Total pages in book: 162
Estimated words: 165618 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 828(@200wpm)___ 662(@250wpm)___ 552(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 165618 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 828(@200wpm)___ 662(@250wpm)___ 552(@300wpm)
Hmm again.
“My beings will love you,” he declared, like he could say it and it would be so.
“We’ll see,” I replied, laying a dubious tone heavily on those two words.
“We shall,” he stated.
“Okay, can we be done talking now?” I requested.
“We should take some time to get to know one another better, Catla,” he asserted.
“We’ll have an entire weekend to do that in less than a week, sire,” I returned.
For once, I saw emotion in him.
Impatience.
This came audibly when he said, “For fuck’s sake, you’re to be my wife. You can call me Tanyn.”
“Thanks, no. I’d rather remind myself I’m a member of your peasantry, obliged to bend to your will.”
Now…this…
Being a bitch was totally a ploy to get him to back out of the marriage contract.
Bonus: I was really good at it.
“Warning, I’ll also be curtsying to you every time I see you,” I shared.
See?
Really good at it.
He sighed.
I carried on.
“Though, this discussion has reminded me that I am just a peasant, obliged to bend to your will, so, Your Majesty, do tell. What do you want to know about me?”
“Mostly, what your cunt tastes like. Also, what it feels like when I’m fucking you. Beyond that, in your current mood, not much.”
I refused to admit, regardless of how incredibly forward and unforgivably rude that was, my nipples tingled at hearing it.
Mightily.
“So, we’ll be having angry sex,” I remarked.
“If you don’t get with the program, perhaps that’s all we’ll have.”
Angry sex was awesome.
Though, he didn’t seem angry.
He seemed perfectly capable of tolerating me in whatever mood I had.
That said, he hadn’t experienced a good one yet.
“So this isn’t a waste of His Majesty the King of Sky’s Edge’s time,” I started, “my favorite color is purple. My favorite thing to do is eat out at an extortionately expensive restaurant that requires me to dress up. Or have extortionately expensive drinks at a ridiculously trendy bar, ditto on the requiring me to dress up thing. I have no pets. I do not cook. I do not own my own craft because I cannot be bothered with piloting it, which means my father gives me a lecture on a quarterly basis to share he dislikes how much I spend on Flys. And it is not advised to speak to me until after my second cup of coffee, because I am not a morning being.”
“Do you like animals?”
“I do. But having one would require me taking care of it, and the energy I have I vastly prefer to funnel into taking care of myself.”
Another ploy.
Be selfish.
Again, not hard, because I already was totally selfish.
“As queen, you’ll never have to pilot a craft,” he retorted. “As queen, you can fill the castle with animals, there will be staff to take care of them, and you can just love on them. As queen, you’ll have to dress up for everything you do, and designers will be falling all over themselves to dress you.”
All that was fabulous.
I would never admit this.
“You do know Laura is my best friend, don’t you?” I asked.
Since he did, I didn’t wait for him to answer.
“So I’ve been watching all she’s had to learn since she met Aleksei. And one can say I’m not all that fired up to be told what my popularity rating is twelve times a day, to pat children on the head and share how cute their drawings are when said drawings look like the deranged scribbles of an unbalanced mind, at the same time juggling hundreds of invitations, planning balls and hanging on every word my mate says like he’s some storied philosopher.”
“Popularity rating?”
“It’s a thing for the Knightstars,” I mumbled.
“We don’t give a shit about that in the Edge.”
“Huzzah,” I mocked.
He ignored my mocking.
Instead, he stated, “Even though you didn’t ask, my favorite color is red. I’m a morning being. I have a pet. A dog named Hurley. My favorite things to do are all outside, but I like to relax being home, with no one around, reading. I do not cook either because fortunately, someone invented the Cook-Companion, so I don’t have to. Now I don’t because I live in a castle with precisely seventy-eight members of staff, including a chef who trained under Sirk Parrin. And if you ever hung on my every word like I was a storied philosopher, I’d probably throw up.”
I wondered what kind of dog Hurley was.
I didn’t ask.
I also didn’t get the chance to ask.
Because Tanyn said, “Now, I’ll leave you to your mood. I’ll call sometime during the week and we’ll try this getting-to-know-you thing again. Hopefully, with a little more time, and distance from your break with that male, you’ll be more open to it.”
His gaze grew intense, the electric part of his electric blue eyes suddenly appearing super-charged.
I would know why when he finished, “And you need to make yourself open to it, Catla. I will have you. So acting like a bitch and pretending you’re an empty-headed, self-involved party girl is a waste of energy. We’re happening. So you better come to terms with it.”