And before I could answer his question, he let me know, “I’ve always preferred older bed partners. And you’ve got a couple more hours before Mum drives you to the Wolves’ kingdom, I believe. Sex with the future king would make for a great souvenir, wouldn’t it? Not to mention a hell of a story.”
I tried to hide the cringe that thought set off in me, but apparently, I didn’t do a good enough job.
“Read the social cues she’s exhibiting,” the Shadow Princess said from the other side of me. “It’s obvious she has no wish to have casual sex with you before she leaves on the most important diplomatic trip of all our lifetimes.”
Sure. That was as good an excuse as any. At least I wouldn’t have to explain that I didn’t have near the experience he clearly thought I had, even though I was 32.
“Also, she’s an unmated wolf, and most likely a virgin,” the Shadow Princess added without being asked. “She-wolves, as they refer to themselves, often don’t exhibit sexual desire until they go into heat—which, given her childless state, she has not.”
Okay. Well. I guess that was out there.
Not for the first time, I wished I wasn’t quite so light. I had enough curls on my head to easily be identified as partiallyBlack, but not quite enough melanin to hide when I blushed beneath my freckled skin.
“Can we change the subject?” I asked, feeling the opposite of the consummate diplomat vibe I was going for.
“What did you plan to tell your Scottish King and Queen about us when you got back?” the second-youngest Mountain Prince asked from the other side of his brother.
“Oh, um…” I tried to think of how to tell him in the nicest way possible that the king and queen did not care at all about the Irish Bears—especially Aunt Tara, who’d given me a long list of questions to ask her estranged younger sister, the Queen of the Irish Wolves.
Once again, the Shadow Princess beat me to the punch. “Given that this was the twenty-year anniversary of the Scottish Wolves’ invasion of the Irish Wolves’ kingdom, I highly doubt Dorcas’s king and queen are thinking of us at all. We were just the party that offered an invitation to peace talks.”
“You really can call me Dorie,” I told the Shadow Princess. For, like, the one-hundredth time that week.
“I prefer Dorcas as it’s not the same as a cartoon fish,” she answered in that overly direct way of hers.
“But what about our da’s invasion oftheirkingdom?” the younger Mountain Prince asked his older sister before I could defend my much-preferred nickname.
He squinted at me in a way that reminded me of the hardened Mountain Kings in many of the portraits lining the gallery walls of the palace’s main hallway.
According to the Shadow Princess, gestating bears were believed to choose their own genetic traits in the womb from the DNA they had to work with, which explained her having her mother’s very dark skin paired with her father’s extremely bright-blue eyes.
But the red-haired and hulking second-youngest Mountain Prince had chosen only his mother’s brown eyes and taken the rest from his Mountain King line. Even though he was still a teen, he towered over me and was at least three times as wide.
He was hard to look at, to be honest. With his red hair and sheer brawn, he looked even more like Da than Albie did.
“Successful zero-death interactions are rarely discussed,” the Shadow Princess answered. “There’s a reason the French Revolution makes every European History syllabus, but almost no one studies Portugal’s bloodless military coup, the Carnation Revolution.”
“Portugal had a military coup?” the older Mountain Prince asked, proving her point.
But while she was right about the Irish Bears’ successful invasion not being discussed much in Faoiltiarn, Ihadthought about that day often.
Back then, I hadn’t known that the Irish Bears kept a standing army that basically required every single citizen of their community to be trained to fight and follow orders in bear form.
So that day, looking on from the window of my parents’ room with my mother, all I’d seen was what looked like a river of bears dressed in strange armor flooding from the gate toward the main street below our house.
The reason the invasion had been bloodless came down to primal instinct. Wolves didn’t fight bears in nature, and the citizens of Faoiltiarn—who had definitely not received any military training beyond playing Scots and Irish—quickly got out of the bears’ way, instinctively ducking into the nearest shelter to avoid being trampled or worse.
I’d never forgotten the sight of the General Bear at the head of the rampaging herd suddenly halting in the street outside our house and shifting from a reddish-brown beast into a man, his strange armor shrinking and reshaping itself to fit his human form.
Despite my overhead viewpoint, I could tell he was even more giant than my new da, Alban.
“SADIE! WHERE ARE YOU? I CAN SMELL YOU!”he’d roared as bears rushed by all around him.“SEND OUT MY MATE OR I WILL BURN THIS ENTIRE KINGDOM TO THE GROUND!”
“I thought the bear in the dungeon was Sadie’s mate,” I’d whispered to my mother, who held me tight in her arms, despite her swollen baby belly.
Maem hadn’t answered. Her wide, scared eyes had stayed locked on the scene below. Looking back, it was obvious she’d feared the General Bear would track his mate’s scent into our house, which would put us all in danger. Senair Hamish had gone to the front room with his shotgun and a grim look after telling us to lock ourselves into the primary bedroom.
But to my shock, Sadie had burst out of the house and called, “Tadhg! Tadhg! I’m right here!”
