Page 72 of Charming Deception

Her face is so pink, she could be broiling in the fire. “My ‘urges’ are also none of your business.”

“So you do have them, then. How do you go through years of urges and not do a thing about it?”

She keeps eating and kind of rolls her eyes.

“That doesn’t sound very healthy to me.” While I eat, I decide to regale her with the way we do it in my tribe. “In my tribe, we become adults at sixteen. It’s a rite of passage having sex on your birthday. You do it in a tent while the whole tribe dances outside.”

She tosses her bones into the fire with a lot of fat and gristled meat still on them. The stuff I would’ve gladly eaten. “Sounds perfectly savage to me.”

“It’s so you understand sex is a part of life, and your body isn’t something to fear. And you don’t have to be afraid to express your sexual desires. It’s natural to have one lifelong lover, or as many as you want. There aren’t any rules about it.”

“Sounds to me like you just can’t control yourselves.”

I laugh. “Serious?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“Right. I’m gonna turn into an animal right before your eyes and savage you.” My grin fades when I see how she’s staring into the fire.

She is serious.

“If I was planning to savage you, Lady Rowan, wouldn’t I have done it by now?”

She glares at me, her cheeks flaming red now, hot with anger. “My Aunt Rose says savages are always in heat.”

“Sounds like a woman who knows.” I stretch out on my back. The stars are bright in a clear, black sky above.

“What does that mean?”

I hear her gasp over the crackle of the fire when I say, “It means, maybe a nasty savage broke Aunt Rose’s heart.”

I check my phone even though I don’t hear a chime. Megan hasn’t texted me again.

It’s almost two in the morning.

I should be sleeping.

The chapter ends with Rowan pissed off at Wolf again, and I start another.

We walk the next day in endless silence, tension sharp in the air between us.

At dusk, Wolf makes a fire in the mouth of one the largest caves we’ve come across, and we settle in to take our supper there. While Wolf prepares his now-infamous rabbit stew, I clear some stones out of the back of the cave and arrange the furs for sleep, giving us each half of them and hoping the fire will warm them before we go to sleep. The temperature has steadily plummeted all day and it smells of rain outside, though not a drop has fallen.

Over supper, we still don’t speak.

I still haven’t forgiven him for what he said about Aunt Rose, and he doesn’t seem to mind the silence like I do. He never does.

I’m still entirely grateful for his company, for the knife in his boot and his capable hands and the food he provides without complaint, but I don’t know how to tell him so without making myself seem weak.

I’d die before I’d admit how much I need him.

After supper, I wash the one pot and two spoons and lay them out on a rock to dry while Wolf pokes at the fire. I strip down in the cave, behind his back, and wrap myself in a fur. Then I go outside to take care of nature between the trees while I chew on a mint leaf.

When I return to the cave, Wolf is already lying down in the back, his leathers and his clothes slung over a rock. He’s doused the fire with dirt, and only a few embers are left glowing, making just enough light for me to stumble to my furs. When I wrap myself in them, I realize he’s given me one of his, but I don’t say anything.

I don’t want to thank him for this or anything else.

Thanking him will just make him think he’s in the right, that all his rudeness has been forgotten.

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