Werewolf Wedding(25)

“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.”