Tu bounced in her seat, pumping her arms in the air like they’d just won the lotto.
“Yes! Yes! Yes! We’ve already got their hearts and minds!” She then smiled happily at Grady. “Oh, Wolf, this is going to be soooo good!”
19
Tu had to give it to Wolf Haven. She’d expected a big welcome back. Her parents still talked about the party they’d found waiting for them when they returned from their wedding tour, complete with a bunch of singing and dancing by the town’s children as King Tikaani rowed himself and his wife into the harbor.
And though there were no charming Eskimo children to sing and dance for them as their truck pulled to a stop outside town hall, they did find what appeared to be the town’s residents standing on either side of the street. They erupted into a great cheer as soon as she and Grady got out of the truck, like the best float in the Macy’s Day parade had just arrived on their town’s doorstep… a great cheer she happily transmitted to Grady as she waited for him to come around to her side and let her out as he still insisted on doing whenever they arrived in a pack town.
“What the hell?” Grady said inside her head, as he opened the passenger-side door.
“Word spreads fast when it comes to good business,” Tu replied as she took his hand. “Here’s where we wave,” she said. “Now!”
They both raised their hands in the air, Tu with well-practiced enthusiasm and Grady with almost comical hesitancy, like he was afraid this was all an illusion that would disappear as soon as he started playing along.
But the crowd cheered even louder.
“I never…” he said. “I never imagined they would accept me like this. Cheer for me like this. So many folks were disappointed when I took the crown. My brother was the popular one. Everybody liked him, but they barely tolerated me.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t like your brother was looking out for their best interest. You are,” she said as they walked up to the raised dais, which had been set up in the town’s main square next to what smelled like a freshly painted gazebo, probably one leftover from an era before drugs had spread like a disease across the state, infecting everybody, including Grady’s own father, the state’s last official king.
But you wouldn’t guess that now. The crowd of wolves appeared clean and pulled together, not an addict among them that she could smell or see, and they were cheering her and Grady onto the stage like they couldn’t be happier to have a black she-wolf as their new queen.
Grady looked like he didn’t quite know how to handle any of this, and she almost felt sorry for him. All this acceptance had to be a little overwhelming for a beta king who’d been kept in a tornado cellar from the age of ten. She smiled a secret smile. If there was one thing she wanted to do other than assure his future monetary situation, it was to make sure his kingdom town loved him as much as she—
She stopped mid-thought, reminding herself not to go down that road. Tu wanted Grady to be loved by Wolf Haven as much as her father was loved by Wolf Lake. And that was it.
“Are you sure you want me to keep the walkie-talkie on?” she asked when they came to a stop in front in the middle of the stage. “Because it’s going to get loud. Louder than anything you’ve ever heard before.”
For a split second, Grady actually seemed a little nervous as he looked around with a frown.
“Where do all these stages keep coming from? I didn’t even know Wolf Haven owned one.”
Tu waved the question off. “If you do a good enough job, stages magically appear. I don’t know how, but it’s a fact of royal life.” She squeezed his hand. “All right, brace yourself, Wolf.”
She could feel him doing just that beside her, his arm tightening, his mind going completely quiet as if it were suspended in space and time, waiting to see what she would say next.
“All right! All right! All right!” Tu yelled out to the crowd. “That is some welcome. But where’s the marching band?”
That got a little laughter and someone in the crowd yelled, “We don’t have one!”
“You don’t have a marching band?!” she hollered. “Well, that’s no good. The only reason I married into the lower forty-eight was because I hear you mainlanders know from marching bands. I guess we’re going to have set one up at our kingdom school, so we can have some good music the next time we get up on this stage.”
Big cheers came from some of the kingdom school kids and a lot of parents.
“But seriously, I’m so honored you have welcomed me back with open arms,” Tu said when the crowd quieted down. “I don’t even know what to say. It’s just so overwhelming. And maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones, but…” She turned to Grady and said aloud, “Honey, I know you were going to save this for Christmas, but can I tell them now? Please?”
“Tell them what?” Grady asked her inside her head.
Tu turned back to the crowd with a huge smile. “He said ‘Go right on ahead, sweetheart.’”
The crowd leaned forward as one with baited breath.
“How best to say this…” she said, really drawing out the drama before announcing, “Everyone who’s already renting property or who rents a property in the kingdom town this month will receive a one hundred year lease. This lease will entitle you to live rent-free and do with your house as you wish. You can sell it, you can rent it out yourself—anything you want for as long as the current king’s line is in power.”
The crowd went crazy. And to Grady’s credit, he played along, smiling benevolently down at his subjects like he knew all about this.
“Smart,” he said inside her head. “As long as I’m in power they get to live rent free.”
“Yep, but somebody kills you in a challenge fight, they have to start paying rent again. My dad always says half of staying in power is making sure people want you to stay in power. We just got rid of most of your in-kingdom challenges and we’re not even done yet.”
She flapped her hands gently in a “settle down” gesture to the crowd. “Wait, our king’s saying that’s crazy. He says he can’t just give you all houses.”
A disappointed grumble started up in the crowd.
“He says a house is no good if you don’t have a truck in the driveway. That means…” she started pointing like a maniac, as she did her best Oprah, “You get a truck and you get a truck and you get a truck. Every hundred year lease will come with a truck!”
This was Oklahoma, home of the land rush and lover of country songs. Land was one thing. But land and a truck?
The crowd lost their collective minds. The screaming got so loud Tu stopped transmitting it for fear it would blow out Grady’s inner ear. A few people even fainted.
The crowd slowly hushed when Tu waved her hands above her head and yelled, “Hold up. Hold up! We’re still not done.” She turned the transmitter back on so Grady could hear this next part, too.
“In January, we’ll start hearing business pitches and we’ll be awarding grants of up to fifty thousand dollars to the first fifty people who pitch us solid business ideas for our kingdom town. So start dreaming now, because next year, all your dreams could come true!”
20
Five Thanksgivings ago, if someone had told Tu one day she’d find herself out in the Oklahoma kingdom town’s square shaking her ass in a red sweater dress with a reindeer imprinted on the front of it to a Colin Fairgood song called “Alabama Girls Bring the Party,” she would have called that person a liar and assumed he/she was crazy.
But here she was shimmying and bouncing to a genre of music she’d never particularly cared for. That was one of the few things she and Luke had held in common.
“Just because I’m from Oklahoma don’t make me county,” he’d told her with a lazy smile that evening long ago when she’d asked if he could tear himself away from the southern rock tracks he was probably planning on playing long enough to throw on a Michael Jackson song or two.
And during the barn party when he was in charge of his own play list, he’d only played so
ngs with digital undertones. Tracks with heavy drums and bass and singers with big, electronic voices repeating the same things over and over again.
But here she was, dancing to yet another country song out of Alabama (maybe that’s the only kind of music they had in Alabama?) and this track—it was real good. She happily bounced to it inside the large gazebo and it made her feel like she was drunk and young again, even though she hadn’t had a drop to drink in five years.
The only person who liked the music better than her was Grady, who’d turned out to be an intuitive dancer, swinging her around and matching her move for move with an ease she never would have expected someone of his size and background to possess.
“It’s the football,” he’d explained when she’d first expressed surprise that he could dance so well. “Teaches you how to stay in control of your body, make it do exactly what you want it to do under any circumstance.”
Which explained a lot of things, including his prowess in bed.
But five songs in, he pulled her in close for a slow dance, not seeming to care that this was a fast song.
“Why didn’t you tell me about country music all those days we were on the road?” he demanded inside her head. “I mean all that Michael Jackson you played and you didn’t think I’d want to hear this?”
She giggled into his shoulder. “No, I knew you’d like it more than anything else. Just like my Eskimo DNA makes me a sucker for pop songs with any kind of chant. That’s why I didn’t play it for you, because I didn’t want to be stuck listening to country music for the whole trip.”
“How can you not like it? This guy is awesome! Never heard anything like him. What’s that he’s playing?”
“A fiddle. If I’m remembering right, Colin Fairgood’s actually a classically trained violinist but he stopped doing that and started doing country because—you know—money.”
“I want to hear the whole album.”
“Okay.”
“Seriously, that’s what I want for Christmas.”
“Okay,” she answered.
“You promise.”
“I promise.”
“All right, I’m going to hold you to that.”
He grinned down at her, and despite being the kind of girl who’d been princess-trained to keep her cool no matter where she was or who she was talking to, she felt her heart skip a beat. Like she was twenty again and had just spotted a super-hottie across the Colorado ballroom, wearing a tux.
He hadn’t smiled much back then but when he did… oh, man, it was a killer. And now that he was well on his way to becoming a wolf of worth, one who’d cured his state’s case of mange… well, any she-wolf would be lucky to have him.
And for the first time, a wave of sadness unrelated to what had happened five years ago passed over her.
“Hey, what happened?” he asked. “Why are you sad all of sudden?”
Ugh, the emotional connection that came with mating. Tentative at first, but still there, especially if you were feeling what you were feeling hard enough. And Tu guessed she must have let her sadness get out of control again.
She pushed it down and smiled back up at him. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
He stopped dancing all together, his eyes searching her face, reminding her of the skeptical beta sheriff he used to be.
“It didn’t feel like nothing, Tu.”
She was on the verge of making something up when a smell surprised her out of their mental conversation. Grady must have smelled it, too, because they both looked in its direction at the same time.
The wolf standing there was taller than Tu but shorter than Grady. Wider than Tu, but not nearly as big as Grady. You couldn’t see any muscles through his hunting jacket, and the hair peeking out from underneath his black skullcap was brown—not short like Grady’s, but not so long as to seem rebellious, like Rafe’s. And as for his looks, he had an oval face—he wasn’t cute, but he wasn’t ugly. If she’d seen him under any other circumstance, she would have dismissed him as average and moved on. There was nothing special about him.
Except his eyes and his smell. His brown eyes glittered with ambition. And he smelled like Wolf Hole, born and raised.
Tu only got to look at him for a few seconds though, because she was soon facing a now familiar sight: Grady’s back as he got between her and the wolf.
The music came to an abrupt stop. Someone must have pushed pause on the smart phone that had been set up next to a large pair of speakers outside the gazebo. In the silence that followed, she could feel the eyes of their fellow dancers on the three of them.
“Grady…” she pushed into his head with a mental sigh. “Relax. I was totally expecting this. Just not so soon.” Then she leaned to the side, pushing Grady’s tree trunk of an arm down with both of her hands to address the wolf.
“Hello, Wolf Hole,” she greeted. “What brings you to our kingdom town?” she asked like she didn’t already know.
“Was you serious about that car dealership?”
Tu tried to keep the smug smile off her face, but doubted she was doing a good job. “Totally serious,” she assured him.
“I heard you been all over the state promising pack towns a bunch of things. Got a brother in River Wolf. He says they own their factory now. That true?”
“We haven’t finished signing the papers yet. But it will be true in another month or so,” she answered. “Why do you ask?”
“Cuz if you was tellin’ the truth about that dealership, we want it.” He stood up straighter. “Wolf Hole wants it.”
“Wolf Hole wants it?” Tu repeated, putting on her best confused look, even though she wasn’t the slightest bit confused. “But that’s not what your pack leader said.”
“The old pack leader’s dead. I kilt him in a challenge fight last night. I’m the new pack leader now.”
Ding-ding-ding! Tu thought to herself even as she said out loud, “I see. I hadn’t heard. Well, it appears congratulations are in order.”
“Yeah, well. I figured I’d do a better job than some meth addict who never gave us nothing.”
“I’ll bet,” she answered.
The, as it turned out, not-so-average wolf’s eyes went from side to side.
“So how about it?”
“How about what?” Tu asked, feigning ignorance.
“You going to give us that dealership you was talking about or are you full of shit?”
Grady’s bicep tensed beneath her hands.
“Calm down,” she said inside her mate’s head. “Tikaani rule of business: stay in charge of all provocations. That means you do the provoking and you never let yourself get provoked.”
Out loud she said to Wolf Hole, “I suggest you watch your language with me, Wolf Hole. I personally don’t give a fuck if you curse or not, but our king has a different opinion about how I should be addressed.”
Wolf Hole glanced at her hulking mate, who wasn’t as easily quelled as a paranoid meth addict, and then back at her.
“Oh, hey, I didn’t mean nothing by that, I just… I just wanted to make sure you was on the up and up. I been driving all day to get here. Sorry for forgetting my manners, ah… ma’am… queen… I don’t know what I should call you. I never met a queen before.”
“How about Tu,” she answered, brightly.
And he smiled, relaxing a bit. “Okay, Tu, is that car dealership still on the table?”
“I have no idea,” she answered. “You’ll have to ask our king about that.”
The wolf’s eyes went to Grady again, but only for a second, before they skittered back to her.
“But he cain’t hear.”
“No, he can’t.”
“Or talk, I thought.”
“Oh, he can talk just fine in ASL. Do you know ASL?”
“Why the he—I mean why the heck would I know ASL?” he asked, looking at Tu like she was crazy.
And she threw that look right back at him adding, “Because our king is deaf and doesn’t speak,” lik
e he was not only crazy himself, but also an absolute idiot. Then she raised her voice, so everyone in the rapt crowd would heed her words. “And I know no one would be stupid enough to approach our king to do business if he or she didn’t have at least a basic grasp of American Sign Language.”
An “oh shit” look erupted across not only Wolf Hole’s face, but also the mugs of several kingdom town wolves at the party—the ones who had probably been planning to do just that when they submitted their business proposals in January.
“I— I…” Wolf Hole must have been a lot smarter than his predecessor, because instead of getting mad, he actually stopped and thought her words over. “I guess I should come back when I know some American Sign Language?”
Tu was her father’s daughter, and like him, business brought out her wolf. Her smile was positively feral when she answered, “Yes, Wolf Hole. Why don’t you do that?”
Then she shouted at the top of her lungs. “And why doesn’t someone turn up the music. This celebration ain’t over yet!”
Right on time, Gretchen Wilson’s, “Here for the Party,” came blasting out of the speakers. And everybody started dancing again.
Everybody except for Grady. She turned to him, happy about the Wolf Hole triumph experienced even sooner than expected. But the look he met her with was so cold, it froze her to the spot. And the anger coming off of him… it was palpable. He was furious, and there was no mistaking who with. It was her. He was beyond furious with her.
“What?” she said inside his head. “Why are you so angry? If it’s because of Bobby Joe Jr., listen, dude was a racist prick. I picked him for the job of dying for a reason and I’m not going to apologize for that—”
He pushed past her, walking out of the gazebo without another word, telepathic or signed.
What the hell, she thought, watching him go. But then before she could go after him, Wolf Hole and several other wolves started peppering her with questions about ASL. “How are we supposed to learn that hand language? That something we can get off the internet? How long do it take to get basic? You think I can do it by January? How long did it take you?”
Wolf and Soul (The Alaska Princesses Trilogy, Book 3) Page 14
