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“Think about it,” she said, her voice sharp. “It will come to you.”
He mulled it over. She was right. It came to him. “You are not Hugh.”
“I am. I’m bound to Kate by the same ritual Roland used to bind Hugh.”
“You’re nothing like Hugh, and Kate is nothing like Roland.”
Julie turned in the saddle and pointed to the northwest. “I can feel her. She’s there.”
He tried not to lie to her, so he said the
first thing that popped into his head. “That’s creepy.”
“It is.” She put a world into those two words.
“But creepy or not, you know Kate won’t do what Roland is doing to Hugh. Roland doesn’t love Hugh. She loves you. You’re her child.”
She sighed. “I know she loves me. That’s why I’m worried. Derek, she still hasn’t told me that I can’t refuse her orders.”
Alarm dashed down his spine. He hadn’t realized she knew. “How long?”
“Roland told me months ago,” she said.
“She hasn’t told you because it’s hard.”
“I know,” she said. “She tries not to order me around. She’ll start to say some Mom thing and then stop, and you know she’s rephrasing it in her head. It’s kind of funny. Instead of ‘Stop stealing Curran’s beer out of the fridge and wash the dishes’ it’s all ‘It would make me a lot happier if you stopped stealing Curran’s beer’ and ‘It would be great if you did the dishes.’ She probably thinks she’s subtle about it. She isn’t.”
He didn’t see anything funny about it. “What are you going to do?”
“It’s not a problem now,” she said.
“And if it becomes a problem?”
“I’ll do something about it.”
He didn’t like the sound of that. “Still, you should stop talking to Roland.”
She sat up straighter. “Will you stop bossing me around?”
“Stop doing stupid crap, and I’ll stop.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Eat my horse’s ass.”
Ugh. No thanks. “What, was Desandra at the house recently?”
“I don’t need Desandra to teach me insults. And what the hell is it with all the comments about what I’m wearing? There’s nothing wrong with these shorts.”
“Don’t you own any jeans?”
“I do.”
“You should wear them.”
“Why? Is the sight of my legs disturbing you, Derek?” She stopped Peanut and stuck her left leg out in front of him. “Is there something wrong with my legs?”
There was nothing wrong with her legs. They were pale and muscular, and men who should know better noticed them. He was not going to notice them for a list of reasons a mile long, starting with the fact that she was sixteen, and he was twenty. He sidestepped her leg. “The more protection between your skin and other people’s claws, the better.”
“I took down a werejackal. I’m not the one bleeding.”
