by Lynn Red
He knelt in front of me.
“Oh holy fuck you’re serious,” I said in one syllable’s worth of exhale. “You’re really doing this and I’m really here.”
Reaching into his open collar, Jake pulled at the cord around his neck, snapping it effortlessly. In a quick flick of his wrist, the cord was gone and a ring was in his hand. “This is for you. Werewolves are more into biting to mark their mates instead of wearing little trinkets.”
“You’re really doing this and you’re serious and I’m not gonna start sweating and gross you out and...” I took a deep breath. “I’m already sweating but you aren’t leaving so it must not be that bad.”
“We all sweat,” he said as he kissed my hand. “We are all animals, after all. I think I said that once before, when I...”
“Oh God yes,” I said. Actually it was more like hearing myself say it. I had a serious case of out-of-body experience just about then. I was vaguely aware of a buzzing noise off in the distance, getting closer. But let’s be serious – I was being proposed to by what was either actually a werewolf, or a lunatic. Or I guess the option I didn’t consider at the time was that I was the lunatic. Wait, is lunatic offensive now? Oh God, werewolf... moon... luna-tic. I shook my head as my thoughts raced.
“What’s that sound?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter. The world is you and me right now. I’m the alpha, I want you to be the vita. The pack needs you, Delilah,” his voice was so smooth that I’m fairly sure my panties fell down a couple of inches that had nothing at all to do with me shifting my hips back and forth.
“What,” I swallowed, my throat clicking. “What is a vita?”
“Means life. It’s Latin. Anyway, the alpha is the leader, the vita is his mate. She’s the life of the pack. The heart, the soul.”
“I’d like that,” I said, despite every intention to say no. “That sounds nice. That buzzing is getting really loud, and there’s a light now. What’s going on, Jake?”
He shook his head, dismissively. “Doesn’t matter. Was that a yes?”
No! No, no, no, no, no, or at least think about it!
“Yes,” I said, my voice hollow and weak. “I’m insane.”
“You’re wonderful. You’re perfect. I am the crazy one.”
“Master Somerset!” Barney shouted, bursting into the dining room. “Your brother! He’s—”
It wasn’t words that cut Barney off, it was the bay window exploding, and a motorcycle whizzing past my head before skidding down the table and falling over on a side, ripping a gash in the beautiful cherry wood.
“Am I late?” Dane said, standing up and brushing the glass off his leather lapel. “Oh, hello Delilah. Funny seeing you here, it’s almost like I planned this.”
-10-
“Why can’t they just be NORMAL brothers that hate each other and only talk on Thanksgiving?”
-Delilah
“This is not okay!” I was shouting as the two brothers were apparently sizing each other up for another fight. “I did not just agree to marry you to watch a pro wrestling match!”
Barney grabbed me and pulled me back into the kitchen. “This could get heated,” he said under his breath. “Best not to be in the midst of the commotion. You said yes?”
“Commotion?” I wasn’t even trying not to scream anymore. “I told him I’d marry him or be a vita or whatever, and then that asshole rode a motorcycle through the window and broke that bottle of wine! What the hell is going on?”
“Master Somerset did say that werewolf lives are often complicated.”
“Am I supposed to laugh at that?”
“Humor for the sake of diffusing stress. It frequently gets me in trouble with my mate,” Barney shrugged.
“So you’re one too? I asked if you were!”
He nodded, watching Jake and Dane still circling one another.
“I never said I wasn’t.”
Exasperated, I balled up my fists and drove them into the small of my back. “Are you two just going to dance around all night?”
Both of them turned to me, and immediately the heat in my cheeks went up about eighty degrees. “Well! I just agreed to marry him! And now you show up for God knows what reason. I want this shit over with! Have it out, beat each other up again, do whatever you’re going to do, but right now you’re both just ruining my getting engaged. This is not how I imagined it!”
“She’s certainly something, all right,” Dane said in his cocky asshole voice. “I’ll give you that. Those hips, too.” He made a kissing noise. “I’m going to love taking her for my own. I don’t know what you’re going to do when she finds out about the challenge. You did tell her, didn’t you?”
Before that could process, Dane threw a punch that caught Jake square in the mouth, though Jake took it like nothing happened. “Get out,” he snarled.
And then, something started... happening.
“Oh dear,” Barney sighed. “I’d say you should look away, as the transformation process can be a bit jarring, but I suppose if you’re to be the vita... At least these two have been doing it for a good while, so it should be too—”
I squeaked something similar to a curse as my fiancé hunched over, his hands twisted and stretched, and the front of his head elongated into something halfway between a nose and a snout. He gnashed his teeth, threw back his now slate-gray head and unleashed a roar that shook the pumpkin nearest him on the table. He flung his head from left to right, roaring in what was either extreme pain, or maybe felt really good. Teeth became daggers, fingernails extended into black claws, and his already muscular body thickened with long, tight muscles.
The buttons of his beautiful, tailored shirt popped, one after another, and his tight slacks ripped up the side seam. Good thing I can sew, I guess.
And for some reason, he got extremely bad posture out of the whole deal. He hunched forward, muscles in his back apparent with each breath that expanded his lungs.
“You... want it your way?” he snapped. His voice was difficult to understand, as though he hadn’t spoken in quite a while and was getting back in practice. “Fine, brother. Leave her out of this.”
“But Jacob,” Dane had an obnoxious, lecturing mother tone in his voice. “She’s what all this is about. How can I leave my mate-to-be out of this? I’m going to murder you, claim her, and then take my rightful place as the head of this family and alpha of the pack.”
As I watched, Dane went through a similar process to Jake, although his seemed much easier – maybe he was more used to the whole thing? He seemed extremely comfortable in his half-lupine skin. His fur was inky black, just like his eyes. “Their eyes match their... uh... fur?”
There was a lump in my throat, which I had to swallow four or five times to push down. “I can’t believe I’m taking this all so well.”
“You’re in shock,” Barney said. “You’ll have a panic when the adrenaline passes. Also, no, eyes don’t match fur. Just a coincidence in their case. After all, I’d look rather silly with blue fur, wouldn’t I?”
“You’d look like my sister,” I said out the side of my mouth. “During one of her phases.”
He snorted a laugh. “I think you’ll do just fine. Don’t listen to Dane. He’s been a loudmouth since he was born.”
The two of them came together in a thud of flesh and bone. Somehow, the first casualty of all their thrashing and clawing wasn’t either of them, but one of the innocent soup pumpkins, which exploded in a shower of orange parts and delicious, creamy soup. The majority of the gourd’s contents splashed on Jake, who understandably had other things to worry about.
Dane caught him with a left hook that would have decapitated a normal person. Jake’s head wrenched sickeningly, but he seemed unhurt. He answered with a head butt that split Dane’s bottom lip and when he was momentarily stunned with pain, Jake kneed his brother in the diaphragm and then slammed the same knee straight into Dane’s face.
“I don’t feel well,” I said, sitting down
hard on the cool marble tile of the kitchen. The room swam around me.
Barney grabbed a towel off one of the many ovens, wrung cool water out of it, and wrapped it loosely around my neck. Almost immediately the wave of nausea passed, but then when Dane answered Jake’s violence with an elbow to the side of Jake’s head that crunched like his skull cracked, the sensation of bile creeping up my esophagus reappeared. “I’m gonna puke,” I croaked.
Barney stroked my face with the towel and led me back, further into the kitchen, and well out of sight of my mate-to-be and his brother beating each other to death. It was the sounds though – the crunch the thud and the crash of fists into jaws and knees into stomachs – that really hit me.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that instant of violence, the crackle in the air I’d felt in the moment before the two of them slammed together. My mind turned to the trail of blood, the soup on Jake’s side, and then to the cascade of orange bits that exploded out from underneath him when Dane slammed him into that enormous dining table.
“Here,” Barney said softly, tilting a cup to my lips. “This will help.”
“This isn’t water,” I said. “Vodka?”
“Water isn’t going to do much good when you just saw your boyfriend turn into a wolf. I think you needed some stronger drink.”
“Good,” I swallowed the rest and then the lump in my throat that seemed unwilling to go away, faded as the liquor burned down into my guts. “Yeah, good call. Are they – is he – going to be okay?”
Barney took a deep breath that he released in a sigh. “This is the less glamorous side of being lupine. Our animal urges overwhelm us and we frequently solve problems that are rather silly ones by being very violent. Jake is unlike most wolves in that respect.”
“You mean most of them are worse with the punchy business?”
“Vastly. The reason his father chose him as alpha over his brother was that he wanted to become more palatable to normal society, and he figured rightly that the only way to do that was to have an alpha who thought more reasonably.”
A vase broke in the other room, which made Barney wince.
“That was a Ming,” he said. “The table is from Haverty’s though.”
“Really?” I asked. “But it looks so fancy.”
“Yes. Well, after you break three or four priceless antiquities from old palaces, you dial it down a little.”
Almost on cue, a massing crash from the other room once again had Barney wincing. “Besides, priceless antiquities don’t come with no-questions-asked warranties.”
I nodded in agreement as something smashed into something else, and Barney just rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Someday they’ll stop honoring it, but then again, they haven’t yet, so perhaps not.”
He sipped at some tea that I hadn’t noticed him making. Someone hit a wall, shaking the entire house. Jake shouted something incoherent and Dane shouted something I also couldn’t understand but the tone of his voice and the way Jake hissed gave away the context.
“What was he talking about the challenge?” I asked.
Barney shrugged and shook his head.
We’d noticed the dining room had fallen silent and stayed that way for a long moment. “Should we...?”
Barney nodded. The motorcycle on the table was on fire, but just a little. As predicted, the beautiful, six-foot vase which had been on the shelves, was lying on the ground in a heap of shards, some of them with a bit of blood coloring the clay. Jake was cut up, bruised, battered, and mostly back to human, but some remnants of his transformation remained. The muscles of his back and his arms were still swollen to their lupine size, and he was nursing a broken lip, but he seemed otherwise fine.
“Where did Dane go?” I asked as I cradled his head against my chest and dabbed at the lip with a cloth Barney handed me. “And I guess you weren’t kidding about the werewolf business.”
He winced and then snarled when Barney returned with some hydrogen peroxide. He handed me the bottle. “Less likely to bite you,” he said with a sly grin. I dabbed the stuff onto his cuts, and he did wince, and flinch just a bit, but I was safe from being bitten.
“I made a deal with him. He leaves you alone, and he gets the pack.”
Barney and I both exchanged a glance, but by the time I looked back down, Jake had picked himself up and shrugged me off. “I don’t want this life anyway,” he said. “All I want is you.”
“Uh, Master Somerset?” Barney entreated, “I think you’re forgetting any number of reasons for that to be a wretchedly bad idea.”
“No,” Jake said. “What I’m forgetting – what I’ve always forgotten – is that I have a life too. I have needs and desires, and none of them involve fighting with my brother for the rest of my natural existence, or running a company from a penthouse office with a goddamn golf green in it. This isn’t me Barney, you know that.”
He spun on his heel and strode out of the dining room.
I have never heard a door slam quite that hard.
-11-
“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had bad dates before, but that was... special.”
-Delilah
The ride back to my house was bumpy, silent and awkward, but as soon as we stepped in the front door, I needed answers.
I took a deep, impatient breath and pursed my lips before exhaling sharply. “What the hell was all that?”
Jake was all surly and stormy. He very obviously wasn’t in the mood to deal with me questioning him, but after what just happened, I wasn’t in the frame of mind to go on like everything was copacetic, so I kept prodding.
“Okay, let me get this straight. You live in a mansion, and your family has farmland of... thirty acres? Forty? How many did you say?”
“Hundred and ten,” he said, grumbling. “Little more.”
“And we’re going to my tiny house? Would you care to explain why that might be? For right now let’s just look past the whole ‘forsaking your duty’ thing and look at logistics. You live in a goddamn mansion and we’re back at my two bedroom, one bath split level? Really?”
He shot me a dark look. “I needed to get away. I needed to feel secure. And that meant getting away from the house. It might be stupid, but I needed time to think.”
I took another deep breath, fairly proud of myself for how reserved I was being. “Then you need to come clean, and now.”
“You don’t tell me what to do,” Jake growled.
Those eyes, those steel, beautiful eyes, put that same squiggle in my belly that I felt last time we were together.
“Or what?” I asked, slightly breathless. “You gonna punish me?”
The corner of his mouth twitched in what could easily be either a grin or a grimace. “You want to find out?”
I took another deep breath, trying to steel myself against his admittedly incredible charm. “No,” I said at first, “I want answers, not orgasms.”
Jake lifted his hands to my face, his thumbs lying along the line of my jaw. “That’s not what your body is saying.”
I was half-consciously moving my hips against one of his massively muscled legs. Just the heat of his skin through his torn slacks, between my legs, was enough to have me almost aching to feel more. Before I knew I was doing it, my head was tilted backwards, and looking up at Jake’s beautiful face. “If you’re going to punish me,” I said in between desperate, sucking kisses, “you better do more than just kiss me and then make me come again.”
Giggling, despite myself, I tried to chase a kiss, but he pulled back. “You will,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. “But so will I. Probably not as many times as you, but...”
“Oh he’s cocky, too,” I said, biting my bottom lip to quiet my second round of inadvertent giggling. “Well, teach me a lesson then, you big werewolf. Wait,” I said, “tell me one more thing. Do you really howl?”
“That,” Jake said, with a growl that shook me to my very core, “is up to you.”
“If I do,” I asked
, my hands trembling as I unbuttoned his jeans, “will the neighbors hear?”
His only answer was to moan as I slid my hand under the denim and around the bulge in his underwear. Soft, cotton boxer-briefs were the only barricade between my fingertips and the thing in the world that I wanted most right then. I squeezed, feeling him move under the palm of my hand, his softest skin burning to the touch.
“How are you so hot?” I asked.
“Wolf thing.”
“You’re serious about all this?” I felt him harden and thicken underneath that damn underwear that was starting to constrict around my wrist.
“Find out,” was all he answered before I freed his hardness from the cotton that squeezed him. Better my hand than a bunch of heartless fabric. Jake took a sharp breath, and let it trickle slowly out of his nose. “Your smell,” he said between clenched teeth. “It’s doing it again, it’s making me feel like I’m losing... control...”
Flattening my other hand against Jake’s muscled chest, I got a hint of what he was talking about. The smell of hard manliness, earth, the outdoors, sweat, it stung my nostrils for a second and then warmed me all the way to my bones. I felt a shiver creep through me, and from the sweat popping up on my forehead, figured it wasn’t the heat.
Well, it was some kinda heat.
I kissed his chest, and let my lips and tongue trail down his body until I heard him groan and felt him shudder. The trail down his chest continued down his length. I held him tight in both hands, pulling, tugging, twisting gently, and then felt a hand on the side of my face. I looked up into those silver-gray eyes, and when he smiled at me, there was a pull in my chest, then a flush of warmth.
The closest I can get to explaining the sensation that filled my soul right then is that it’s the same general tingling I get when I’m about to eat a chimichanga that has way too much queso sauce on top. Well, except the feeling Jake gave me was about a million times more intense.
