Page 17 of My Orc Contract Husband (Eastshore Isle #9)

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 about your 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.

“Kitlings are the greatest gift the gods of our ancestors could grant us,” I rasped, looking up to meet her eyes. “That your world had so many—unwanted, unclaimed, or unable to find a home…” I shook my head again. “It wasn’t right.”

She was watching me, frowning thoughtfully.

“I suppose I never thought of that, which is embarrassing to admit. My childhood wasn’t happy , but I never had to worry about survival or food.

” Tossing the towel down, she moved toward me.

“Leave it to my thoughtful, good-hearted husband to think of such a thing.”

My Kteer crowed when she called me hers, and when she leaned forward to kiss my forehead, I gladly moved my chair back to reach for her. Sami settled on my lap—the same easy way she’d done so in that barn all those weeks ago—and wrapped her arms around my neck.

“Mmmm.” I nuzzled against her neck. “I got it. Shut The Fuck Up, A Certain Orc Took Delight Licking A Delicious Little Shoulder.”

Laughing, Sami tried to wiggle away from my tusks, but she didn’t go far.

“So you left the facility, and you took that blood money and you—what? Started fostering? Adopting?”

She was determined, wasn’t she? So I confessed.

“I couldn’t do either of those things. Hells, I was barely legal to your government.

And we had no permanent home. Abydos is my best friend, and he was all torn up—inside and outside, full of hatred for the humans who’d done it.

He decided to hide in the mountains, and a few of us went with him.

We found Bramblewood Bluff and made a home there. ”

“But you couldn’t adopt. ”

“I was a single male orc.” Grinning, I bent down to nuzzle her neck. “Half the humans I met would’ve assumed I was going to cook and eat the kids, like something out of one of your fairy tales. But I gave that money to the Boys and Girls Club, and I sponsored the local teams.”

“Really?” She reared back, arms still around my neck, eyeing me speculatively. “So somewhere out in the mountains there’s a group of little kids running around with your name on their jerseys?”

“Even better, each spring the high schoolers compete for the Tarkhan Just Be Awesome Scholarship for Junior Athletes.”

Since I was chuckling when I told her, Sami soon joined me. “You gave away all your money to kids, didn’t you, Tarkhan Shayson? I’m very impressed.”

You know what impressed me? Hearing my name paired with hers. Since orcs didn’t have last names—we’d been classified as “Smith” in the government records—I took hers. And even though Shayson was a made-up name to hide from her father, it suited her— us —better than her father’s name.

Sami and Tarkhan Shayson.

Yeah, I liked the sound of that.

She leaned forward and dropped a kiss on my nose. “So what did Sakkara say to you at the wedding?”

Oh yeah, I’d forgotten about the start of our conversation.

I exhaled, decided now wouldn’t completely suck to confess.

“Right after we left the facility, I did consider fostering, and Sakkara knew it. At the wedding—I was standing up there by the holy man, nervous and needing a distraction, I guess—he pointed out that once I was married, I would find fostering easier.”

I saw the surprise in her eyes, saw the way she reared back, and I hurried to assure her.

“I’m not suggesting it, Sami. It’s honestly something I’d given up on. I can help kids in other ways. It’s just that after not thinking of it for years, Sakkara brought it up and it was on my mind.”

“You want…to foster a child?” Sami said slowly, as if trying out the words.

And in an effort to get her to understand, I closed my hands around her waist. “No, no, I would never ask you to?—”

“I never thought about children—having them or otherwise.” Her gaze had gone distant, and I knew she wasn’t really staring at my forehead. “I guess I don’t think…”

“Sami, we don’t have to consider?—”

“No.” She blinked, then shook herself and smiled at me. “I’m not vetoing something that means so much to you.”

And all I could do was stare up at her.

What ?

She was…she’d actually consider fostering a child, just because it was once my dream?

I opened my mouth—to thank her? To argue?—but luckily no sound came out.

And she smiled when she leaned forward to kiss me. While I was still dazed, she wriggled off my lap. “I have to get ready if I’m going to meet my client in time. Thanks for breakfast, Tarkhan.”

She dropped another kiss on my forehead and shimmied out of the room.

All I could do was watch her go in amazement, wondering at this incredible female who’d allowed me to be her husband.