I knew that Ryan was strong; he must’ve been if he tamed down all those rogues and made them decent pack members. He also had to be tough to face my father and demand land, titles, and rights. Some of those things weren’t just given to him, some of them had to be physically fought for. Nevertheless, the royal guards were nothing less than elite. They trained and fought daily just to stay sharp.
I became upset almost right away, thinking of the men I grew up with and my mate tearing at each other, both parties terrified while trying to do what they thought was best for me. I forced myself to go into the kitchen and clean up the residual mess from last night. Within ten minutes the plastic containers from yesterday’s food had been cleaned out, the counters wiped down and the kitchen was given a light dusting. I smiled a little bit when I thought that I could’ve made a decent house wife in another life, then instantly became saddened when I thought about how different my life would be if Ryan and I had been human.
We could’ve fallen in love, happy with nothing other than being with each other’s company. There would be no hatred, I wouldn’t have to impress hundreds of thousands of werewolves, and he could just be the edgy guy who liked spoiled girls.
“Have you started making breakfast yet?”
“Jesus!” I shouted, practically throwing myself against the nearest counter. “You scared me!”
I glared darkly at my mate while he just walked sleepily through the kitchen.
“Better question, can you cook?” he asked, those blue eyes glimmering with a cheeky glint.
“Of course I can cook,” I spat back, my cheeks flaming.
Ryan nodded to himself as he pulled open the fridge and began searching for ingredients. He pulled out a carton of organic eggs, some peppers, and hash browns.
“Come on,” he encouraged, “Come show me those tremendous cooking skills, Gordon Ramsay.”
“Who?”
He looked amazed at my lack of knowledge for a second, but simply shrugged and pulled out a frying pan from one of the cupboards. I tried to hide my shock and horror when he handed it to me a second later. Fine, I confess, I wasn’t able to cook. I had an astonishing chef who did it for me, and I knew I would always have a personal cook. In the werewolf community it was nearly impossible for a princess to marry down and lose her rights as a royal.
Unfortunately for me, it seemed I had been the only princess to meet this criteria so far. Now I was just trying to figure out if this man who pushed my limits and called my bluffs was actually worth it.
Chapter 28
“Ask me,” Ryan blurted as we washed the dishes from breakfast together.
“What?”
“Ask me why everyone hates me. I know that you’re dying to find out because you won’t stop glaring at me, like I did something wrong,” he explained.
He was carefully wiping a plate dry, but his blue eyes were locked on mine, almost challenging me.
And he was right; I couldn’t even begin to deny that.
My father hated this man and my dad barely hated anyone. Not to mention the fact that the majority of the werewolf community wanted his entire pack exterminated. I desperately wanted to know what atrocious things this man had done to put himself in such an awful social standing with every member of his kind but I simply just shook my head at him.
“I didn’t steal you away from my dad so I could do an interrogation of my own. I don’t want to be a princess right now, and I don’t want you to be anything other than my mate right now either, okay? I want to be able to really get to know you before I start making assumptions about your character and your actions.”
“Well, then starting judging my character because I doubt we’ll be able to hide out here for long before the place is ripped apart in search of the kidnapped princess,” Ryan muttered.
“Please, my family will know for a fact that you did not kidnap me. I’ve been stubborn since I was born. They would know that if I didn’t want to go with you I wouldn’t even leave my bedroom. Besides, it’s not like you could’ve broken yourself out of that prison.” I plucked the dried dishes from Ryan’s hands and put them away in the cabinet, alleviating the distraction. “I made the choice to bring you here, and now I’m deciding to get to know you.”
“Fine, what do you want to know?” he asked.
“Whatever you want to tell me,” I murmured.
I took a little breath and grabbed one of his hands. I wasn’t able to meet his eyes, I feared that my actions were too bold and I could already feel my cheeks flaming with embarrassment. However, holding his hand made me feel incredibly pleasant and I wasn’t prepared to let go just yet. I gently pulled him over to the small living room and sat down on the worn-out couch.
“That’s hard. It’s impossible to know where to start,” he mumbled, sitting beside me.
“Well, tell me about your family. I mean my family and how I grew up is the foundation of who I am now. I can’t imagine that it would be different for anyone else.”
Ryan sighed and rubbed one hand over his face, looking a little pained and slightly annoyed, though I couldn’t fathom why. “My family is pretty fucked if I’m going to be straight about it.”
I immediately felt bad. My family was quite an easy topic to discuss, I had a nearly perfect childhood and I had only intended for this conversation to be little and gentle. I wanted to get to know the man whose smile could disarm me, the man whose first instinct was to make me tea during our initial encounter.
I hadn’t meant to jab at the dark back story that was lying beneath all the joy and happiness he seemed to radiate.
“We don’t have to talk about it,” I said quickly.
“Adeline, if you only want to talk about the peachy and perfect times in my life you aren’t going to hear much. It’s fine. My mom lost her virginity before she found her mate. She was seeing this guy in high school on and off for two years, she had sex with him a few times, and she ended up pregnant with me and my brother. After she gave birth she found her mate which didn’t go smoothly. Basically, she was rejected by her mate, her own pack no longer existed because they weren’t financially stable, and no other pack would talk with a shewolf who had two half-bred kids.”
“So you grew up rogue?” I whispered. I could hardly believe my ears. I barely knew Ryan and even when I had tried to hate him with all my heart, I became physically ill when I was without him. It seemed impossible that someone could actually reject their own mate, especially when their mate was in need. “God, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be, it wasn’t a bad life. We weren’t completely alone like most rogues. We had each other and that made it easier to hunt and keep your sanity. It was kind of like we had the tiniest pack in the world. It sucked sometimes, but I feel like no matter what life you live it’ll start to suck at some point.”
Ryan gave a casual shrug, as if it were no big deal but when he caught me staring at him he gave me a little half smile.
“Addy, it’s not that bad, I promise. I bet if you tried you could make your life sound miserable.”
“Not really, if I tried to make my life sound bad I would just be whiny,” I admitted, laughing a little. “It’s really hard to hate your life when you have everything handed to you on a silver platter. I’ve never really had any challenges in my life.”
“No? I can’t believe that. Everyone has had something get in their way at least once. There must be something about your life that you aren’t a particularly big fan of,” Ryan pressed.
I shook my head, smiling sadly, “Ryan, there are only two shitty things about my life. The first shitty thing is that I live by structure and rules every day. I’ve never been allowed to just be a kid who didn’t have a care in the world or a strict schedule with lots of tutors and instructors. The second shitty thing is that I was dying to find my mate, and now that I’ve found him I’m almost certain all of my subjects will hate him.”
Ryan surprised me by chuckling to himself as if I had just told him a joke while
he stood up.
“Oh, Addy, that sounds awful, and that last one is going to be a hell of a task to get through but since we already started breaking rules by taking you off your schedule, how about we break some more?”
“How do you intend to do that?” I questioned. My eyes followed him intently as he walked to the kitchen and began pulling open random cupboards, clearly searching for something.
Finally, after he had opened nearly half of the cupboards he grinned with triumph and held up a glass bottle. He had found my parents’ old liquor stash.
“Ever been day drunk, Princess?”
Chapter 29
“I’ve never been drunk at all and now you expect me to get intoxicated before lunch,” I grumbled, childishly turning away from the bottles Ryan had set on the table. They hadn’t been touched so long that Ryan’s hands were covered in dust.
“Then this is the perfect time to get drunk,” he insisted. He slapped his hands together to get the dust off then moved back to the kitchen to grab some glasses. “Besides, I’m not forcing you to take seven shots before noon. Just have a drink, we’ll play a board game and pass the time until the evening comes and we can go to sleep. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but we are basically under house arrest because we don’t want our scent to get carried by the wind and draw hundreds of guards to this place. We might as well try to have fun.”
I laughed a little despite the anxiety that was pooling in my stomach, “Right, this isn’t just a hoax to get me drunk so you can actually beat me at a board game?” I teased. I gave him a fake glare and reached for one of the cheap, scratched glasses. “Fine, I’ll have one drink to keep you quiet, but no more.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but that was going to be my last lie for the day.
Ryan never tried to force drinks on me while we played a very intense game of Monopoly. He continually changed out his drinks but he never even asked me if I wanted a refill. In fact, when I eventually got up and poured myself a cup of wine, he appeared a little shocked for a split second before shooting me a half smile that glowed with triumph.
“Hey, another drink in my system does not mean that you are going to win,” I warned.
He just grinned and shrugged his shoulders.
Apparently I was wrong. After the two drinks I was starting to feel a little lightheaded and my focus was suddenly terrible. I found myself staring at Ryan’s intricate tattoo more than I was looking at the board that Ryan was slowly dominating. I had never been drunk before, I mean my parents would absolutely not let me drink as it wasn’t a regal pass time but I could tell I wasn’t actually drunk yet. Maybe a little tipsy with slightly impaired thought processing, but not drunk.
And now, I wanted to get drunk.
“I win,” Ryan announced two hours later.
“You do not!” I protested, staring at the board in shock but he was right. He had won. He had completely and utterly obliterated me in this game.
“Shit.”
“Oh the princess swears or is that just the hundred glasses of wine talking?” Ryan taunted.
He was still beaming down at the board when he started to pick up the pieces and disassemble it.
“I have not had a hundred,” I argued.
But my cheeks flamed with embarrassment at his comment anyway. Once I started drinking I began feeling nice and didn’t want the feeling to go away, but now I had taken it too far and I had already downed three glasses of wine, two beers, and some sweet drinks Ryan made me. It didn’t seem like a lot at the time, but it was too much for my body to handle considering I’ve never built up an alcohol tolerance. I hadn’t wanted to get to the point that I was in at the moment but it was an accident.
“I know. I was exaggerating,” Ryan said, softening a little. He slid the monopoly box off the table and patted the couch cushion next to him. “Come sit with me.”
I gave out a little sigh while I stood, slightly sore from our long trek yesterday, then I dawdled over and flopped on the couch next to him.
“Such grace,” he mocked.
“You’re smiling an awful lot right now,”
“You have no idea how happy I am to be here with you and not have you constantly shouting that you need to go home, that your parents are going to kill me, or some other threat. Or, you know, your dad lurking around, just waiting to kill me or my beta,” he explained.
I noticed the way his hand moved, almost like he wanted to reach up and touch me, but then thought better of it.
“But you’re a rogue; you shouldn’t even have a beta.” I blurted. Ryan just sighed in response which immediately made me feel awful. “I shouldn’t have said that, I’m sorry, it’s just confusing for me is all. I wanted to learn about it, but my dad won’t tell me anything. He says I’m not ready. Maybe I’m not, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m mated to you and I should know.” I shook my head, feeling defeated and burdened.
“Oh come on,” Ryan whispered.
His lips were incredibly close to my ear which caused excited goose bumps to form on my skin, which then intensified when he slipped a single arm around my shoulders so he could pull me against his side.
I felt my eyes close on their own accord and the corners of my mouth turned up in a tiny grin.
“I can’t explain everything to you in one sitting and, at this point, I’m wondering if you’ll even remember this tomorrow, so I won’t go through the whole thing with you. Just try not to think of my pack as rogues. That’s technically what we are, but it has such a negative connotation. Did any of the werewolves you saw look crazy and deranged?” I shook my head, “That’s right; all of them are mostly normal wolves. Just think of them as odds and ends from other packs.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
In my mostly drunken state I was brave enough to lift my hand and gently trace his tattooed arm with a single finger, deeply entranced by the patterns and pictures. The tattoo was bright, quite colourful, laced with reds, blues, and a little bit of purple. Though I couldn’t make out the symbols or even what culture they were from, I could tell there was a message. There was even a bright yellow apple.
“What does all of this mean? Or did you just get it to look cool?”
Ryan laughed loudly, as if I had told him the most ridiculous joke he had ever heard and he gave my shoulders a tight squeeze.
“Definitely not to look cool. The other alphas judge me enough; having something on my skin that separated me even more from them would not help my case. I got it for my brother, a reminder,”
“Oh.”
I felt like I had touched territory I wasn’t supposed to so I shut my mouth and averted my eyes. I wanted to get to know Ryan better, but instead I was jabbing at sensitive subjects like his dead brother and the hatred of his pack.
Ryan didn’t say anything for a while and I was too afraid to open my mouth again so we just sat in silence for a few minutes. His fingers traced their way up and down my arm while I rested my head against his shoulder. It felt nice and my blurry mind couldn’t form any thoughts beyond that anymore.
“Is it time for a movie or a nap?” he murmured eventually.
I just shrugged as if I didn’t care, yet my chest tightened. Ryan and I didn’t have a picture perfect relationship, we both done a lot of wrongs already, but this moment was a good one. It was the first time we had been physically affectionate and it didn’t feel completely awkward and forced but that could’ve been because we had a fair amount of alcohol coursing through our blood stream. Still, this moment was nice and I didn’t want it to end just yet.
“How about I grab us some more drinks and you pick a movie that you like? I picked the movie last time,” he proposed, sensing my resistance.
I nodded and he got off the couch in search of more booze while I slowly slugged over to the shelves lined with old movies. I almost scoffed at my parent’s selection. There were a lot of old Disney movies like Cinderella which was my mom’s favorite and The Jungle Book which my dad lov
ed. There were also intense war documentaries that would wash away all the delightful feelings in me, cop comedies, and even a couple chick flicks. I decided that a police-based comedy from the eighties would be our best bet.
Once the movie had started to play and we had settled ourselves back on the couch. Ryan brought me a glass of water and some bread. I almost refused under the premise that he was drinking more than I was and he wasn’t drinking any water, but then he started to run his hands over my back and every protest died on my lips.
“I’ve never had any one touch me like this,” I confessed.
“No? Well, I imagine it’s kind of a couple’s thing. I’m not sure how you parents were on the subject of dating, but my mother aggressively shunned it. For obvious reasons.”
“Oh my parents hated the idea until recently. Then they wanted me to pick any old alpha who would suit my needs well enough. It was pretty much the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Lying to all those people when I knew that you were out there.”
“Okay, so you do have hardships,” Ryan encouraged, bring up our earlier conversation.
“Please, compared to your life my hardships are nothing,”
“It’s not a contest. I wouldn’t judge you based on what you thought were the low points of your life. Still, if you don’t want to talk about it I won’t make you,” he assured.
“I misjudged you,” I mumbled, “I thought you would be an asshole because you’re a rogue and because everyone hates you, but you’re not. You’re actually pretty sweet.”
“You’re not the only one who has assumed I was a bad person. Don’t beat yourself up over it,” Ryan sighed.
We fell into a heavy silence after that, both of us pretending to watch the movie and sip our drinks.
The Princess and the Alpha: A Shifter Romance Page 12
