“Anything else you need? Mr. Somerset has asked me to prepare the dining room. I’m hoping you enjoy the arrangement. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the food – Mr. Somerset is—” he cut himself off. “I shouldn’t say too much. But if there’s nothing else you need, I’ll leave you to your magazine.”
“That was cryptic,” I said with a laugh. “Are you trying to tell me that the urgent business Jake is on is that he’s making dinner?”
All I got for an answer was a cryptic, Cheshire grin. “Mr. Somerset is very excited to show you his talents. I’m sure you’ll enjoy what he’s got coming along. But if that’s all...”
“Are you werewolves?” I asked, blurting out the thing that had been on the tip of my tongue since I first started thinking about it. “That sounds really stupid, it’s just that Jake was joking about it the other day, and I read a few books, I—ugh, sorry. How dumb can you get, huh?”
Another Cheshire grin. I was really making a great first impression. First with the stupid boat drink and now asking someone if he’s a werewolf? Jeez, Dilly, I chided myself. Boat drinks are excusable, but asking stuff like that? Get a grip woman, just get a grip.
“Sorry,” I said again. “I’m just excited, so I’m yammering.”
“Happens to the best of us, Miss Coltrane. Try not to worry. Enjoy your drink, please, and the magazines. He picked them out especially for you, if there was any question. It may sound difficult to believe, but he’s been planning this since years before he met you.”
With that, he turned and left.
His parting words – that Jake had been planning this for a long time – got me thinking. Did he just mean that he’d be waiting for anyone? Or was it just me? Was it somehow fate, or was I just heading into legit crazy town?
“When you start thinking fate, then, yeah you’re headed right into crazy town,” I said to myself, and to the magazine. “Jon Stanton wins the Ice Crown for the sixteenth year in a row with a beautiful pair of bears!” it read. “I need to quit drinking this or I’m really gonna make an idiot out of myself.”
I said this as I finished the drink.
So much for that.
It wasn’t five minutes later that Barney came and fetched me for dinner. If I thought Jake being a cook was the biggest surprise of the evening, I had a whole other thing coming.
*
“Close your eyes,” I heard in Jake’s beautiful gravelly baritone, as I approached the massive oak doors that opened into the dining room. “No wait, this works better.” Something silky, soft and satiny, slid across my eyes. I felt the cloth tie behind my head, a knot snugly but comfortably behind my head.
“A blindfold? I can’t see anything!” Panic immediately gripped me, but Jake’s smooth laugh calmed my nerves.
“Right,” he said. “That’s kind of the point. Hush, I want this to be special.”
“It already is,” I whispered, as he took my hand and led me forward. “You, this... I can’t believe you did all this for me.”
I felt him shrug – or at least I thought that’s what it was. I sensed his arm lift and then lower. Jake chuckled softly, the way he does when he’s about to admit something. But instead of an admission, I was just lead a few more feet, over a slight hump in the ground, and he said, “take a deep breath.”
I did.
“Er, through your nose I mean. That’ll be—”
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “That’s incredible, what is it?”
I heard him chuff a laugh. “What would you say if I told you it’s beef wellington? Made in the way that takes about six hours and also a re-do because I screwed it up the first time and it was more “beef doughnut” than wellington?”
“I’d say,” I was shaking my head. “I’d say no one has ever done anything like this for me ever in my life, and I’ve never eaten that but let’s be serious – I’ll eat anything that isn’t still moving around.”
“Your preference in steak doneness speaks a different tone,” he kissed the side of my face. “There’s more though. I, uh, may have gone to some pretty stupid extents with this whole thing.”
A tear rolled down the side of my cheek, cooling in the air coming off the overhead fan before he noticed. It just hit me all at once, I guess, this guy going to all this trouble for me. I wasn’t kidding when I said that business about never having anyone do this for me before. Hell, I was excited when one of my boyfriends made a pot of spaghetti with sauce that didn’t come out of a jar. But this?
“Oh Jake,” I said, gripping his hand harder, “is that pumpkin soup? I can smell the nutmeg.”
“You’re good. Here, sit,” he said, guiding me gently to a seat that was warm when I sat. It felt like very, very old leather: soft, supple and firm to the touch, but oh so warm.
“Can I look?”
“In a second. I... Everything that’s going to happen tonight is going to seem too fast.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t worry about it. But, remember that I said it. It’s going to be really incredible foreshadowing later on. Oh! Barney! Good to see you.”
The butler – which is how he was then dressed – took my hand and pulled my chair out for me to sit. I shuffled around a little, and then he helped me push it back in. I was sitting on one side of the corner and Jake on the other. In the enormous room with the slightly upsetting hunting trophy of... an elk? Gazelle? I can’t ever really tell large antlered herbivores apart from one another. Anyway, this enormous room with a fire the size of some beach bonfires I saw in college, blazing away in the hearth, somehow, the entire world seemed to be about six square feet in area.
“This is crazy,” Jake said. He had my hands in his. I hadn’t even noticed. “Everything about what I’m going to say is completely, totally crazy.”
“Is that an elk?” I asked, already burning with embarrassed blush. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but every single time someone is going to do something nice for me I get a terminal case of jittery blushing, and then I force myself to do something stupid to undermine it. Self-sabotage... the greatest of all friends, the most reliable of enemies. “Sorry, I just can’t ever tell.”
I tried pulling my hands away from his, but Jake held tight. That’s about the time my eyes caught a tiny orange flicker. “Candles?” I asked. “When did that happen?”
“Barney lit them on the way out. And yeah, it’s an elk. Most people think it’s a gazelle for some reason. One idiot thought it was a reindeer.”
“That was you, Master Somerset!” Barney’s urbane voice came from the kitchen, followed by a hearty chuckle and a loud sigh.
“Someone’s been drinking!” Jake called back, and then turning to me said, “it’s fine, I told him he could have a few nips of brandy. In this ridiculous world of mine, with all the backstabbing and the politics and the... well, the whatever, Barney has been a rock. He was there for my dad, there for my uncle in his short-lived interim alpha reign, and now he’s here for me. I... couldn’t do it without him.”
I took a drink of the wine that had magically appeared with my free hand and cocked my head. “Did you just say alpha? That’s... kind of a weird word to use for the head a family.”
Jake cocked one of those smiles – the same kind of smiles that he gave me about thirty seconds before he made me come without taking my underwear off. “It’s... kind of a weird family to be the head of. But there’s plenty of time for all that kind of stuff later.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I took another swallow of wine. It was good – really good. Although, I can’t explain why. I’m a six buck bottle girl, I don’t taste oak or peat when I drink Malbec, I just taste wine. For while. Then I taste spinning and glee and giggling. Or wait, those don’t have a taste.
“Just...” Jake squeezed my hand. I looked up, into those steely, burning eyes as his skin burned against my palm. “Listen, I—”
“Master Somerset?�
� Barney broke in, with a slightly worried waiver in his voice. In the past couple of hours, I hadn’t heard him speak any way other than completely collected and together, so the switch was slightly worrying. “There’s something I need to, er, can you come with me?”
“Does this have to happen right now?” Jake asked, his eyes still burning into me. I could tell his mind was decidedly not on whatever serious business Barney wanted to discuss. “There are other things going on right now.”
The older man leaned in close and whispered something into Jake’s ear that made him stiffen up and purse his lips. The eyes that had seconds before been serene and charming, turned to raw rage. “He knows,” Jake growled. “That son of a...”
His hand was still in mine, so I squeezed it. “It’s just us here, Jake,” I said in my most soothing, calmest voice. “Just the two of us, three,” I said with a smile to Barney. “There’s nothing to be angry about. If your brother tries anything we’re safe, you can deal with him later.”
Jake blinked hard and pinched the bridge of his nose with the hand that wasn’t grasping mine. He turned his head to the massive bay window to our left, and stared through his reflection, into the infinite blackness stretching out from the house. There were spotlights about the grounds, and then the ones in the trees, but otherwise, there was no way to see anything between the splotches of light.
“Dark out there,” I said just to have some noise fill the air that wasn’t the whistling from Barney’s nose. “Although I guess it is night time, so that makes sense. Dark, you know, when the sun is down.”
“It isn’t dark to us,” Jake said. “We can see in the...”
Barney cleared his throat. “If Miss Coltrane’s suggestion is going to be followed, I’ll be back to the kitchen. The tiramisu needs to, uh, be fluffed.”
As he exited with a decent amount of grace, Jake smiled. “Now maybe we can do this right.”
“You’re being really cryptic,” I said, dipping my spoon in the pumpkin and licking the seductive, savory liquid off the back. “Oh God that was some kind of Emily Post faux-pas wasn’t it?”
“Hell if I know. This wasn’t ever the life I imagined, if that isn’t abundantly clear already.”
“What is?” I asked, having another lick. “I’m sorry, but this is really good.”
A snicker. “You’re apologizing for complimenting my soup? That’s a little weird.”
“No, apologizing for interrupting whatever it is you want to tell me, or ask me, or whichever it is. I’m terrible at taking social cues.”
Jake loosened the collar of his shirt, revealing a thin cord around his neck that I’d never noticed before. The cords in his neck were taut, which is when I realized he was gritting his teeth. “You okay?” I asked. “Seem nervous about something.”
He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth. “Nah, nothing anybody else wouldn’t be nervous about. In fact, I’m pretty impressed with how I’m handling it. After all, I’m just going to ask you to marry me and be the vita of a werewolf pack.” He shrugged. “No big.”
“Oh,” I said.
Before I knew what I had said ‘oh’ to, my hands started shaking, which I tried to remedy by swallowing the rest of the glass of wine. And then a pumpkin full of soup, and then a roasted duck.
“B-b-but why?” I asked. “Wait did you say vita? And you are a werewolf. That’s not possible, those don’t exist outside of movies and romance novels.”
“And creepy Carpathian myths involving thousand year old vampires? Ever heard that old axiom that behind every fiction is a kernel of truth?”
“And you want me to marry you?”
My heart started beating reasonably faster. “I hardly... you barely... I mean we’ve been together once! That’s not logical!”
“But you haven’t said no,” he growled. “I’ll take care of you. Your studio? The bills? The constant need to go to birthday parties and carve dolphins? Gone.”
“I don’t... wait, how did you know about that? About any of it? And it was weddings that I did the dolphin statues at – and by the way I was really good at them. Wait!” I said, “wait, no, you’re trying to trick me. Somehow... you wooing me with fantastic wine and incredible food, and you spending all this energy and effort to make me feel special is some kind of trick. It has to be.”
Jake narrowed his eyes. “That’s right, damn!” He shook his head. “My careful plan to let you know how I’ve fallen completely in love with you in the last week and a half, I can’t stop thinking about you, and I knew from the second we met that you... that I wasn’t going to let you get away. It’s true, you caught me.”
“But it makes no sense!” I continued protesting for basically no reason at all, except that I wanted to protest. “Why?”
“I just said why.” His eyes were getting dark again, but not in the scary, unhinged way. No, they were stormy and sexy and ridiculously hot and I was doing everything I possibly could to keep from jumping across the corner of the table and into his arms. “I need you. There’s nothing I can do. Every moment, every second, my heart reminds me that without you, I’m empty. Without you, all of this, the mansion, the business, it’s all for nothing.”
In a huff, Barney emerged from the kitchen with an entire pig on a tray. “Wolves are impulsive creatures,” he said. “But they are loyal unto death, and once they meet their life mates? I’d rather not get in his way.” He said all this in a short whisper in my ear, as though I needed any convincing about Jake’s impulsivity.
Then again, I was aching to just say ‘yes.’ I couldn’t though – everything going through my head about the stupid childishness of marrying some guy I barely knew? That’s what I was going to listen to. That’s the good stuff right there. Reason feels good, I thought. Being steadfast and logical and calculating. Spock would never have it any other way.
I closed my mouth as soon as I realized that it was hanging wide open and that I was lucky I hadn’t drooled. “But I mean,” I started. Jake took my hands – both of them this time – and stood up, pulling me with him. “It’s so... This is just...”
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.”
Spring Feve Page 83
