He didn’t make any snide comments or try to do anything other than tell me what to do.
And it was driving me batshit crazy.
Was it a little bit toxic of me to like when he rose to my bait and bickered with me? 100%. But did I want it anyway? Yes, yes I did.
In all of the iterations of the myth of King Arthur—even the few that were written by the pro-single alpha factions during the English Reformation that didn’t mention packs at all—Guinevere always fell in love with Lancelot.
It was the most consistent piece in every different retelling. It was fate.
But how was I supposed to love someone who seemed to hate me?
“I’ll just walk with Gawain while he gives the horses water then,” I told him, ignoring the shake of his head as I grabbed the reins of his stallion, Sarion, who, unlike his stick-in-the-mud master, was an absolute sweetheart.
“What did you do to be stuck with such a moody master?” I asked the horse who nipped at the tattered sleeve of my dress affectionately.
A laugh bubbled up in my throat as I reached up to scratch along the horse’s muzzle.
“You really have a way with horses, Gwen,” Gawain said with a chuckle once we were out of earshot of the camp.
Lancelot still shot glares in the younger alpha’s direction whenever he slipped up and called me by my nickname in front of him, so Gawain tended to avoid it to keep the peace.
“I guess I do,” I told him with a shrug. “My mom always loved them.”
“Did she ride?”
I snorted. “No, she was the least outdoorsy person of anyone I’ve ever met. She once took us camping when I was eleven and we ended up in a four-star hotel by the end of the night. She was more of a sit-on-a-beach kind of girl. But she did love to look at them. Only look though—no touching—in fact, she’d probably throw a fit if she saw me on one of them. It would be a whole thing full of scolding and telling me I was going to fall and break my neck.”
Gawain’s lips pulled up into a cheeky smile. “She sounds lovely.”
“She was.” I looked away from the soft look in his blue eyes. Over the past couple of days I had told him more and more about my mom and he’d shared tidbits about his own family.
While it had been just me and my mom in the future, it sounded as if Gawain had no one at all in his family to turn to or rely on. It must have been lonely to grow up the way he had.
On the other hand whenever he spoke about Arthur in the rest that same gentle gleam that he had now would appear.
Found family,was a phrase that lots of my friends in college whose families weren’t the best used to use when they described our friend group. I was almost certain that that was what Gawain thought of the other alphas in Arthur’s round table.
Sarion, who had been docile and walking at my side, suddenly jerked forward with a nicker and practically dragged me waist deep into cold water.
“Oh,shit!” I gasped, still clutching his reins in my hand as I stood in what looked like a creek. “You bad boy! I take back my earlier opinion of you!”
The stallion ignored me as he dunked his muzzle into the water and took long drags of liquid in with a huff.
Gawain’s laughter filled my ears and I glared over Sarion’s back at him as he stood with his hands on his knees and let out the loudest, most obnoxious guffaws that I had ever heard. The other two horses, unlike the one that had dunked me, stood on the sandy shore demurely drinking the water with the utmost politeness.
“Don’t laugh! It’s cold!”
“I am sorry, Gwen, but I do not think I have ever seen such surprise on someone’s face before tonight,” he told me as he straightened and wiped a tear from the corner of his eyes.“Sarion is famous for his—ah—penchantof desiring to be legs deep in water.”
I rounded the horse, wading back towards the shore and pulling my now waterlogged dress along with me. “He doesn’t do it to you or the others!”
My protest was just met with another knowing grin. “He would not dare, but you were untested.”
“And you just let me take his reins tonight knowing he would try to waterboard me?”
“What is this ‘waterboarding’?”
I ignored his words, instead my hand lashed out and curled in the front of his tunic and I dragged him into the water with a great splash.
