Her Viking Wolves(42)
“Let me get this straight,” she finally says, her jaw clenching and unclenching as she speaks. “You come here out of nowhere—”
He quickly corrects her, “From the land of the North Wolves. You know exactly from whence I’ve come.”
“From out of nowhere,” she repeats as if FJ has said nothing. “With your epic dragon battle story. And your wolf-bound brother trying to hump me before he tackles me in the snow. And you’re MFM fantasy scenario, which I guess I’m just supposed to help you carry out sometime before or after you drag me back to a place and time that doesn’t have video games…or flushing toilets. And when I say, ‘nah, ain’t going to happen,’ your answer to that is, ‘That’s because you’re a dumb female, just like my mom and Alisha, and don’t know any better.’ Are you shitting me?!”#p#分页标题#e#
They agreed to handle her gingerly, FJ reminds himself. He gave his brother his word. But her disrespect for her fated mates seemingly knows no bounds.
FJ fists his hands in order to remain calm. “You do twist my words.”
Only to have her whisper back fiercely, “No, I don’t think I do.”
He clenches his fists again. “You purposefully spin a terrible tale of what life in my land is like. My mother attends to her duties without complaint and has done so for so long as I can remember. And she does not mind our circumstances anymore.”
As the words spill from his mouth, he recognizes them for the partial truths they are. His mother only just tolerates the lack of what she calls “modern conveniences” with the occasional lament about “indoor plumbing” during the dark winters when the lake freezes and they are forced to walk to the hot springs for their weekly baths.
Yet FJ presses on. “And I am sure you will soon learn to live without your video games.”
Her brows lower then, and a new expression comes over her face, as if she has been suddenly met with a foul stench.
“Okay, well, the only reason you can say that is because you don’t know me. Not one bit. Video games are my life. They’re what I do, my best talent. What I’ve literally dedicated the majority of my waking hours to. And the thought of going somewhere where the thing I do best isn’t around in any way, shape, or form—that doesn’t appeal to me. At all.”
He struggles to understand her defense of her work, because the story she’s telling about how she spends her life sounds to FJ even more terrible than the one she has conceived about their mateship in his land.
Also… “By their very name, I can assume these video games of which you speak are not as important as my parents lives. Or the lives of all the packs in my land if our serpent enemy begins to massacre other villages.”
This finally garners the reaction FJ has been looking for. Her shoulders slump and her eyes soften in the manner of one who realizes her words bear less merit than previously thought.
“I’m sorry about your parents. I read both the fictional and real accounts of their lives, and I know not being there to protect them must be killing you.”
However, her soft eyes harden upon his shoulder. “But since you were nice enough to explain to me about the ways of the wolf, let me tell you a little something about being a princess.”
A shadow falls over the she-wolf’s face. “Princess is supposedly a title of privilege. One a lot of she-wolves say they would kill for. But what it really means is you’re a pawn. You’re told your entire life that what you want doesn’t matter, because you’re only there to serve your king and your pack. Listen, I went along with it. Rah-rah, wolf pride. I got my brand, I went to all the parties—even though I really, really hate parties. I even agreed to marry the wolf my father handpicked for me behind my back. And you know what? It all blew up in my face. It was a total humiliation shit storm. And I’m still trying to figure out if it was their fault for conspiring to deceive me, or my fault for being so damn weak in the first place.”
FJ’s gray eyes narrow, understanding little of what she has told him except, ‘I even agreed to marry the wolf my father handpicked for me.’
It is as Olafr suspected, he thinks to himself. She is here in the land called Alaska, not merely for the winter festivities, but because she would hide from the Detroit fenrir who would have her wed another.
FJ knows not whether to be relieved or perturbed by the news that she does not wish to mate with the wolf her father has chosen for her.#p#分页标题#e#
But then the she-wolf shakes her head as if coming to some great conclusion.