The Orc Who Built the Bridge

I'm not looking for true love on another planet. I'm there to visit my goddaughter. Also to look at orcs. I'm a woman of layers.

I'm the coach. I pick everyone first, fill the water bottles, hype the win, and wait in the parking lot until the last kid's ride shows up. Thirty-one years, and nobody has ever picked me. Nobody benched me, either. I did that myself.

So I sell my summer volleyball camps to pay for a translator chip, and cross to another planet to spend two weeks with my best friend, her orc husband, and a goddaughter I've only met through a screen. I'm not expecting the warchief himself to stop mid-toast in front of three hundred guests, drop his drinking horn, and go dead still when the wind carries my scent across the terrace. Every eye lands on me. I ask why everyone is looking at the bench.

Thorrgan is the reason half this valley is mated. Eighteen years he championed the matching program, stood witness for the claimings, and walked home alone. He built the bridge and never crossed it. Now his biology has picked the tourist with the return ticket, and the most persuasive male on two worlds won't say one word to keep me. No speeches. No campaign. I'm the one argument he won't make.

I have a life that fits me fine. I didn't expect the male who built the bridge for everyone else to put the whole choice in my hands and wait to see if I'm how he finally crosses it.

For readers who love: short and spicy fated mates, orc romance, scent bonds that bypass all higher brain function, "who picks the woman who picks everyone first?", a warchief who courts with deeds instead of speeches, a coach heroine who hypes everyone but herself, monster size difference (everywhere), he-falls-first-and-harder, claiming bites, and the kind of heat that cracks stone.