She made herself give a little smile, her best attempt at a dutiful, eager expression. “Do your worst.”
He looked her over from head to toe: the mist-damp shirt, now icy against her puckered skin, the equally stained and damp pants, the position of her feet . . .
“Wipe that smarmy, lying smile off your face.” His voice was as dead as his eyes, but it had a razor-sharp bite behind it.
She kept her smarmy, lying smile. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He stepped toward her, the canines coming out this time. “Here’s your first lesson, girl: cut the horseshit. I don’t feel like dealing with it, and I’m probably the only one who doesn’t give a damn about how angry and vicious and awful you are underneath.”
“I don’t think you particularly want to see how angry and vicious and awful I am underneath.”
“Go ahead and be as nasty as you want, Princess, because I’ve been ten times as nasty, for ten times longer than you’ve been alive.”
She didn’t let it out—no, because he didn’t truly understand a thing about what lurked under her skin and ran claws down her insides—but she stopped any attempt to control her features. Her lips pulled back from her teeth.
“Better. Now shift.”
She didn’t bother to sound pleasant as she said, “It’s not something I can control.”
“If I wanted excuses, I’d ask for them. Shift.”
She didn’t know how. She had never mastered it as a child, and there certainly hadn’t been any opportunities to learn in the past decade. “I hope you brought snacks, because we’re going to be here a long, long while if today’s lesson is dependent upon my shifting.”
“You’re really going to make me enjoy training you.” She had a feeling he could have switched out training you for eating you alive.
“I’ve already participated in a dozen versions of the master-disciple training saga, so why don’t we cut that horseshit, too?”
His smile turned quieter, more lethal. “Shut your smart-ass mouth and shift.”
A shuddering rush went through her—a spear of lightning in the abyss. “No.”
And then he attacked.
She’d contemplated his blows all morning, the way he’d moved, the swiftness and angles. So she dodged the first blow, sidestepping his fist, strands of her hair snapping in the wind.
She even twisted far enough in the other direction to avoid the second strike. But he was so damn fast she could barely register the movements—so fast that she had no chance of dodging or blocking or anticipating the third blow. Not to her face but to her legs, just as he had the night before.
One sweep of his foot and she was falling, twisting to catch herself, but not fast enough to avoid thudding her brow against a weather-smooth rock. She rolled, the gray sky looming, and tried to remember how to breathe as the impact echoed through her skull. Rowan pounced with fluid ease, his powerful thighs digging into her ribs as he straddled her. Breathless, head reeling, and muscles drained from a morning in the kitchen and weeks of hardly eating, she couldn’t twist and toss him—couldn’t do anything. She was outweighed, outmuscled, and for the first time in her life, she realized she was utterly outmatched.
“Shift,” he hissed.
She laughed up at him, a dead, wretched sound even to her own ears. “Nice try.” Gods, her head throbbed, a warm trickle of blood was leaking from the right side of her brow, and he was now sitting on her chest. She laughed again, strangled by his weight. “You think you can trick me into shifting by pissing me off ?”