by Lauren Dane
He headed right to their table as several Dooley wolves in the place kept a very close watch on him.
“If you’re here to start some mess, Mac Pembry, I’m happy to give you some,” she warned.
“I’m here to talk to you about what happened last night.”
“This is something between you and Jace. I’m not going to let you put me between you.”
He smiled, tipping his head to indicate the empty chair. “Can I sit? Have a few minutes of your time? You worried Jace might get jealous?”
“Oh, you think you can say that and not piss me off?”
Two wolves at a nearby table shot to their feet, catching her attention. She nodded her thanks, but waved them back to their seat.
“Don’t you try to get to me through Jace, you understand? I don’t take kindly to such talk.”
“You’re right. I apologize for that. May I have a few minutes? Here in public. If you don’t like what I have to say, I’ll go.”
“What?” She indicated the chair. “Say it and be done.”
“You’re still mad about last night,” he said.
“Is that what you have to say?”
He gave her one of those earnest handsome guy faces. “You’re being hard right now, Katie Faith,” he added a charming smile.
She just stared at him until he sighed.
“She didn’t mean it the way you think she did.”
She goggled at him a moment. “Really? Are you referring to the ugly stuff your mother said last night that set off a fight in the middle of a Founder’s Day dance? The comment wishing me better than the mother of three sons standing right there with me? God, no wonder y’all are so messed up with that as a mother.” She shook her head, really mad now.
“She’s still my mom.” His voice took on an edge and that made her even angrier.
Aimee put her hand on Katie Faith’s arm, just a touch to let her know she wasn’t alone. “What is your problem?” Aimee asked Mac, defensive of her friend.
“This is more complicated than you’re making it out to be.” He glared at Katie Faith and she glared right back. “Yes, it was a bitchy thing to say, but she didn’t mean it to say she hoped you died.”
She snorted. “Oh well then it’s totally okay for Scarlett to have said such a thing in front of three men who lost a mother. Or maybe Annie’s sisters, who were there too. I’m sure all those folks who lost someone they loved mean nothing in the never ending quest your mother has to be the ugliest, pettiest citizen of Diablo Lake.”
His eyes widened then as he reared back, offended.
Good.
Katie Faith waved a hand at him. Dismissing him.
“Get out of my face, Mac. I’m not joking around now. Your mother or not, she’s broken rules. You know it. How can anyone take Pembry serious when you don’t handle that? She’ll tear y’all apart. And good luck with it, because it has nothing to do with me. What she said was meant to hurt Jace and his brothers. Scarlett is a mess and I won’t play pretend that she didn’t mean what she said. And I sure won’t take any responsibility for what she said. We’re done here.”
“You’re just going to let this keep going until it ends up in open war?” he asked her.
“I’m going to what now? You’re truly sitting there after what your mother and brother have done and saying this is about what I have or haven’t done? Is that what you learned in your fancy school in London then?”
He growled, but it wasn’t cute like when Jace did it. She didn’t like it one bit so she crowded closer, fighting the urge to get away from him. If she meant to do what she told Jace and truly lead at his side, she had to think and act like a wolf at times like this.
“I’m doing what I can. But you make it harder when you act this way. Everyone starts feeling like they’re losing power and position and they make bad choices.”
“It’s not my job to make your life easy, Mac. The scene at the grocery store? Your mother started it. Continued it even as I literally ran away from her. Darrell getting his ass tossed into the street when he threatened me? He started it. He came into the Counter and got my daddy all riled up. Your mother deliberately ruined my engagement and said cruel things. Getting my momma upset, sending my father to bed early. Your brother started a fight with Jace, got his ass kicked, called for his daddy and your daddy hasn’t done a damned thing to shut him up. So. As I said, we’re done here. This is a Pembry problem. Not a Katie Faith problem. But if you make it a Katie Faith problem you’re not going to like my response.” She looked at her phone. “I have to be somewhere just now so I’ll even make it easy and leave first.” She stood, leaving money on the table for her food.
Aimee looked across the table at Mac for long moments as if trying to puzzle him out before she joined Katie Faith at the front door.
“I’ll talk to you later on.” She needed to stop by her parents and then head home to meet up with Jace.
“Yes. I want to hear on the dress situation.” She gave Katie Faith a hug. “Don’t let him get you all upset, you hear?”
“This whole mess makes me upset.”
“I know. But try not to let it anyway.”
Sighing, Katie Faith headed to her car and over to check on her mom and dad, who’d taken the day off and stayed home to rest after Katie Faith harassed them and even resorted to tears.
It was bald-faced manipulation of her dad, but she’d have done it again in a heartbeat if that’s what would be necessary to keep him safe and healthy.
He was still pouting when she arrived. But Miz Rose was there, sitting at the dining room table with her mom, when Katie Faith came in.
“Hey,” she said, giving her grumpy dad a smooch before heading over to the table to do the same with her mom and Miz Rose.
“Hey, darlin’. Miz Rose and I were just talking about the dress. She brought hers, I have mine and we’ve got your Grandma Abel’s dress too. But we also want you to know if you don’t want any of the dresses we won’t be upset. This is your day.”
“Let’s go try them on and see what’s what first? Then we can decide if I need an entirely new dress or if we can do some alterations.”
Two of Miz Rose’s daughters had worn the dress and Katie Faith knew why. It was a beautiful, simple silk sheath. It was what she’d always considered elegant. But perhaps more suited to a long, lean body instead of Katie Faith’s, she thought as she checked herself out in the mirror.
“Even with alterations I think this wouldn’t flatter you,” Miz Rose said as she frowned.
Her mom nodded. “Try this one.” Grandma Abel had been Rose’s second cousin and Nadine’s great grandmother.
A white satin undersheath went on first, followed by a lace overdress with two tiers. There was a sharp nip at the waist, but it was a higher waistline. It should have been too much. Or not enough. But it was...perfect.
“My great grandpa Mike went off to the city and came back with the dress. It sat in the back of a closet at your grandma’s house for years and years. I found it in a garment bag. It’s in perfect shape for a dress that’s at least a hundred years old.”
“It’s very old fashioned.” She cocked her head and looked at herself.
“Edwardian, I believe, is the style and time period.” Miz Rose gathered up Katie Faith’s hair, twisting it back at the base of her neck. “It suits you.”
“Feminine without being overly fussy. I wouldn’t have thought the tiers would suit you so well. You look beautiful. What do you think?” her mom asked her.
It was totally different than her dress the first time around. That one had been a poofy, floofy confection with seed pearls and the like.
This dress was sort of like Jace and their wedding itself. Improbable, but it worked.
“I think it’s the most perfect wedding dress I could have imagined.�
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Her mother stood behind her on one side and Miz Rose on the other as they stared at the dress and Katie Faith in it.
“If you cry, I’m going to cry and it’ll be a mess,” she warned her mother.
Her mom sucked in a breath and stood up straight. “I think you’re perfect in it. There’s a veil.”
She pulled out a length of tulle and Katie Faith gasped at the pretty embroidery at the edges. Delicate whirls and swirls of tiny flowers and leaves.
In her hands, the magic of it seemed to flare to life.
“This wasn’t bought in the city, though. Someone who loved the bride very much did this over painstaking hours of work.”
She held it at the back of her neck. “Here. We can pin it in to the bun. Give it a little bit of modern to go with the traditional dress that way.”
They did a little measuring and pinning to adjust the fit better. Her mom would do the alterations and Miz Rose volunteered to handle the flowers as her son-in-law ran a floral delivery service out of his landscaping business.
“His greenhouses are absolutely bursting with roses right now. What about something with fall colors?”
Witches were badasses when it came to growing roses. All winter long the roses climbed up the trellis at the side of her parents’ house because her dad had such a gift with them.
“Corals and yellows with some orangey reds. Yes. Nothing else. Long stemmed. We can tie them with ribbon or the like. Jace’s boutonnière should be one of those colors. He’s going through the mercantile to order a tux. He pretty much just let me choose it.”
“You’re not giving us very long to plan. Are you sure you’re not pregnant? Because if you’re not, if you gave me six weeks, that’s only a month longer than you already had chosen. If you give me six weeks we can do up such a pretty wedding at the church.”
She ignored the pregnancy comment. “I’m so relieved it was booked.” She set the veil aside carefully before taking her mom’s hands and squeezing. “Honestly. I want to have Carl do the honors on the front porch of the mercantile. Then we can put a big tent up on the lawn for food and dancing after. I want to marry Jace. I want to do it with my family and friends there. I’m really happy with all the plans.”
Her mom kissed her cheek. “Your aunts and I will be baking the cake. No arguing.”
When she was going to marry Darrell, his mother had insisted they buy a cake from some bakery all the way in Tompkins Creek. She’d sneered at the very idea of making a wedding cake like common people.
“I’m not arguing at all. I can’t wait.” She was as common as they came and thank goodness for it. Especially if it meant she’d take a cake baked by people who loved her over a store-bought one any day.
“Jace told me earlier that the pack would provide the meal. I don’t remember that at all from Darrell and said so. But then he got that face of his and explained that Darrell was a lame wolf anyway. Cake is ours though, I’ll let him know that.” Once she told him why, he’d be all for it.
“Where on earth are we going to get all the chairs we’ll need for the ceremony? Six hundred plus, he said?” Her mother looked heavenward.
“What I think would work best is if we can work with city hall to get the permit to shut this part of the street down. Make it into a block party type of thing. But I’m thinking the ceremony party will be less crowded than the rest. You give people cake, food and drinks and they’ll come out. We can rent chairs.” Normally she’d get them through Pembry freight but she didn’t want to have anything to do with them at the moment. “Aimee says she knows someone who knows someone. It’ll happen.”
“An operation this size will be bound to go wrong here and there. Long as we’ve got enough chairs for the elderly and enough food, we’ll be fine,” Miz Rose said as Katie Faith got dressed in her street clothes once more.
“The only thing I can’t deal with going wrong is the actual wedding part. Everything else we can handle as it comes up.”
* * *
Jace had been chopping wood when one of his cousins came over to tell him about what Mac Pembry had done to Katie Faith earlier that day at Salt & Pepper.
Katie Faith came into the yard five minutes later, when he was still working through his mad as he put things away in the moonlight.
“Whatcha doin’ out here?” she called out.
“It would be nice,” he said, trying hard to keep the anger from his tone, “if I found out things from you instead of other people.”
Her smile fell away. “What are you talking about?”
“Mac Pembry getting up in your face in public and me hearing from my cousin instead of my fiancée.”
“You listen here, buddy. I’ve been with my mom and Miz Rose fitting my wedding dress and planning the reception. Do you think I was going to toss that—actually important thing—aside to run to you to tell you Mac Pembry acted like an alpha wolf in the middle of a restaurant? Is that what you think I should have done? Because I don’t. Would you like to hear what happened from someone it happened to instead of some tattletale cousin?”
Then she poked him in the chest and he was so stunned he started to laugh, pulling her into a hug. “Can we start over?”
“I think that’s a good idea. I just got back from my mom’s house. I have a dress. The alterations will be made. I chose flowers and we even got the ball rolling on gathering all the things we’ll need to try to accommodate a thousand people or so. I wanted a small wedding. Remember that? You’re the one who was like oh well hey we need to invite all six hundred of my friends.”
She then laid out all the different details from the dance floor to tents to be set up. “I’m leaving the food to you, because that’s your thing. But the cake is my thing. My mom and my aunts will make it. That’s what they do when one of their own gets married.”
“I admit all that is more important than rushing over here to tattle on Mac Pembry. But how about a text instead if something like that happens in the future? And it most likely will since you’ll be leading them with me and you’ll come to see what a pain in the ass it can be to sit in the leader’s chair. Tell me?”
“If I’d have texted you, you’d have rushed over to my mom and dad’s place and demanded to know exactly what happened. Don’t pretend otherwise. Now if you cool your jets a little, I can tell you what happened.”
She told him about the weird interaction she’d had with Mac earlier. He didn’t like it. Not one bit. He should have approached Jace rather than going around him to Katie Faith.
When she’d finished, she looked him over carefully, wagging a finger. “That face of yours. Stop. I’m here. He didn’t scare me. Like, at all. He was doing the bidding of his family, but he’s not Darrell. And I did insult his mother.”
“That’s because she’s out of control. Still, there—”
“Are rules. I get it. He should have talked to you. Which is what I told him repeatedly. All he did in there was look like a jackwagon and I underlined for him that I wasn’t going to be put in the middle and that he needed to speak to you.”
She kissed him even as he kept frowning.
“I don’t like that he came at you.”
“I know. But it wasn’t threatening. I would have said so if that was the case.”
He wanted to storm over to Mac’s place a little less than he did just a few minutes prior.
“I really do hate being told no. It’d be much easier if everyone just obeyed me,” he muttered as they went up to her place.
“Yeah, well. I told you the other day that if you mean to have me in your life you’d better get used to hearing it. Also, there are four wolves in the hallway outside your apartment. You might need to have office hours or something so they don’t all have to wait around.”
He walked a careful line, especially until his grandfather
stepped down. He didn’t want to shove JJ out. So as they slowly transitioned, he let his grandfather set the pace. It had been his seat for decades and Jace could learn from him for the rest of his life and still not know everything.
“Let me handle this. Will you let the wolves know I’ll be up shortly? I’ll be over at your place after that,” he told her, kissing her quickly before she hustled off toward the mercantile building.
Chapter Twenty-Six
On the Monday before the wedding, Jace came home from work to find a note taped to his door. An invitation to dinner for him and Katie Faith from his grandmother. She advised them to show up with a big appetite at no later than five thirty.
Which was about half an hour from that moment.
He turned on his heel and knocked on Katie Faith’s door.
She opened up with a smile. “Hey.”
“We’ve been asked to dinner in half an hour over at my grandparents’ place.” He kissed her quickly.
“Tonight?”
“Yes. I’m going to clean up a little while you gussy up a little. Come over to my place when you’re ready and we’ll head over.”
She might have muttered that he was bossy, but he couldn’t argue so he didn’t.
Once they arrived, he wasn’t surprised to see his brothers and uncles at the table already. This had the hallmarks of some sort of official pack business.
There was hugging and kissing all around. It pleased Jace to see how easily Katie Faith had adapted to their more touchy-feely ways, giving and receiving caresses and reassuring touches.
“Just in time.” His grandmother motioned them to the table. “Tab, honey, bring in that big platter with the pork chops. Jace, bring in the potatoes.”
JJ gave the blessing and within a few minutes, all chatter had quieted down to get serious about eating.
They weren’t really used to girlfriends at the table, but Katie Faith wasn’t really that. She was more. Someone they’d all known since childhood and she fit with them. Mainly because that’s how she was, but he wasn’t unaware of how hard she worked to learn about pack law and custom.
