Some Were In Time

by Robyn Peterman

  "Really?" I asked as I bit down on my lip to keep from squealing with excitement.

  "Yes. Step out of the car and place your hands on the hood."

  "Can I put on some lip gloss first?" I asked politely.

  "No ma’am, you cannot. Out of the car now. It would be a shame to have to cuff you and bring you downtown."

  Today was the best day ever.

  I stepped out of the car and brushed his massive chest accidentally with one of my breasts as I made my way to the hood of my car. His quick intake of breath was music to my ears and I knew the pants of his uniform had just gotten tighter.

  "Like this?" I placed my hands on the hood and spread my legs so my miniskirt hiked up to the level of indecent.

  "Jesus Christ, Essie. You left the house wearing that?" Hank, our local sheriff and my sexy mate, griped as he yanked my skirt back over my bottom. "Where in the hell are you going dressed like that?" His normally green eyes had turned icy blue with desire.

  "To try on wedding dresses," I told him as I jumped him and wrapped my legs around his waist. "Don't you like it?"

  "In the privacy of our bedroom it would be great, but in public where any man can see the color of your panties—no."

  "Thong," I corrected him.

  "Worse," he replied.

  "Aren't you gonna feel me up and check for weapons?" I asked as I placed little kisses along his lips. "I am a deadly secret agent."

  "What I want to do, deadly secret agent, is put you over my knee and spank you for going out in public dressed like this."

  "Works for me," I said as I tangled my fingers in his thick dark hair and laid a big one on him.

  "God, you taste good," he muttered as our tongues tangled. He grabbed my ass and ground me into his happy camper. "Can't get enough of you."

  "Then don't," I whispered against his lips.

  "You wanna take the chance of someone from town driving by and seeing me take you on top of your car?" he inquired as his hand crept under my shirt and caressed my breast.

  "Um, no… we could get in the back seat," I suggested as I arched into his talented hand.

  "I don't fit in your car, Essie," Hank said.

  He was right. He was huge and my car was tiny.

  "Didn’t you drive the cruiser?" I asked as I glanced around. My eyes landed on his motorcycle and I sighed dramatically. "You are woefully under prepared today, my fiancé."

  "You are correct, my fiancée," he answered with a huge grin on his face. "And P.S.— you're driving the wrong way if you're going to the bridal shop."

  "I know that," I said. "I knew you were working this stretch this morning. I was hoping to get arrested and felt up by a sexy sheriff."

  "As appealing as that sounds—and trust me it's appealing," he said as he pressed his painfully hard lower half against me. "I actually am working at the moment and you have an appointment. Please tell me you have a change of clothes in the car."

  "Nope. Can't tell you that," I said as I slid to the ground, wiggling all the way. "As long as I'm not bent over a car my ass will feel no wind."

  Hank ran his hand through his hair in frustration and backed me up against the passenger door. "Who will be at your fitting?"

  "Granny, Dwayne and the bridal shop gals," I said, knowing he would be fine with that crew. Granny was my Granny and Dwayne was my three hundred year old gay Vampyre best friend.

  "Species?"

  "Of the shop gals?" I asked.

  "Yep."

  "It's Lori and Layla. They're Were Weasels," I told him as I bent over far more than necessary to get back in my car.

  "You're killing me, Essie," he growled. His wolf was close to the surface and I was so turned on I needed to get the hell out of Dodge before I took him on the hood of my car.

  "I know, Hank," I shot back. "It's my job."

  "Be careful, my little Werewolf," he said as he gave me one last scorching kiss.

  "Careful is my middle name," I said as I gunned the engine of my small piece of crap and peeled out.

  Through my rearview mirror I spotted the love of my life and I giggled. His hands were in his hair and he was looking up to the Heavens like he was praying.

  ***

  "Oh my God, I look fabu," Dwayne squealed as he pranced around the bridal shop wearing a full-on princess wedding gown with a sequined bodice.

  The Were Weasels, Lori and Layla, who owed Bring on the Bride were speechless. Actually I was speechless too. Almost. We'd been here for three hours and I was ready to punch somebody in the head.

  "Um, is he planning on buying that?" Lori whispered to me as we watched him defy gravity, do a leap across the room and land in the splits.

  "Hell if I know," I muttered. "Dwayne?"

  "Yes, doll?" he asked as he gracefully rolled out of the splits and hopped to his feet.

  "You gonna buy that dress?"

  "Do you think I should? White's not really my color, but I love what this neckline does for my pecs." He examined himself critically in the trio of full-length mirrors.

  "First of all," I snapped. "We're here for me. You are not getting married—I am. You have tried on fourteen dresses. I have tried on two. There is something wrong with this picture."

  "Oh honey, let him be," my granny said without looking up as she played Scrabble on her phone. "How often is Dwayne going to be allowed to go in a store and try on wedding dresses without getting arrested? Son of a bitch," she shouted and slapped her phone. "This Scrabble bastard cheats. What in the hell is a zyzzyva? Total bullshit word. I tell you what… I'm gonna find him and skin him alive.

  "I thought you played with the computer," I said, slightly confused.

  "I do."

  "Alrighty then." I pressed the bridge of my nose and wondered how refocus the attention back onto myself… where it was supposed to be to start with. "Dwayne, remove the dress. I'm not wearing white, so neither are you."

  Granny's eyes narrowed dangerously and I scooted away. "What color you wearin', sugar plum?" she asked in a deadly quiet voice.

  I debated telling her. We were in public and I hoped that would mean I wouldn't get my butt handed to me when I sprung the color on her.

  "Granny," Dwayne interrupted my inner debate. "Just in case you didn't know, Essie is not a virgin. I would think the church would go up in flames if she wore white."

  "Actually, I would think it would be more apt to explode with you wearing a dress," I told Dwayne—my Vampyre BFF.

  "But you promised," he whined as he stomped the blush pink four-inch stilettos he had tried on.

  "Fine," I relented. "But you're not wearing white and it has to have sleeves. I don't want to catch a glimpse of your armpit hair on my wedding day."

  "Good point, well made," he said. "However, I could get my pits waxed… "

  "No," I yelled in unison with Lori and Layla.

  "It was just a suggestion," Dwayne said with a pout.

  "Um, we have four brides waiting," Layla said nervously. "Would you like to try anything else on today or should we make another appointment?"

  "I think I'm good," Dwayne said as he slipped out of his gown.

  "She was talking to me," I informed him with an eye roll and a laugh.

  "Whoops, my bad," he said as he walked buck ass naked except for the stilettos back to the fitting room to get his clothes.

  "Holy shit," Lori gasped as she turned several shades of red and began frantically gathering all the dresses Dwayne had tried on. "We'll have to have all of these dry cleaned now."

  "Sorry about that," I mumbled as I yanked Granny and a mostly clothed Dwayne out of the shop. "I'll call and make another appointment."

  "Don't hurry," Layla said sweetly. "Oh my God, I meant we'll see you soon," she stuttered as she hustled away in embarrassment.

  "Those Weasels are a bit odd," Dwayne said, buttoning his pants as we walked across the street to the diner for lunch.

  "Oh, they're nice girls," Granny said as she dropkicked her phone into the
fountain in the middle of the town square. "They're just not used to peckers touching the inside of their dresses before they've been sold."

  "Oh dear lord," Dwayne gasped, completely mortified. "I'll wear panties next time."

  "There will be no next time," I muttered as I retrieved my Granny's phone from the water.

  "Well, aren't you a party pooper," Dwayne huffed.

  "Yep," I told him. "And you…" I dangled Granny’s now useless cell phone in her face. "I am not getting you a new phone. This is the third one this week you've destroyed."

  "No problem," she said with an evil little grin on her face. "I'll play Scrabble on your laptop."

  "That's just awesome," I said in defeat.

  No getting felt up, no dress and soon no laptop. This day rocked.

  Chapter 2

  "I've got the pictures back from Jamaica." Dwayne squealed as he pulled a large envelope out of his man-purse and slapped it down on the table of our booth. "Granny, you are gonna flip!"

  Hank, Granny, Dwayne and I had just spent an awesome week in Jamaica. I'd gotten engaged, sunburned and had more fantabulous sex with Hank than I'd ever had in my life. Jamaica was now my favorite place in the world. Of course Hank and I were already mated, which in the Werewolf world was as good as married, but since we inhabited the human world too we decided to tie the knot.

  "Please tell me you didn't snap one of Granny in her thong bikini," I pleaded. I took a huge sip of my Coke and said a quick prayer to all the angels and saints.

  "Oh for heaven's sake, no. But I did get some gritty yet artistic nudes of her," Dwayne said with glee.

  "Left side or right?" Granny inquired as she carefully folded her straw wrapper into a small football.

  "Right," he answered as he examined a few shots.

  "Good, because my right boob is slightly bigger than the left one. Wanna show my best assets."

  "Okay, let's start today over." I positioned my fingers in a goal post so that Granny could flick her paper football. "We have three days left in Hung before we have to report to Chicago. I need to pick out a wedding dress."

  "And invitations," Dwayne interrupted.

  "Yes, invitations. And we have to brief Junior so he can take over the Pack," I continued.

  "And pick out your flowers and a cake," Dwayne added.

  "Yep—cake and flowers. And we have to make sure Granny can still shoot a gun straight," I said, trying to steer the conversation back on track of what was actually important.

  "I resent that, sugar lips," Granny said as she downloaded Scrabble onto Dwayne's phone.

  "And we have to get a caterer and a band and a photographer and a…" Dwayne reeled off his list like an auctioneer on crack.

  "I'm gonna elope," I hissed as a large and ugly headache exploded between my eyebrows.

  There was silence.

  Blessed silence.

  And then there were tears.

  "Do you hate me?" Dwayne blubbered.

  "Um… no?" I answered wondering if this was a trick question.

  "Well, I am feeling hate. I have only been in one wedding in my three hundred years. The bride was an absolute cow and the groom had three teeth."

  I winced at the image he'd just planted in my brain and hoped this was going to be one of his shorter diatribes.

  "There were a total of three blind people and four others that no one knew at the wedding and I had to wear a robe."

  "Why in tarnation were you wearing a bathrobe?" Granny asked.

  I kicked her under the table. We did not need to encourage these nightmare-inducing stories.

  "It wasn't a bathrobe," Dwayne huffed indignantly. "I have far better taste than that. It was a clerical robe."

  "I'm about to ask a question that I'm sure I don't want the answer to, but… why were you wearing a clerical robe?" Because as much as I didn't want to hear the rest of the story, my morbid curiosity always got the better of me.

  "It was when I was a Catholic priest," he said as if that were even a little bit logical.

  "I got nothing," I mumbled as I held up my hand and tried to get Donna Jean's attention so we could order, eat and leave.

  "I wasn't an actual priest," Dwayne explained. "It was because I was bald. The monastery was full of hair-impaired fellas and I fit right in. It was winter and they were an unending blood supply. It was totally awesome. Plus those holy men had a wonderful glee club and they let me sing tenor."

  "You ate monks?" I asked as the headache moved to my temples.

  "Noooooooooo, I just sipped. They were a bit bland, but what would you expect?"

  I decided to ignore him and move on. Sometimes that was the easiest thing to do with Dwayne. The waitress, Donna Jean, was clearly on her break as she was sitting at the counter and had taken off her shoes. She was a Were Fox and had bunions. That was a mystery to me since all the Weres I knew were exempt from most human ailments. Granny said she was just lazy and I tended to agree.

  "Guys, we're out of here," I said as I stood to leave. "Donna Jean has her shoes off. That means she's about to go out back and have a smoke which she'll make Chauncey hold so she can pretend that she quit. Getting fed is out of the question."

  "Seeing as Dwayne doesn't eat food and I had five breakfast burritos this morning, I'm good with that," Granny said.

  I gaped at her and wondered where she put it. She was tiny—looked like a young slim Sophia Loren. She was eighty but didn't look a day over forty. Werewolves aged very slowly.

  "Doesn't anyone want to hear about my time as a man of God?" Dwayne asked, a bit miffed.

  "You weren't a real priest, were you?" I asked as I slurped down the rest of my soda.

  "Oh heavens, no."

  I paused and placed my glass back on the table. "Oh my God, all their lives that woman and her three-toothed husband thought they were legally married."

  "Sweet Baby Jesus in a thong," Dwayne gasped as he paled even more than his usual shade. "I never thought about that. There could be thousands of toothless bastards running around the world thinking they're legitimate. Sweet mother of Lady Gaga," Dwayne wailed, attracting the attention of everyone in the small diner. "What have I done?"

  In his distress he began to levitate. I quickly yanked him back into the booth before anyone saw him. I did not want to explain Vampyres to unsuspecting humans. It was enough to digest that the Council wanted the Werewolves out of the closet. Vampyres would cause mass hysteria.

  "What's done is done," Granny stated with a chuckle. "Who knows if they even procreated? Were they Weres?"

  "They were Were Cows," Dwayne whispered in a strangled voice.

  A burst of laughter escaped my lips and I had to sit back down so I didn't fall. "Oh. My. Hell," I said as I wiped the tears from my eyes. "There are no such things as Were Cows."

  I looked to Granny for conformation, but she had paled a whiter shade than Dwayne. In fact, I was certain she was about to puke. What in the mother humper was going on here?

  "There is no such thing as a Were Cow, right?" I repeated in a whisper so the humans in the diner wouldn't hear. They lived blissfully unaware of the paranormal world around them and I wanted to keep it that way.

  "Yes, there is," Granny muttered tightly and shook her head.

  "So wait," I said to Dwayne. "When you said she was an absolute cow, you meant Were Cow—not that she was fat?"

  "For Cher's sake," Dwayne said as if I was two years old. "All Were Cows are fat and yes, when I said Cow I meant Cow—fat, magical and deadlier than a Dragon."

  Again in his agitation he started to float to the ceiling.

  Again I yanked him back down.

  My smile was now gone. How in the hell was there a species I didn't know about? Cows? There were freakin' Were Cows—and they were dangerous? This was too much.

  "Where's the camera?" I asked.

  "What camera? My hair is a mess," Granny said alarmed as she ducked under the table in terror.

  "Never mind." It was too much to hop
e I was being punked. "Out. Now," I snapped at my dysfunctional little posse. "We're going over to the sheriff's office to talk to Junior."

  "That's good," Granny said as she cased the diner for cameras. "We'll have privacy there."

  "Can Junior hack?" Dwayne asked as he slung his man purse over his shoulder.