If I Know You

Chapter 11

"Give it to me, Rory, I'm begging you!" Pippa's face was getting redder with each passing moment.

I shook my head, enjoying the view with a smug smile. "You'll just have to keep going."

"But it's too slippery, it won't stay in my hands! Everything is too wet," she pleaded. "I don't know how I'm supposed to do this."

"It'll happen, trust me. I've been doing this for years. And it'll feel better now that you've had to work for it."

She stopped moving and stuck out her lower lip. "I'm so close. Please."

I tried to harden my resolve, but her face was too cute to resist any longer.

"Fine," I conceded, sighing. "I will give you the secret to catching a frog."

"Yes!" She giggled, pushing her fists into the air victoriously and scrambling out of the murky swamp water.

She had been running around like a madwoman trying to grab one of the little amphibians for at least thirty minutes, but so far, I had caught three, and she had caught exactly none.

The skirt of her dress, and all my clothes, were soaking wet, but I had never been warmer.

"You're going to scare them all away," I laughed, reaching out for her hand so I could prevent her from faceplanting into the mud like I had earlier. "Don't you know that lesson number one of hunting is that you have to be deathly serious and quiet at all times?"

"Princesses don't get to go hunting in Marden," she lamented. "If I had been able to, I would be amazing at this by now."

"If you'd been at home, I would have taken you," I told her.

"Well now you can," she responded, grinning.

We walked a few meters away from where she'd been hunting, and we got down on our hands and knees. We wiggled closer to the water's edge, crawling like little snakes over the damp, grassy ground. Snakes that were about as stealthy as two drunk buffalo.

But she was cuter than a buffalo. I couldn't just go around calling my honey bathtub a buffalo. If Pa ever said that to Ma, Ki would not have a very happy queen or an intact king for a while.

When the water was rippling right in front of us, I pressed my shoulder to hers and gave her a stony frown. "Are you ready to know the secret?"

She turned too, giving me a hardened expression. "Tell me the secret."

It was so hard not to smile when her features were wobbling with the effort of keeping a serious face.

I narrowed my eyes back at her. "Are you sure you can handle the secret?"

"Oh, I was born to handle the secret."

"You have to see the frog," I said with a manly gruffness, pointing at the green blob sitting on a stone near us. "And then... you have to be the frog. Do you understand? Be the frog."

Her tongue darted out immediately. She nodded gravely. "I am the frog."

"You're about to see a master at work." I stood up in a crouch and took a few deep breaths. "Whatever you do, don't make a sound."

My hands flexed, my shoulders rolled, my eyes narrowed.

And then I casually walked up to the rock and nudged the squishy creature onto my hand. He flopped onto my palm.

As I turned to go sit down next to her, we both doubled over laughing in our chorus of snorts and wheezes.

"You're so mean!" she laughed, shoving my knee. "You let me run around like an idiot for so long!"