Royal Wolf Box Set by Haley Weir
Chapter Twelve
When Holly woke up from the tincture, she heard voices outside of her room. Theo and Rubius were talking to Dex about what had happened in the Tavern. They had been furious about the brawl and about what the man had done to Holly. Theo already had trouble controlling his impulses, and Rubius was every bit as angry and agreed that something had to be done in order to stop this sort of action against the new queen completely. It was a treasonous act to try to harm a member of the royal family.
Holly wondered what they had done to the man that had stabbed her. From the way that they were talking, she got the feeling that they had taken him out to the woods and let the wolves at him. The thing that she found most intriguing, though, was the way that Dex was engaging in the conversation with them. She was surprised to hear him talking with her brother and father at all. Holly didn’t remember anything that had happened after her mother’s tincture had taken effect, but she figured that Dex would have left as soon as he had safely delivered her back to her family. She was surprised that he had stayed and even more surprised that he was still there and talking to her family as if he was willing to help them. It all seemed contradictory to what both he and Rubius had told her about being a lone shifter. It sounded as if he had a change of heart.
She listened silently as she lay in her bed and heard them talking about how they would issue Holly a guard that would accompany her anywhere that she might go in the city. When she was in the forest, Dex said that he would keep watch over her. As much as she appreciated their concern and efforts, Holly didn’t want a constant guard. In fact, she hated the idea of never having a moment of privacy unless she was in her own quarters. She reached down to touch her hand to the wound at her side. It wasn’t that bad. She refused to live in fear of the Neanderthals that had attacked her, and she would refuse the guard when they proposed the idea to her.
They also talked about something else. The men’s voices became a bit more hushed and they spoke of things that sounded an awful lot like recruiting some of the shifters to slip quietly into the kingdom at night and kill off the remaining hunters and any of the men whose loyalties to the crown seemed questionable. Holly didn’t like the sound of that either. It didn’t sound like the way a just kingdom should be run, or the way the pack laws worked either. It sounded like a desperate attempt to maintain control and power over the humans. There has to be a better way than this, Holly thought to herself.
When it sounded as if the conversation was ending, and the footsteps of a couple of the men were walking away from the outside of the door, the bedroom opened, and Dex stepped back inside.
“You’re awake,” he smiled when he saw Holly’s open eyes staring back at him.
“Yes,” she answered, meeting his smile with one of her own. “You stayed.”
He nodded and came to sit down on the bed beside her.
“Why did you stay?” she asked as she looked up at him.
His close proximity to her on the bed made her dizzy. She could feel his body heat emanating from him, and she wanted to reach up and run her fingers through his wildly hanging strands of dark hair.
“Your mother asked me to,” he said.
Holly felt underwhelmed by that answer.
“But I wouldn’t have left anyway,” he added.
She couldn’t help but let a grin usurp her face at that answer, which quickly made them both uncomfortable. She wanted to ask him why again, but Dex changed the subject before she could.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her.
“Sore, but fine,” Holly answered. She got up to get changed into a new dress that wasn’t torn open and bloodstained. There was a small wince as she twisted her torso to move.
“You’re supposed to be taking it easy,” Dex said while he watched Holly get out of bed and look around her closet for something to put on.
“I don’t want to take it easy,” she argued. “I am more angry and frustrated than I am sore or scared. I need to put an end to all of this feuding in the kingdom. This sort of thing wouldn’t be happening if Aeron was still alive. He’d find a way to put an end to it immediately.”
“I was just talking with Rubius and your brother about that,” he said. “We have a few ideas.”
“Yes, I heard,” Holly said as she yanked a dress out and started to pull her old one off.
She didn’t even seem to care that Dex was sitting right there in view of her naked body. He’d already seen her nude once in the forest, so it didn’t matter anymore. She did, however, glance at him as she was disrobing and noticed him shift anxiously in his chair.
“I don’t agree with the things the three of you were talking about,” she said as she tried to step into the new dress and pull it up. “I don’t want an escort everywhere that I go, and I don’t want the three of you to start killing humans off.”
Dex tried to stay focused, even though it was exceedingly difficult not to get distracted by her changing.
“The men that we were discussing aren’t worth keeping alive. They will only seed problems both in the kingdom and in the forest,” he said.
Holly let out a frustrated sigh, which he thought was in response to what he had said, but turned out to be the fact that she had gotten herself wedged in her dress, unable to move her arm.
“Can you please help me?” she asked in exasperation. “This is embarrassing, but due to the bandages around my torso, I seem to have gotten stuck in my dress.”
Dex chuckled in amusement as he went to stand up and help her, but then when he got closer to her, the levity gave way to something much more enticing. He stood in front of her and gently tugged the dress over her shoulder until her arm was freed, letting his fingers linger on the top of her collarbone for a moment longer than was necessary. When the dress was on, she turned around and asked him to lace up the back. Dex looked at Holly’s bare back in the dress and slowly began to tie the laces. She could feel his labored breaths against her neck, and it sent a wave of yearning through her that she had never felt before. When he was done, Dex had trouble keeping his hands off her, and he stood behind her as she turned back around without stepping away or pulling his hand from the side of her dress. She thought for a moment that he might kiss her, and she wanted him to as she stood there and stared into his eyes. But a shuffle of people walking in the hallway seemed to make him realize what he was about to do, and he quickly took a step backward, letting his hand drop to his side. When the moment was broken, Holly went back to thinking about what she would do today.
“I cannot let this continue,” she said as she grabbed her dagger from the nightstand and tucked it into her bodice.
“What are you going to do?” Dex asked her. He was visibly flustered in more ways than one.
“I don’t know yet,” she answered as she stepped right up close to him again so that their feet were almost touching. “But it will be something.”
“Don’t do anything reckless,” he said, still breathing heavily due to her close proximity to him.
“Why not?” she taunted.
Holly wanted to see what Dex would do. She wanted to push him to see if she was nearly to the point of their bodies touching, and speaking words like “reckless” with a voice dripping with innuendo, if he would still be able to resist her.
His eyes darted between her eyes and mouth, and his jaw tightened as if he was trying to keep himself in line. She leaned closer toward him by the tiniest amount, but enough for him to tell that she was urging her body closer to his. But then, instead of grabbing her in his arms as she had been hoping for, he abruptly took a step back.
“Just don’t be reckless,” he said breathlessly before turning around and walking out the door.
Holly went to the doorway and put her hand on the frame as she leaned out of her bedroom to see where he was going. She watched as Dex walked down the corridor and straight out of the castle. Then she went to her window and saw him shift as soon as he hit the forest line and go running off into the woods. Hurrying away back into the forest seemed like it was either a huge measure of self-restraint or an exercise in the same sort of lesson that Rubius had warned her about—that he only cared about himself. Still, she had trouble fully embracing that idea, especially since he had stayed by her side. But the fact that she was now here, dressed, and alone in her room, made Holly definitely feel like it was time for her to make a decision for herself and do something reckless indeed.