Nellie
Voss

I'm not looking for true love on another planet. I'm just looking for a way out before there's nothing left of me to give.

I'm the woman who handles everything—my mother's dementia, my brother's money issues, my sister's emotional breakdowns—and I'm bone-dry empty.

So I walk into an alien matchmaking facility expecting to get on a list for "someday." I'm not expecting a seven-foot, scarred, forest-green orc rounding the corner and dropping to his knees like he just took a blow he wasn't braced for.

Ruhn isn't even in the match pool, but his biology doesn't care. One scent of me and he's shaking. I haven't been touched in years and my body just volunteered as tribute. Neither of us planned this.

I came here to take something for myself for once. I didn't expect him to kneel before I even got his name.

For readers who love: short and spicy fated mates, orc romance, scent bonds that bypass all higher brain function, "who takes care of the caretaker?", snarky first-person heroines, monster size difference (everywhere), he-falls-first-and-harder, claiming bites, a warrior who will ruin you and then make you midnight porridge, and the kind of heat that soaks through the pages.

I'm not looking for love. I'm looking for a statistically optimal outcome.

I'm the woman who rates everything—like the abstract art that's either a sunset or a medical diagram—because if I can assign a number, I can keep it at arm's length.

So I walk into an alien matchmaking facility with a fourteen-question interview and a color-coded evaluation matrix. I'm not expecting a seven-foot, wild-haired, bright-green hurricane of an orc to wedge through the doorframe mid-sentence and then go completely still the moment he catches my scent.

Brokk talks like a man who swallowed a motivational calendar and chased it with an action movie. He can't answer a single question without a tangent or a boar story, and he plates food like a natural disaster. He's the loudest thing in every room he enters.

He also saw what I came here for before I figured it out myself.

I came here because the math made sense. I stayed because the math stopped mattering—and the man underneath the chaos looked at me like he could see the woman behind the spreadsheet.

For readers who love: short and spicy fated mates, orc romance, scent bonds that fog your glasses, "she rates everything except him," snarky forensic accountants who think they can evaluate their way through a mating bond, golden retriever energy hiding a real one underneath, chaos meets control, he-falls-first-and-harder, claiming bites, and the kind of heat that breaks the rating scale.