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To believe anything.
Just as I had these many years.
“Let’s say for just one minute that I still believe your ridiculous theory that there’s some magical werewolf bloodline that has the power to restore order to the entire shifter kingdom and bring about a period of eternal peace and prosperity.” I picked at a knot in the wood with the tip of my finger. “You’re telling me that you honestly believe that fire-haired ruadh over there who just shoved an entire wedge of Brie in her mouth when she thought no one was looking is the one who’s going to do it?”
A strange little smile curled the corners of my brother’s lips as he watched her steal a second bite. “Yes.”
My irritation receives a violent shove from mild to murderous. My brother may have inherited our father’s looks, but I inherited Joseph Abernathy’s temper.
“Ninety-three years you’ve dragged me from hell to Haaf Gruney, every single time insisting that this one was definitely the heir, and never once have you shared with me how you know,” I said, slapping the table with my open palm. “Not to mention the various insults and injuries I’ve endured at the hands of these hussies.”
“Ach, here we go.” Mark crossed his arms over his broad chest like a barrier against my well-worn discontent.
“I’ve been stabbed—” I began.
“With a cockle fork,” he countered.
“Shot at—”
“Her aim was nothin’ to brag of.”
“Vomited on—”
“She was possessed of a banshee.”
“And baptized with a whole host of other bodily fluids I’d rather not call to mind, and after all this time, you still haven’t found her.”
My brother reached for his mug. “That’s where you’re wrong, Kat. I’ve been right every single time.”
My mouth cracked open in a gape.
“They get to choose. The others have chosen—”
“To either try and murder us outright or flee you like the fecking plague.”
Hurt flickers in the depths of his eerie eyes, transforming them into molten bronze. I can see him as he was when we were children for the briefest of seconds. Full of boyish enthusiasm and protective anger.
“How do you know this one will be any different?” I asked, placing both hands on the table before me. “How do you know that any of them will?”
Mark reached out and covered my hands with his. There’s old comfort in the gesture despite the myriad crumbs stuck to my palms.
“The same way I know we need to do this together,” he said. “We both have a role to play in finding the peace neither of us has ever had, Kat.”
That my role was to traipse around on his coattails attempting to make sure some strawberry-headed tart got the chance to turn down the offer of the kind of power I knew I could use to the good had officially begun to chap my arse.
But like most men of my acquaintance, my brother had never entertained the idea that if a female shifter of a royal bloodline was needed to restore order, that shifter might possibly be me.
“I don’t want to do this anymore, Mark,” I said. “I’m tired of searching for the heir.”
“You could go back and marry Angus MacLeod,” he teased. “Have yourself a whole pack of bairns with hair as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat.”
The flippant suggestion is a bellows aimed straight at the seething rage at menfolk in general I’ve had a harder and harder time keeping concealed as of late. Perhaps it’s a function of having crossed my first century on the planet, but I’ve begun to chafe under the bridle of their unquestioned rule. Their wars and weddings.
“What he’d have is a silver blade buried between his arse and his ballocks if he ever tried to bring that drooping meat sword near me.”
My words vibrated with revulsion at the memory. Since we’d been children, Angus MacLeod had been flipping up his kilt to show off his exceedingly mediocre man tackle.
But it was more than that.
