“That’s okay,” Rukhar says, beaming at us, and for a moment, his smile is all Harlow. “Mom doesn’t expect us back for a few days. She knows we were following you guys.” He grins up at his father. “This’ll be great. I love fruit.”
Rukh glances down at his son and strokes a hand over Rukhar’s braid. “Yes, we can join them. I can help teach Day-see as well.”
“No one teaches my mate but me,” O’jek all but snarls, his tail tightening on my leg. “Wait out here and we will join you once we have packed our bags.”
“We’ll wait,” Rukhar says happily. “We’ll scout the area while you two pack. Come on, Dad.” He tugs on his father’s hand. “Let’s go look at those hopper tracks we saw.”
Rukhar glances back at me, smiling, but his gaze goes toward my burned cheek and I feel awkward and horrible and useless. My day is ruined. I felt so sexy a short time ago and now I just feel like deformed, hideous Daisy. A good companion keeps her skin fresh and unblemished, Johani’s voice intones in my head. Her flaws are flaws upon her master’s reputation.
I feel sick.
As Rukhar and his father head off, O’jek turns and puts a hand on my arm, squeezing it. “I do not like that we have company,” he mutters. “Now we must go at their pace, not ours.”
Shaking my head, I pull from his grasp. “This was a bad idea. All of it. We should just go back.”
“Go back?”
“Back to the tribe. Back to the way things were,” I say dully, moving to step around him and retreat into the cave. Back to old, useless sidelines Daisy, because at least she wasn’t vulnerable—
O’jek grabs me by my arms and tugs me toward him, a frown on his face. He peers down at me, as if trying to read my expression. “You are upset.”
I shrug, trying to hide the fact that yes, I am. “It’s not important. He’s right, we didn’t ask Veronica for her help, we just assumed. And she has been really focused on healing me. It’s selfish of me to expect her to be at the beck and call of the burned lady.” I choke back tears. “And you don’t want to be with me anyhow. This was all my idea and you’re just humoring me. You don’t even want a baby—”
He cups my face in his hands, staring into my eyes. “We are not going back to the way things were.”
A stupid tear trickles down my cheek and I sniff, even though I’m doing my best not to cry. A hunter wouldn’t cry, right? I’m supposed to be learning how to be a hunter so O’jek will want to make a baby with me, and I can’t even get that right. “What if I never learn to hunt, though?”
“Impossible. I will teach you.” His thumb swipes over my burned cheek. “You do not cry over their words.”
“I’m not crying over their words,” I manage. “I’m crying because I feel stupid. I’m pushing everyone around to get my way. Veronica, you—”
“You think I am being pushed?” O’jek asks.
“Well…yeah.”
“You think I do not want to be your mate?”
“It was my idea—”
He leans in and kisses me, hard and fierce. His mouth is rough over mine, as if he wants to devour me alive, and his teeth scrape my lip. I gasp against him, but then his tongue strokes against mine, and I forget all about everything except him and this heated, reckless kiss. “You are mine,” he breathes as he lifts his lips. Instead of pulling back completely, he rubs his long nose against my smaller one. “My mate. My D’see. And we do not let others tell us how we will live our lives. Understand?”
There’s a knot of emotion in my throat at his fierce words. “I just don’t want to disappoint you, too.”
“Then do not give up,” he says simply, and rubs his nose against mine one more time. “Now come. We must pack. Our day of rest is a day of rest no longer.”
CHAPTER 11
O’JEK
I want to glare at R’kh and his son all afternoon for showing up and making D’see cry. She has been curling back into herself with their arrival. I see it in the way her shoulders hunch and how she tries to keep her cheek turned away whenever we talk, as if a mark on her face could somehow diminish her beauty. She is thinking of her old master’s words, I suspect, and how he told her she was nothing if she was not pleasing to look upon.
I must make her forget him. I want her to think of me and only me.
Their presence is an ongoing problem, however. I know that they mean well enough, but R’kh is impatient and walks fast despite his best efforts. R’khar wants to help D’see, so he tries to point out things to help her. But when he laughs and says that “even he can see a snow-cat’s tracks on the hill” I want to grab the kit and fling him over that hill.