Werewolf Wedding (20 page)

“That’s my Jake,” George said, since I was too busy turning purple and choking on my own glee to say much of anything. “Runs through his entire office building half naked, terrifying everyone to death. But, he’s got the presence of mind to bring back a damn lunch cart.”

“Oh shit,” Jake said, disbelief in his voice. “I’m not wearing a shirt, am I?”

After making sure I wasn’t going to collapse back into unconsciousness the second she got up, George stood up, patted Jake on the shoulder and wiped her sweaty hand on his jeans before she turned her attention to the lunch cart, which was far more interesting than Jake being shirtless. “Did you get any with mayo?” She pulled a foil-wrapped sandwich off the cart, grabbed a soda and then inspected the sandwich. “You know I need mayo.”

“I honestly don’t have a clue,” Jake admitted. “I just took the whole thing. There are gonna be some irritated workers come noon, but they’ll live.”

“Yeah,” she said, taking a big bite and smiling at the mayo. “They’ll live because you’re gonna take this back down there. It’s bad enough to take someone’s lunch out of the community fridge. Stealing
everyone’s
? Come on now.”

Jake arched his eyebrows and frowned deeply. “Why can’t they get their own lunch? It isn’t like I don’t pay them.”

“Uh, Jake?” it was my turn to scold him for being comically inhumane. “You
do
realize that the people in your office do all your work for you, right? And that if they’re happy, they do a better job?”

His frown deepened. “Fine,” he said. “They get their damn sandwiches back on
top
of getting free health insurance and a retirement plan. Happy now?”

“Yes!” I said. “Any of those tuna salad?”

*

“W
eird” is such a limp word. It has no power behind it, no oomph, no meaning. Something can be weird because it’s good, weird because it’s bad or funny or anything else. Just the fact that a thing is slightly abnormal makes it weird. That’s why I feel bad describing the mood between Jake, George and I in that office as “weird” but, what the hell, nothing else fits.

We ate our sandwiches, my strength finally came back enough that I could stand up without fear of toppling over, and Jake even seemed to get less pissy as time went by. I knew what I needed to do – convince him that abandoning the pack and his life wasn’t going to make anything better – but I’ll be damned if I had the first clue
how
I was going to do that. Oh, and I had to remember that Dane expected me to do exactly the opposite.

Dane
, I remembered. I hadn’t thought about him, or what he wanted me to do since...
Oh my God, he sent me here. He dropped me off and told me to come in here and flaunt my matedness in Jake’s face
.

I felt my face go cold and my palms get all wet and slimy. “Ugh,” I grunted. “I think I have a memory.”

“From the look on your face, that’s a lot like being constipated,” George said.

Jake laughed in a huge burst, but then immediately went quiet again, like he was ashamed at having laughed at a constipation joke. “Anything important?” Jake watched my face for a moment and then his grew stern. He threw his hands above his head, exasperated. “What
won’t
he stick his fingers in?”

George gave Jake a long glare with an arched eyebrow. His face turned bright red as he realized what he said. “Er,” he stammered. “I mean whatever. Ha, ha, yes I said something that could be vaguely sexual. Very good.”

“Just sayin’,” George said.

The memories were coming back at first in a slow trickle and then a flood. “We were at your mom’s house for enchiladas and he had just marked me, so—”

“I’ll rip his throat out,” Jake said. It was cold, calm, and absolutely terrifying that he didn’t carry on or shout or yell or anything else. Just flatly stated he was going to rip his brother’s throat out. “That’ll solve this thing once and for all.”

“I,” I started before trailing off. “Yes, well I guess it would. But I don’t think that would help anything except you to feel better. There has to be a better way than murder.”

“Better way? He forced you to mate. He claimed you out from under me, he screwed up the—”

Then the worst of it hit me. “The challenge?” I asked sharply. “He said something about that, too, which I just remembered along with the rest of this bullshit. That’s what this is really about, isn’t it?”

George sat up stiffly. Jake opened his eyes wider than I’d ever seen. His nostrils flared, and for a second I thought he was going to throw his desk out the window. “It isn’t what you think,” he said. “It’s not a game. It isn’t because I don’t love you.”

Now
I was going. It’s one thing for me to feel like someone’s screwing around with me, but it’s another entirely for them to do it, not come clean, and
then
act like I’m too dumb to understand what’s going on. “Oh it isn’t?” I asked, hands on hips. “Then please, Jake, explain what it is.”

“Jeez,” he said, “this got out of hand quickly. What say we have another sandwich?”

“No.” I put my foot down, and when I finally did that, I always meant it. Usually. “I got dragged into a pissing fight between a pair of brothers that resulted in me and my best friend being kidnapped and then me being dragged around like a puppet for a few days until he dropped me off here to taunt you. He still has Jeannie and he has Barney and they’re all holed up in that mansion.”

Jake took a step forward and opened his mouth to speak.

“I’m not finished,” I said, cutting him off. “What the hell gives you the right to mess around with my life and never tell me anything? I should’ve known,” I said, tears welling up in my eyes even though I was more pissed-as-hell than sad. “I should’ve known that some mysterious billionaire waltzing into my dumb-ass life, and acting like I cast some kind of spell on him—I should have known you were full of shit from the first second.”

“No! No, it isn’t like that,” Jake protested, trying to grab me. “It isn’t like that at all, just let me—”

I dodged his grabby hand. My cheeks and my neck just kept getting hotter with each passing second. “I want answers,” I said, pushing harder. “I don’t deserve this shit. I don’t deserve to be thrown into a world that I know absolutely nothing about, and then be expected to just swallow the fact that the guy who told me he couldn’t live without me was just trying to win some dumb fucking bet!”

At that point, George pushed herself off the desk. “That’s not like you, Jake,” she said. There was disappointment dripping off her tongue. “I’m... I need some time to think about all this. And you need some time to explain to her what the hell was going through your head.”

She paused on the way out the door and turned back to us like she had something else to say. Instead she just looked at Jake for a moment and smiled sadly as she shook her head. “Not like you at all.”

“Wait!” he shouted. “Is this really how this is going to work? Dilly, you know I mean what I said. You know I love you, you know I—”

“I do?” I asked. “It’s been two weeks since we met. Three weeks, whatever. I got carried away. I got swept up in a fantasy. And now I’m paying for it with my sanity, and my life, apparently. I’m owned by some asshole with an overinflated sense of self-worth who wants to start... I can’t believe I’m saying this shit – a war between humans and werewolves? What fucking planet is this? What the hell is going on? I never thought I’d say this, but I’d rather be carving a damn dolphin statue than dealing with you and your brother.”

“Wait.” Jake grabbed my wrist this time before I could twist away. He wasn’t hurting me, but he wasn’t letting go, either. “You have to at least give me the chance to explain. You can give me that much, can’t you?”

I didn’t like it, but what the hell did I have to lose, right? I
had
actually gotten heated pretty quickly, come to think of it, so why not give the guy a chance to talk himself out of being an insensitive, obnoxious, frat-boy like idiot?

Crossing my arms, I stared at him pointedly. If I could, I’d have tapped my foot. No idea why, but I’ve never been able to do that without watching the foot, and then giggling and this was
not
giggle time.

“You’re right, of course,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest, leaning back against his desk and exhaling in a long sigh.

“I can’t believe you have the nerve to—wait, what?”

“I said you’re right. I was an insensitive prick. But that’s not even anywhere near enough for what I did.” He rubbed his eyes and then flipped his hands upside down and shrugged. “I... can’t explain it. When Dane showed up at my office, the very damn day that I met you, it just seemed perfect.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “You’re telling me that he made this dumb bet before you met me? Then why was it me you decided to suck into your stupid little web?”

Jake shook his head and brushed the hair back out of his eyes. He stared at me for a moment, his gunmetal eyes shimmering in the sunlight coming through the window and pooling at his feet like it was bowing before his greatness. He opened his mouth enough that I could see his perfectly straight teeth and slightly oversized canines. But then before he spoke, he chomped them shut, squeezing his jaws taut, emphasizing the statuesque qualities of his cheekbones and his sculpted chin.

Finally, after just about making me weep with anticipation and longing for him to touch me again, he started pacing.

As I watched him, the fantasies rolled through my head. Why
couldn’t
we just run away from everything? Why did all this wolf bullshit have to matter? If he really loved me the way he said he did – if he really
did
feel all that hokey fate stuff – then why the hell did it matter what anyone else thought?

But as I watched him circle his desk and wring his giant hands – which, by the way made his forearms flex – another thought occurred to me. It mattered because it
just mattered
. I was just about to open
my
mouth to ejaculate my grand revelation when he cut me off.

“I want to run because I want to be someone I’m not.”

Talk about a way to kill a bunch of whining in the bud.

He was still wringing his hands, but added squeezing either wrist to his nervous movement repertoire. “It’s hard to say this stuff because honestly, I never have. I’m the alpha. I’m the leader, you know? Everyone looks to me to solve problems, and I generally do just fine at it. But the thing is, even though I put on like a big shot, I don’t feel like one.”

You could hear a pin drop across the alley and in the lobby of the bank across Denton Street. I thought about arguing with him, but kept my mouth shut. This seemed like one of those times not to spout off and try to get a word in. And besides, I really didn’t know what I was going to say.

“My brother, Dane, he’s... well he’s got his problems.”

“Lots of them,” I added, and immediately felt stupid.

“Yeah, no, he definitely has plenty of problems. My dad – our father – he tried
so hard
to get Dane to think like a leader instead of a rebel. He spent his days here, working to build this massive commercial empire. And then he went home and spent his nights worrying about Dane and on the few nights my brother wasn’t out carousing somewhere, Pop tried to teach him things.”

Jake sat down, started the ball clacker thing to going, and got back up. The
thik-thik
of the balls matched the short, halting steps he was taking, and as it happened, the breath going in and out of my lungs. “I’m guessing it didn’t work?” I asked just to keep things going. I had no idea when Dane was going to show up, or call me home, or whatever, so I thought getting to the point might be good.

A chuffed laugh, and then a sigh as he shook his head were my answers. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it. The other way to put it is that Dane is like the living embodiment of the word ‘anarchy’, which I’m sure you know now that you’ve spent a few days with him and seen how he acts.”

“It bothered me,” I said, thinking back to dinner, “the way he talked to your mom. Greta was so nice to me, she talked and talked, and then he just...” I winced slightly, remembering his venom. “I get it, people don’t like their stepmoms sometimes, but holy shit was he wild.”

Jake nodded. “That was one of the things that made our dad take him out of the succession. Mom – Greta – she was never anything but nice to him. She bailed him out of jail more than once, and even lied to one of his teachers about him having some weird disease so he could pass high school botany.”

“He’s just so angry,” I said, as a cold chill ran through me. I hugged my elbows to hope for a little warmth past the towel I had wrapped around my shoulders. “When I’m near him I can feel the... the hate.”

Jake was nodding as I spoke. “And that’s exactly why. Our dad was panicked. Well, he never panicked. He was concerned, let’s put it that way. He worried that if Dane took over the pack, decades of work in keeping our kind safe would go straight down the toilet.”

“So you agreed?” I asked. “But you didn’t want to do it?”

“Bingo.”

“I gotta say, I never would have pegged you for the Gerald Ford type. You know, the reluctant leader? The whole alpha thing suits you really well.”

“Oh God,” he said, sighing. “Don’t bring up that statue of myself again, I—”

“No, no,” I said, taking a step closer. “That’s funny. If Dane did it, I’d think it was posturing, but with you it’s pretty obviously not. You don’t posture, you don’t pretend, that’s what I mean.”

Jake watched my face, looking a little confused.

“You’ve never heard this before?” I asked.

“We’re wolves, Dilly. We’re not exactly the most open and honest about our feelings.”

I took a step closer to him and grabbed both of his hands, holding them in mine. “Yeah, well, I’m a person and I’m not exactly super open either. There’s this... okay so you’ve been to a zoo before, right?”

He nodded, furrowing his eyebrows.

“So, you’ve seen the gorillas, yeah?” After he nodded again, I continued. “There’s always the male gorillas who play at being the alpha. They roar and bite and wrestle and act like idiots to try and prove that they’re the big badass.”