuse. Someone who was too afraid to fight back.

I hadn’t even told the HR Director all of the things he called me. The worst was when he talked about my weight and called me “fat” or “chubby.” I think those words hurt me most of all because they were true.

I mean, I knew I wasn’t stupid—I’d graduated top of my class and I had a 4.0 GPA, which isn’t easy in Pharmacy School. Have you ever taken Organic Chemistry? It’s not exactly a walk in the park—but I aced it.

So I could mostly shrug off his hateful remarks about my IQ. But when it came to my weight, well…that was a number where I was most vulnerable. And I was sure that Mr. Price knew it.

So I was stuck—which was exactly what I was thinking as I sniffed back tears and gathered the torn and trampled documents around my evil boss’s desk. Stuck with no way out for at least the next four years!

The worst thing was, the abuse I got from my boss reminded me a lot of the way my uncle and aunt had treated me growing up. My mom died of breast cancer when I was ten and my dad had left before that, when I was only eight. So rather than letting me go into the foster care system, my mom’s brother and his wife adopted me.

Sometimes I think it would have been better in foster care. I could never do anything good enough—could never please them. Even my excellent grades didn’t make them happy— nothing did. It also didn’t help that both of them were skinny and I’ve been chubby all my life. I was just a big disappointment—a burden they had to bear and nothing I could do would ever make them love me or even like me.

That was how I felt with Mr. Price—like I could never make him happy, no matter how hard I tried.

“So why do I keep trying?” I muttered to myself as I gathered the papers. Hot tears splashed on the stack in my hands and I realized I was crying—which would only make my sadistic boss angrier if he came back and saw me “bawling.”

Rising to my feet, I shoved the stack of papers to one side of the desk. I needed some time alone—five minutes to get myself together, I thought. I couldn’t have a breakdown right here in my boss’s office—who knew when he might come back?

I rushed down the hallway, heading for the ladies room. I noticed that the door looked slightly different—were the edges of it glowing? But my eyes were too blurry with tears to make out the details and I just wanted to be alone. I was nearly running as I pushed blindly at the door, which swung open…

And dumped me out in the middle of Hidden Hollow.