Amanda Hocking [Trylle Trylogy 01] Switched (pdf)

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Mountain Dew with fervor, but I just sipped at my water.
So what do you think? Rhys nodded at the plate of food I was trying
to eat.
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It s pretty good, I lied. He had obviously worked hard on it, and his
blue eyes showed how proud he was of it, so I couldn t let him down. To prove
my point, I took a bite and smiled.
Good. You guys are hard to cook for, Rhys admitted sourly and took
a mouthful of his own food. I don t know how you can eat this plain, though.
I don t know how you can eat it with sauce. I wrinkled my nose at
the smell of it.
To each his own, I guess, Rhys laughed lightly. When he looked
down at his plate, his sandy hair fell into his eyes, and he brushed it away.
So& you know Finn pretty well? I asked carefully, stabbing my fork
into a mushroom.
Their banter earlier had left me curious. Finn seemed to genuinely
enjoy Rhys, even if he didn t approve of his cooking, and I had never seen Finn
enjoy anybody. Patrick, he had kind of liked, but I think that had been more of
a means of getting closer to me. He openly looked down on Matt, and while he
respected and obeyed Elora, I didn t think he really liked her.
I guess. Rhys shrugged like he hadn t really thought about it. He s
just around a lot.
Like how often? I pressed as casually as I could.
I don t know. He took a bite and thought for a minute. It s hard to
say. Storks move around a lot.
Storks?
Yeah, trackers, Rhys smiled sheepishly. You know how you tell little
kids that a stork brings the babies? Well, trackers bring the babies here. So we
call them storks. Not to their faces, though. They don t like it that much.
I see. I wondered what kind of nickname they had for people like
me, but I didn t think that now was the best time to ask. So they move around
a lot?
Well, yeah. They re gone tracking a lot, and Finn is in pretty high
demand because he s so good at it, Rhys explained. His parents were some of
the best, I guess. And then when they come back, a lot of them stay with some
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of the more prestigious families. Finn s been here off and on for like the past
five years or so. But when he s not here, somebody else usually is.
So he s like a bodyguard?
Yeah, something like that, Rhys nodded.
But what do they need bodyguards for? I thought back to the rod
iron gate and security guards that had allowed our entrance into F�rening in the
first place. When I had looked around the entryway, I remembered seeing a
fancy alarm system by the front door. This all seemed like an awful lot of
trouble to go to for a small community hidden in the bluffs.
She s the Queen. It s just standard procedure, Rhys answered
evasively, and he purposely stared down at his plate. He tried to erase his
anxiety before I noticed and forced a smile at me. So how does it feel being a
Princess?
Honestly? Not as awesome as I thought it would be, I replied, and he
laughed heartily at that.
Rhys kind of straightened up the kitchen after we finished eating, but
he explained the maid would be in tomorrow at ten to take care of the rest of it.
He gave me a brief tour of the house, showing me all the ridiculous antiquities
that had been passed down from generation to generation. There was room that
only had pictures of previous Kings and Queens. When I asked where a picture
of my father was, Rhys just shook his head and said he didn t know anything
about it.
Eventually, we parted ways. He cited some homework he had to get
done, and he had to get to bed because he had school in the morning. I
wandered around the house a bit more, but I never saw either Finn or Elora. I
played around with the stuff in my room, but I quickly tired of it. Feeling
restless and bored, I tried to get some sleep, but I had slept too late in the
afternoon.
On top of all that, I felt incredibly homesick. I longed for the familiar
comfort of my regular sized house with all my ordinary things. For Maggie s
suppers that she worked so hard on, and the way she always sang when she did
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the dishes. If I were at home, Matt would be sitting in the living room, reading a
book under the glow of the lamp light. He d be telling me to get to bed, and I d
be trying to convince him that we should stay up all night and watch The
Gladiator again. I didn t really like the movie that much, but Matt loved the
architecture, so he would sometimes cave.
Right now, he was probably sitting in the kitchen, staring at the phone. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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