Page 17 of The Wulver's Bond
Weed tutted with a grin. ‘Well,gosh,I guess I’m not going to, then.’
‘That is fine.’
‘Hm.’
Next, Arran offered to teach Weed how to pickle a few fish he’d kept back from the smoker.
‘Are you ordering me to learn?’ Weed asked, leaning over Arran’s shoulder as he sat mixing salt with water in a large jar on the ground.
‘No.’
Weed stuck his hands over his ears and gleefully shut his eyes. ‘Then I shan’t!’
Arran got the feeling Weed was keeping score on some imaginary tally between them. It didn’t seem to be sinking into Weed’s brain that Arran had no intention of using him. Or, perhaps it had, and the cunning fae was going out of his way to abuse that very notion.
Whatever the case, Weed played the same game over the next string of days.
Everything Arran suggested, Weed did the opposite. He took great delight in loitering outside the cave when Arran invited him in; in standing when suggested to sit; and most of all in being stubbornly idle, and yet maddeningly determined in the way he followed Arran around during the course of his daily chores.
It was far worse than when Weed simply fell asleep while Arran worked. He hadn’t been in the way then, nor obstinately talkative. Weed seemed to talk aboutanything, from patterns in the dirt and musings on the Shetland landscape to unwelcome studies of Arran himself.
‘What are your teethfor,if not for hunting?’ Weed asked, while trying to all but shove his head inside Arran’s jaws to inspect them up close.
‘Eating, like yours,’ Arran growled, shoving him away.
‘But they’re sobig.’ Weed fluttered his eyelashes coquettishly. ‘Ooh, Mr Wulver, what big paws you have, too. All the better for holding me down with, maybe?’ He preened against a tree, conjuring a slender plant root to slide alluringly over his body like the fondling of a lover.
Arran met this with silence. But internally, his wolf sat up on its haunches, dangerously intrigued by the challenge.
While lugging a heavy urn of water from the river, Arran dearly wished that Weed would find something else to amuse himself. Weed skipped behind him empty-handed, practically treading on his paws.
‘Pleasewould you consider at least walking next to me?’ Arran grunted at him.
‘Is that an order, wolfie?’
‘You know it isn’t.’
Arran suppressed an aggravated snarl as Weed’s toes grazed his heel yet again.
When it came to dinnertime that evening, the joke finally wore through Arran’s patience.
He placed a bowl of hot stew in front of Weed more forcefully than necessary. ‘Here is some food,’ he growled. ‘Perhaps you wish for me to order you to eat it. I shall not.’
Weed’s smirk wavered—had Arran just called his bluff? But then his grin was back, and so was the snark in his voice. ‘Looks like I won’t be eating tonight, then.’
‘Fine,’ Arran snarled, turning away. ‘Starve,for all I care.’
Weed gave a sharp inhale behind him. Arran sensed something wrong in the sudden stutter of his heartbeat and turned back in alarm.
Weed looked fine. Though his eyes were fixed on the bowl of stew. He glanced at Arran, then immediately away. The smirk had fallen from his face.
Starve.
Arran released a long breath. He was such a fool.
‘That was not an order,’ he said evenly. ‘I do not wish for you to starve, or to come to any harm at all. Please. If you would like to eat, then eat.’
Weed stared at the floor. He nodded mutely, and Arran sensed that some of the fight had left him. In that moment he wanted the irksome Weed back, the one who would respond to this incident with some mocking comment about how a beast like the Wulver couldn’t help but be his master.
