Felix stopped me once we’d finished our run as a pack and gotten dressed again. We were walking toward the outskirts of town where Sylvie and I had opted to keep the little cottage they’d set us up in instead of the larger house typically reserved for the Alpha in Silverback along Main Street. We both agreed the initial memories we’d created there outweighed the benefits of more size.
“Did you hear?” He asked.
“About?”
“The Coven made it official. They’re picking up small alliances with all the extremist cults of vamps scattered across the country.”
I nodded. “Preparing for all our war, most likely.”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
“Let them,” I said. “But until they make a move, I’m choosing not to give a shit. I have a life worth living now, and I intend to live every moment of it.”
Felix grinned. “You’re a new man ever since that woman. It looks good on you, though.”
“When are you planning to find one of your own?”
He averted his eyes, then made a dismissive sound. “Just because you’ve gone soft to human ways and decided to settle down, it doesn’t mean I have.” He clapped my shoulder with a wolfish grin. “I happen to enjoy the freedoms of single life.”
He was full of shit, but I let him tell the lie for both our sakes. I’d found myself wondering several times if he’d been hoping to form some sort of relationship with Sylvie’s sister, but if he had, the interest was one-sided. She had since gone back to Blackridge and made it her home. She came to visit Sylvie often, but she preferred to spend most of her nights there with Steve, the vampire boyfriend of hers who had nearly gotten himself killed and dragged them into this world in the first place.
Personally, I found the guy completely unimpressive. He reminded me of the sort of guy who hung around high school parking lots when he was in his senior year of college—completely relying on his age and status to creepily land young girls he would’ve never had a chance with if the playing field was even. Steve had probably captivated her simply because he was a vampire, and I wondered how long her infatuation would last once she realized he was just one of a few thousand in this world.
I grinned, realizing that my protectiveness towards Sylvie had, at some point, extended to her sister as well. There I was fretting over her choice in men. But I supposed it wasn’t shocking. Sylvie cared so deeply about her sister that harm to Maisey might as well have been harm to Sylvie, which meant my charge was to keep both women protected at all costs. My efforts with her sister simply had to be less hands on and less frequent.
I retrieved the ring from the place I’d hidden it in beneath a rock behind our cottage. Yes, it was slightly paranoid, but I’d done a great deal of research into marriage rituals for humans and understood the surprise factor was very important. The story of the proposal, it seemed, was almost as important as the ceremony itself. Of course, I’d planned the perfect proposal. It would all start when she woke up and went looking for me.
50
Epilogue - Sylvie
* * *
I stretched in the bed, expecting to roll to my side and find Riggs waiting there for me to wake. He’d made an adorable habit of that. He said he liked the way I woke up—that I reminded him of some sort of forest creature with all the sounds I made and strange wiggling motions I did.
I loved that about Riggs. He had a way of seeing me that was greater than what I ever saw in myself. He celebrated all my little oddities and quirks like they were strokes of genius on some artist’s masterpiece. Nothing was unimportant to him and he was always discovering new things he seemed to find irresistible about me.
Odd as it may sound, he had a way of making me love myself more, which only made it easier to love him back.
But when I looked around our darkened cabin bedroom, I couldn’t find him. I wondered if maybe one of their pack hunts had gone longer than expected. He was always taking time to run with the pack during the day while I slept. I felt a little guilty about that, because I suspected his job as Alpha was supposed to be more involved throughout the day in the ordinary dealings of running a small town. Sort of like being the mayor.
But the schedule I forced him to keep by being nocturnal meant he slept through all but the most essential duties during the day and usually just made time for the pack activities in wolf form.
I took my time getting dressed and ready. One benefit of vampirism was that it seemed to be the long searched after secret for skin care. Just a little blood every week or so and you too could have perfect porcelain skin. Of course, I highly recommended werewolf blood, if you could come by it.
I studied my face in the mirror, trying to see myself as I’d been several months ago, before I knew any of this wild ride was coming for me. I looked for a long time and didn’t think I saw that same girl. I saw someone stronger. Someone bold who had more to talk about than the latest episode of her favorite show or whatever was coming next in the Moonlight Caravan series. Okay, I still snuck online to fangirl about Moonlight Caravan almost weekly, but the point was it wasn’t my entire personality more.
Breaking out of my bubble had helped me discover parts of myself I didn’t know were there before. Somehow, I thought I could see all that in my face. I looked like somebody who had control of her life, and I felt a burst of pride at that realization.
Of course, I wished I was someone who had control of her life and knew the hell where her boyfriend slash mate slash breeding partner was. I still couldn’t keep all the werewolf terminology straight, but I knew they seemed to scoff at labels like boyfriend and girlfriend. I was Riggs’ mate. We didn’t date. We bonded. But that was all okay. This was his world, and I wanted to respect it, even if I didn’t always understand it.
Once I was dressed and ready, I headed outside to glance around, wondering if maybe he was just chopping wood. Yes. It turned out that one of Riggs’ actual hobbies was chopping wood. He even had a wood chopping axe collection, along with all sorts of peculiar reasons each one was better suited for certain jobs. When he was stressed, bored, or extra excited, he liked to go out, chop down a tree, and then chop it into small bits for no particular reason.
Thankfully, the pack seemed to find some use for all the spare firewood and regularly came to gather from the huge pile that had grown behind our cabin. But I suspected Riggs would’ve kept on chopping whether anyone wanted the wood or not.
I’d spent many nights watching him hack through wood like butter. It was like a dance the way he did it. He’d swing overhead, then cut back back handed, pivot, and hack down. In moments, he’d have a round split into multiple evenly sized strips of firewood.
So I went toward his wood pile when I didn’t see him out front. He wasn’t there, either. I started toward the trees, thinking maybe he decided to get a fresh tree to play with when I heard a window in the cabin open.
I turned, then saw him on the second floor. He threw something toward me. I watched it sail for a few seconds before my brain registered what I was looking at.
A paper airplane.
I laughed then. The cheeky bastard was teasing me, wasn’t he?
He absolutely was, because when I looked back toward the window, he was pretending to bashfully hide so I could only see his eyes over the frame, just like I had back in the city when I’d thrown my stupid love letter slash suicide note, as he liked to call it.
The airplane landed nowhere near me. It took a rogue turn, spun in a circle, and nearly collided with the cabin. I could’ve told Riggs that was a normal occurrence with paper airplanes thrown from windows. You always had to prepare for the invisible wind currents.
He disappeared from view, leaving me to go collect the airplane note and pull it open. As expected, I found writing in his cramped, messy handwriting within.
To the beautiful strange woman walking outside in the middle of the night,
You make me want to be better. This is me trying.
Oh, and to anyone
who happens to find this letter. My address is the lone fucking cottage right in front of where you found it. You’ll find the door unlocked and you’ll find me scantily dressed, totally unprepared for you to come up and murder me.
P.S. If I forgot to unlock the door, there’s a key behind the broken shingle.
I grinned at the note. What a big idiot.
Still, I wondered what that part about making him want to be better meant. It otherwise seemed like a total tease, and I had no doubt I’d find him upstairs with only whip cream covering his genitals or something equally ridiculous.
Naturally, I rushed inside and ran up the stairs, a big smile plastered on my face.
“Very f-” I started but trailed off when I came in the upstairs room. Riggs was on one knee with a ring held up toward me.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
My lip shook and I had to put my hand to my mouth to compose myself. I hadn’t expected this with Riggs. Not ever. Werewolves didn’t do marriage. If anything, they looked down on it as a silly, stupid human tradition. But Riggs was on one knee and he’d gotten his hands on a ring. He had set all this up just for me, even though he probably knew his pack would make fun of him when they found out what he was doing.
“Of course I will,” I said, jumping on him and wrapping him in a hug, which accidentally knocked the ring from his fingers.
We both laughed, then worked together on our hands and knees to look for the ring, which somehow took a miracle bounce and wound up impossibly far from where it had dropped and partially tucked under the rug.
Riggs slid it on my finger but put it on the wrong hand. I didn’t fix it because I didn’t want him to think he’d screwed this up. The truth was he’d gotten it perfect. If the point of a perfect proposal was to demonstrate love, Riggs had knocked it out of the park.
“So,” he said. “I understand it’s tradition to consummate the marriage, correct?”
“On the wedding night,” I said, smirking.
He frowned. “That’s disappointing.”
“Some couples wait until marriage for sex, you know. Would you have waited for me, Riggs?” I asked, giving him a mischievous batting of my eyelashes.
“It would have been hard,” he said.
“What’s that, the wait or the thing between your legs?”
We were both still sitting on the ground from our search for the ring, and Riggs scooted closer, kissing me tenderly. “Keep talking dirty, and we’re about to consummate this engagement right here on the floor.”
I bit my lip. “Well… It would be fun to have a baby as a wedding gift.”
Riggs perked up at that. We’d so far made no serious attempt to get pregnant. He claimed it wasn’t easy for a werewolf to get a vampire pregnant, but he’d still been pulling out, even if we hadn’t taken the precaution of a condom after the first couple of times.
“You want that?” he asked.
I put a hand on my stomach, imagining what it would feel like to know a little life we’d built together was growing in there. I nodded. “I would. I want you to put a baby in me, Riggs.”
His eyes flashed yellow as if I’d spoken some sort of hex to immediately wake his wolf.
Riggs struggled for a moment within himself, then only one eye remained yellow.
I felt my stomach go warm. Sex wasn’t always half wolf like this, but I’d come to learn that some of our most memorable encounters were with that single yellow eye. Riggs fully himself was already wild and untamed. Riggs with his wolf unchaining his reservations was like a hurricane.
I expected him to take me right there, but he surprised me by scooping me up and throwing me over his shoulder like a caveman. I laughed, swatting at his back and kicking my legs while he carried me down the stairs toward our bedroom. “My legs work!” I protested.
“You’ll need to save your strength for this,” he said. “We’re not stopping until there’s a baby growing inside you.”
I laughed. I was fairly sure it didn’t work that way, but like all things with Riggs, I planned to enjoy the ride and worry about what may or may not come when I got there. Right now, all I needed was this moment. This perfect moment that I sensed was just one of many, many more to come.
The End
I don’t usually fang and tell, but she earned an exception. The hapless woman who accidentally released me. The one who nearly got herself killed mere hours later. So I saved her, but my help came with a price.
Read Kiss Kiss Fang Fang now —> Click Here
(P.S. Vladimir is Lucian’s hilarious roommate in this story.)
For a fun little bonus scene between Riggs and Sylvie, click here! You’ll be asked to sign up to my newsletter to download it. You can unsubscribe at any time, but I hope you don’t feel the need to. All I do is send a quick email when I have a new release. That’s it! No spam or cross promo. And you get free bonus scenes with every book I write for being part of the list. Cha-ching!
51
A Note From Penelope!
Werewolves and vampires, huh? I know some of you were probably already hoping I’d have it out of my system once I’d finished Kiss Kiss Fang Fang, but I jumped into this little paranormal diversion with a pretty firm plan to at *least* do two PNR books. My hope is that I can continue sneaking this style of book into my regular rotation going forward, but mostly get my focus back to the world of contemporary.
If I ask other authors, the advice is pretty universally to just stick to one thing because that’s how you “blah blah business jargon”. But for me, that’s like wearing the same clothes every day. After a little while it just gets suffocating. So I really enjoy having the freedom to kind of chase the shiny object, as my squirrel brain would put it.
Sometimes, office romance looks shiny and exciting to me. Sometimes it’s BDSM. Sometimes it’s PNR. Sometimes it’s weird fantasy worlds where I make up sports and have people shoot each other with sword guns (yeah, I did that once. The book got taken down for some unrelated issue about formatting and they keep saying they’ll put it back up and never do).
Anyway! If you’re anxiously waiting for me to return to contemporary romance, that’s the plan. I’m actually wrapping up some of the nitty gritty that goes into preparing for my launch next week, and then I’m going to start brainstorming plots. I should be outlining tomorrow and writing by the end of the week (it’s Tuesday April 13th as I write this).
I’m always trying to whip myself back into shape and get my books done faster like I used to. But lately, they keep turning out 25,000 words longer than they used to *and* I’m writing them slower. I’m not really helping myself out here.
If you were wondering, my next book is going to be called… I’m not 100% sure, but something like… “The Boss(hole).” I’ve already got a plan for the story and I think it’s going to be super fun to write. I don’t usually toss out titles way ahead like that, but I’m my own boss, so I can do what I want, right!?
With all that said, I hope you did enjoy the book and won’t forget to leave a review for me! Amazon is like a big mysterious machine nobody understands, but I do know reviews help other people decide whether they want to check out my book or not. In other words, your reviews are the biggest thing you can do to help support me if that’s what you’re into. If making me ugly cry over a bucket of ice cream in my pajamas is your thing, you also have that option by leaving a nasty review. So, pick your poison, dear reader. I’ll see you in the reviews!
xx
Penelope
I Bite She Sucks Page 23
