Page 5 of Single Pucking Orc

“Four hours?”

“Give or take.” Rognar shifted the carrier against his enormous forearm. He looked tired, she realized. Not end-of-a-hard-practice tired. Not stayed-up-too-late-with-his-teammates tired. Something deeper. “There was a lawyer. There was a wall of nipples. I’m still processing several parts of it.”

She stared at him. “Rognar, do you even know how to take care of a baby?”

Something flickered in his eyes. It was there and gone so quickly she might have missed it if she hadn’t spent the past twelve months paying considerably more attention to Rognar Stonebreaker than she would ever admit. For one second he didn’t look like the male who leaned against her fence and grinned while she complained about his recycling bin. He looked like a person holding something breakable that he’d only just discovered was his.

Then the familiar grin came back, dimmed around the edges.

“Bold,” he said. “Four hours in and you’re already writing my reviews.”

“I didn’t mean⁠—”

“You did.” He said it lightly, the way he said almost everything. “It’s okay. Everything’s upside down. Nice to know you still think I’m a disaster.”

“I don’t think you’re a disaster.”

One dark eyebrow went up.

“I think you’re…” She stopped, because none of the words currently presenting themselves would improve the situation. “How did this happen?”

“I’m pretty sure you know how babies happen, Bennett.”

She gave him a look.

“There she is.” His grin widened a fraction. “I was worried the shock had knocked the disapproval right out of you.”

“Rognar.”

“Her mother died,” he said quietly, and every clever thing she had lined up went straight out of her head.

“Oh.” Her gaze went instinctively to the baby. “Oh, God. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“Car accident. Three weeks ago. I didn’t know.” His attention dropped to the carrier. “I didn’t know about Charlie either. I found out this afternoon in a lawyer’s office.”

Charlie. The name did something the word daughter hadn’t managed. It made the small green shape in the carrier into a person. A specific person with a specific name, and something squeezed unpleasantly beneath her ribs.

“This is Charlie,” he said, with a not particularly successful attempt at his usual ease. “Charlie, this is Nora. She’s going to complain about the noise.”

“That is a very unfair characterization.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You keep a log.”

“I keep a log because your defensemen sang in my driveway at one o’clock in the morning.”

“They were celebrating.”

“It was February.”

“We won in February.”

The grin he gave her hit somewhere low in her stomach, which was the problem and had been the problem for twelve months. She had spent the past year trying not to look directly at him, and she had never once managed a full week of it. Rognar was six and a half feet of shoulders and muscle, with medium green skin, pointed ears, and prominent lower tusks that curved past his lip and somehow made every smile look wicked. His dark beard was neatly trimmed along a strong jaw, and his long black hair was pulled into a loose knot that had probably been tidy that morning and definitely wasn’t now.

He wore a soft grey henley with the sleeves shoved up, and the shirt did absolutely nothing to disguise the size of what was underneath it. He also had warm amber eyes and completely ridiculous eyelashes, which she considered an unnecessary flourish on the part of the universe.