I snorted at that and shook my head. "Orc bait," I said, thinking the words out loud.

Out of the corner of my eyes, Sunny blushed and preened, watching me work to ready the tub.

* * *

Sunny's fingers fidgeted on my shoulders as I carried her back to the cottage, my steps slow and careful with the precious cargo in my arms. Perhaps my pace was reluctant too. The cottage was one step closer to the reality now less than a day away.

Five days had seemed excessive on Monday. Now the session felt shockingly brief.

The moon was high and bright through the thinning branches of the trees surrounding us, the agency's woods quiet. There were a few other houses, but none between the orc den and the cottage that we might see, nothing to prove we were anything but alone. Sunny wasn't wearing her monitor watch, and there were no cameras or smart screens out here.

A brief and almost amusing fantasy of carting Sunny off the property altogether flitted through my head, and I let it float there in the background for far too long.

"Khell," Sunny whispered.

My arms had tightened around her, and I loosened them slightly as I turned my head to meet her gaze. She was shades of blue and gray in the dark, hints of her gold hair faint and glittering as we passed into brief patches of moonlight, and I was too busy studying the details of her face—pert nose and round eyes, the dimple on her chin—to immediately catch the expression on her face.

"Stop walking."

My feet obeyed the command without question, and I swayed in place, Sunny clasped to my chest with her legs spread. There was a rare, slight downturn of her lips and an ache in her eyes that echoed down into my chest.

"What's wrong?" I asked, ready to adjust my hold on her, concerned she might've been in pain.

She shook her head. "Nothing, I just… I want you," she said, voice so soft, it almost slipped beneath the rustling of the woods around us. "Here. Please."

My heart squeezed, as if Sunny had pressed her small hand right through my rib cage to take the organ in her grip, to force it to beat slow and hard, painfully in her possession.

"Do you want to be chased?" I asked, glancing around the woods.

"No. I just want you," she said, the thin thread of her voice breaking on the last word. "Out here. I don't know—"

I wouldn't ask her to reason with me. I didn't want to argue. I'd resisted Sunny for most of the day, and there was no battling that look on her face, the way it tore into me. I took three strides forward, into a break of the tree's shadows, where moonlight pooled on the floor of the woods like water, and then knelt.