“Are we keeping secrets now, Val? Are you not going to tell her about the whole mate thing or any of that? Or how about the fact that you plan to throw a large fucking party now that she’s here? That might come as a little bit of a shock,” Jack proclaimed, “though not as much as the fact that she’s pretty much already pledged to a man that she’s never met.”
It was at that moment that her head started to spin. “Excuse me, what the fuck?”
Ashley blinked, not knowing what to say or how to deal with the situation. Whatever was going on, she was far more in the dark than she originally thought. Not a good feeling, not a good feeling at all.
Mates? Ashley had heard the word mentioned a few times, though mainly by the girls she went to high school with who were fans of romance novels. They talked a lot about the fated mates and the idea that one could be destined for someone they’ve never met. But, never had she ever thought that those words would apply to her. The second that Jack said she had a mate, she stumbled backward, nearly falling. Thankfully, Val caught her in his arms.
She pulled away from Val, however. Whether he was her brother or not, he had plans to marry her off, trade her like a bargaining chip in a business deal and she knew couldn’t trust him. She headed for Ned instead, since she’d known him her whole life and knew that, whatever the truth was, she could trust him.
“Okay, I know you guys are in some kind of fantasy land, maybe you’ve taken your love of Dungeons and Dragons a little too far, but I know this much. I’m not going to be married off to some stranger. And you aren’t my brother. My parents died in a drunk driving accident and Ned, a distant cousin, was the onlyrelative I had. He took me in, cared for me like his own, and he’s my father. Not some dead guy who wanted to build an empire because daddy didn’t love him enough,” Ashley stated, standing firm, left eyebrow raised to dare the other men in the room to challenge her.
“But Ashley,” Val started but Ashley held up her hand.
“My whole life I’ve been poor. I’ve been the center of gossip. I’ve been ridiculed and belittled. Once you accept that as your fate, it stops hurting. It doesn’t mean you let the world walk all over you, but you also learn to get on with life. It made me appreciate my shitty waitressing job, my secondhand car, the home I shared with Ned. This? This isn’t real. I don’t know how you’re pulling it off, but it isn’t real. And I don’t care if you’re the king of the universe, Val, you aren’t forcing me to marry anyone. Ever.”
Val just looked at her blankly, blinking slowly, before he pulled a chair out of nowhere and sat in it. He turned to Ned, who still had on that ridiculous suit of armor. Ashley quietly fumed as they all seemed to ignore her.
“You really want to force the sister you’ve only just found to leave the castle and mate with some stranger? That’s how you want to play this?” Jack said, as if she hadn’t just made it clear what she would, and would not, do.
“This is Ashley’s duty, Jack. Regardless of how you have failed to come to terms with the reality of your life, my sister will be following through on what is expected of her,” Val said, raising his voice so that it roared far above Jack’s, asserting his dominance over him. “The Tannagen line is far too important to end with the two of us. It is her duty to continue it onwards, and as we both know, those with a mate mark are destined to be far more successful in reproducing than most of us. It is my sister’s duty to keep the line going, and she will gratefully accept it, regardless of what the consequences are, unlike you…”
“I’m sorry?” Ashley squeaked, blinking between the men as they continued to ignore her and kept charging around each other in the room. “I thought you said I was damaged goods and that’s why our father cast me out? And why can’t you just take a wife and leave me out of all of this?”
Val grimaced and waved his hand at her, but Jack nodded in agreement. “She’s not wrong, you know. You did say all of that.”
That made Ashley smile a little. For a man who’d done something so horribly wrong he’d been kicked out of inheriting his own titles he didn’t seem that bad. Plus, he seemed to be the only one willing to stand up to her brother, whether he was the hired help or not.
“You don’t get to talk about how I’ve approached my duties. The choices that I made were the ones that I had to make. Not all of us can live with the choice fate made for us, born without the rules that come with the mate mark. Some of us have been cursed by fate. We decided to choose our own path, to love our own people. The moment that I saw that mate bond on my back, I decided that I wasn’t going to acknowledge it, that I wasn’t going to be a part of the Dragon Games that so many are part of and fight for someone else’s mateship. I was going to forge my own path, I was going to be my own man, and I wasn’t going to let myself get dragged into all of your bullshit, but here you are, Val, acting like you’re better than me once again because you happened to find it easier to deal with the hand that fate has dealt you, which is hilarious, considering you don’t have a mate mark to oblige,” Jack said, speaking like Val should be well aware of all the reasons why he had taken the path he had.
The moment he said mate mark Ashley felt the world narrow down. She had a rather large birth mark on her back, one she’d always tried to hide, but apparently it meant something. That she had a mate?
“Holy shit,” Ashley breathed, reaching back to touch the mark that sat between her shoulders.
Were the books right about what that mark meant? That fate had given her a mate, someone she didn’t get to choose. Jack made it sound like it was something that you could change after the fact, which was interesting, to say the least, but confusing at the same time.
Still, he seemed to be saying that she had a right to choose, and she couldn’t disagree with that, at all. Could he actually be an ally and not just the man that kidnapped her?
“Dad, you aren’t really going to let this man force me into some kind of marriage, are you? You’ve loved me, protected me my whole life. Are you really going to let this happen? And you know what,” Ashley paused, turning to her brother, “if I do have some kind of mate mark, doesn’t that mean you can’t force me to marry someone who isn’t my mate?”
But her words trailed off because Ned might be standing there in a suit of armor, looking better than he had for a long time, but that didn’t mean he was doing great. His skin still shone with sweat that made it clear he was struggling.
“I hate to break this up, fellas, but if you’ll stop prancing around like champion bulldogs, you’ll see that Ned isn’t well,” Ashley interrupted what promised to be another long diatribe from Val. Val pursed his lips as if he was going to interrupt her, but she held her hand up. “Nope. I’m done. Ned’s done. We need to go home. Now. He had a stroke and he needs to rest.”
“Ash, honey,” he said, his voice very low and careful, like he didn’t want to hurt her. “There is no home anymore. Not for us. Not there, anyway. The storm that was brewing? It destroyed most of Tennessee, honey. Our home isn’t there anymore.”
Ashley fell into a chair that appeared from thin air at this betrayal. “What? Of course we have a home to go to. We paid for that trailer and the land. It’s ours.”
Ned shook his head, but Ashley couldn’t make sense of that either. “Dad. Tennessee still exists. So does Walland and our home. My job. Let’s just go home and go back to our lives. Before we end up as crazy as these two.”
Nobody contradicted her. But that wasn’t agreement with her. From the way the other two men looked away from her, she had a sinking feeling that Ned was right. They wouldn’t be going back to Tennessee. Even if it still existed.
“None of this makes any sense. And I’m tired of you two talking but not answering my questions. Somebody tell Ned we can go. Now.” Ashley made the demand, but nobody answered her. “Oh, you’re both quiet now? For once?”
“He’s wrong, right?” Ashley asked Val, though she doubted he’d be honest with her. He proved her right by clearing his throat and looking away.
She turned to Jack and she almost moved to approach him, but Jack shook his head, though she wasn’t sure if that meant she shouldn’t turn to him or if he was telling her that there was no home to go to. She didn’t like either answer.
Ashley sprung to her feet, unwilling to listen to any of the men now. She needed some fresh air or she’d suffocate, she just knew it.
