Page 9 of The Forbidden Wolf King
“I love you too,” I murmured.
Reaching out, he stroked his thumb across my bottom lip and then I leaned forward and captured his mouth with a kiss. He opened his lips to deepen the kiss and our tongues intertwined as I leaned further into him. Since my parents had died, not a lot had made sense in this world. Why bad things happened to good people. Why I’d had such a hard life while others had it easy. But being here now with Axil, wrapped in the safety of his arms, it felt so right. It felt like home.
My brother cleared his throat next to me, pulling me out of the memory and back to the room at Death Mountain. I blushed, giving him an apologetic smile and then looked next to Axil to see Ansel Moon.
His older brother walked with a permanent limp, the only reminder of their fight for alpha king two years ago. Axil had won and now I saw why. He was a head taller than Ansel and bigger too. Axil had a scruffy beard which framed his chiseled jaw and his blue eyes were like arrows seeking flesh as they scanned the room and stopped at me.
I looked away on instinct and found that the woman in the gold dress was watching me with a grin.
Damn.I’d shown my hand, unable to hide that I was affected by seeing the alpha king.
Hopefully she would think I just found him attractive and not that we had a history together.
I could feel Axil’s gaze on me and so I took the opportunity to take off my fur coat and showcase my lean chiseled arms and abdominal muscles. I was still just wearing a cloth strip over my breasts and the low-slung tight trousers made of elkin leather. My body was dotted with dried blood, dirt and fading bruises as my wolven healing took care of this morning’s wounds. I looked like a warrior, forged in fire and blood, a far cry from the girl he once knew at fifteen.
When I turned to face him, he was passing by our table and looked like he’d seen a ghost. I held his haunted gaze and tipped my chin up high as if to say that I no longer cared that he left me broken-hearted at the training camp all those years ago. I wanted him to think he was barely a memory to me, a wisp in my mind that had all but disappeared.
But I wasn’t prepared for the agony that crossed his features. Pure misery was etched into his face and I swallowed hard, trying to process why he would seem that way upon seeing me.
Did he recognize me? I had grown into a woman myself, but I was still the same brown-haired girl he’d asked to dance with at camp.
He walked right up to me and his advisors pushed the crowd of other women back as his brother Ansel began to talk with them, giving us privacy.
I steeled myself for this interaction, for the chance to speak to him after he so cruelly left me without a word.
In every other culture you bowed before kings.
Not ours.
I held his gaze even when it hurt. As my breath hitched, I stared into his blue eyes for as long as possible, as he continued to hold mine in his line of sight. I knew from the moment that I’d met him, when we were fifteen, that he would be a future alpha, but I’d had no idea he was a prince and would one day be the king.
I wanted to show him now that I wasn’t the weak little girl from the Mud Flats that he and his brother thought I was back then. And I wanted the first words out of his mouth to be,I knew it would be you, I knew you would be the strongest among your pack. I had clawed my way to the top and now I had a chance to be his equal.
“Zara.” He breathed my name like a prayer and all rational thought left me. “I don’t know whether to be happy you came or horrified.”
I paled, not expecting that response. “Horrified? You … invited me?”
He swallowed hard and then leaned close, his familiar scent washing over me which caused a whine to build in my throat, but I swallowed it down. Lowering his voice to barely a whisper, he pressed his lips against my ear.
“Now I regret it. You shouldn’t have come,” he said and pulled away from me with a heartbreaking frown before he stalked off, leaving me in a world of hurt and confusion. This was not exactly how I imagined my reunion with Axil, but the bastard had clearly changed. He was no longer the sweet teenage boy I’d tongue kissed for hours under the moonlight while we’d dreamed up a future together.
Horrified to see me? Regretted inviting me? That fool was going to have some regret. I was going to make him regret the day he met me and every day thereafter.
Now I wanted to win this and to become his wife just to deny him every time he asked to bed me.
Wolven mated for life and were monogamous. I’d force the bastard into celibacy as payback for how he treated me.
Never underestimate a woman who’d been scorned.
THREE
Cyrus and I refused the living accommodations inside the castle and preferred to sleep in the large tent outside with our packmates. After seeing Axil, we’d left and I’d slept in one of the eight hammocks set up inside of the sizeable shelter. I’d much rather have my packmates watching my back while I slept than sleep alone in a room inside the belly of the beast.
To be honest, hearing Axil tell me that I shouldn’t have come had shaken me. I felt as unwanted as he’d made me feel all those years ago. I shouldn’t allow it to bother me, but it did. After the cruel way he’d broken up with me at camp, to now tell me that I shouldn’t have come was awful and I hated him for it. My brain chewed on it all night until I was fuming with rage.
How. Dare. He.
I was quiet all through breakfast as my packmates made a meal of fresh rabbitin and quail eggs they’d hunted that morning.
