Werewolf Wedding(29)

I couldn’t stop thinking about that instant of violence, the crackle in the air I’d felt in the moment before the two of them slammed together. My mind turned to the trail of blood, the soup on Jake’s side, and then to the cascade of orange bits that exploded out from underneath him when Dane slammed him into that enormous dining table.

“Here,” Barney said softly, tilting a cup to my lips. “This will help.”

“This isn’t water,” I said. “Vodka?”

“Water isn’t going to do much good when you just saw your boyfriend turn into a wolf. I think you needed some stronger drink.”

“Good,” I swallowed the rest and then the lump in my throat that seemed unwilling to go away, faded as the liquor burned down into my guts. “Yeah, good call. Are they – is he – going to be okay?”

Barney took a deep breath that he released in a sigh. “This is the less glamorous side of being lupine. Our animal urges overwhelm us and we frequently solve problems that are rather silly ones by being very violent. Jake is unlike most wolves in that respect.”

“You mean most of them are worse with the punchy business?”

“Vastly. The reason his father chose him as alpha over his brother was that he wanted to become more palatable to normal society, and he figured rightly that the only way to do that was to have an alpha who thought more reasonably.”

A vase broke in the other room, which made Barney wince.

“That was a Ming,” he said. “The table is from Haverty’s though.”

“Really?” I asked. “But it looks so fancy.”

“Yes. Well, after you break three or four priceless antiquities from old palaces, you dial it down a little.”

Almost on cue, a massing crash from the other room once again had Barney wincing. “Besides, priceless antiquities don’t come with no-questions-asked warranties.”

I nodded in agreement as something smashed into something else, and Barney just rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Someday they’ll stop honoring it, but then again, they haven’t yet, so perhaps not.”

He sipped at some tea that I hadn’t noticed him making. Someone hit a wall, shaking the entire house. Jake shouted something incoherent and Dane shouted something I also couldn’t understand but the tone of his voice and the way Jake hissed gave away the context.

“What was he talking about the challenge?” I asked.

Barney shrugged and shook his head.

We’d noticed the dining room had fallen silent and stayed that way for a long moment. “Should we...?”

Barney nodded. The motorcycle on the table was on fire, but just a little. As predicted, the beautiful, six-foot vase which had been on the shelves, was lying on the ground in a heap of shards, some of them with a bit of blood coloring the clay. Jake was cut up, bruised, battered, and mostly back to human, but some remnants of his transformation remained. The muscles of his back and his arms were still swollen to their lupine size, and he was nursing a broken lip, but he seemed otherwise fine.

“Where did Dane go?” I asked as I cradled his head against my chest and dabbed at the lip with a cloth Barney handed me. “And I guess you weren’t kidding about the werewolf business.”

He winced and then snarled when Barney returned with some hydrogen peroxide. He handed me the bottle. “Less likely to bite you,” he said with a sly grin. I dabbed the stuff onto his cuts, and he did wince, and flinch just a bit, but I was safe from being bitten.

“I made a deal with him. He leaves you alone, and he gets the pack.”

Barney and I both exchanged a glance, but by the time I looked back down, Jake had picked himself up and shrugged me off. “I don’t want this life anyway,” he said. “All I want is you.”

“Uh, Master Somerset?” Barney entreated, “I think you’re forgetting any number of reasons for that to be a wretchedly bad idea.”

“No,” Jake said. “What I’m forgetting – what I’ve always forgotten – is that I have a life too. I have needs and desires, and none of them involve fighting with my brother for the rest of my natural existence, or running a company from a penthouse office with a goddamn golf green in it. This isn’t me Barney, you know that.”

He spun on his heel and strode out of the dining room.

I have never heard a door slam quite that hard.





-11-


“Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had bad dates before, but that was... special.”





-Delilah


––––––––

The ride back to my house was bumpy, silent and awkward, but as soon as we stepped in the front door, I needed answers.

I took a deep, impatient breath and pursed my lips before exhaling sharply. “What the hell was all that?”

Jake was all surly and stormy. He very obviously wasn’t in the mood to deal with me questioning him, but after what just happened, I wasn’t in the frame of mind to go on like everything was copacetic, so I kept prodding.

“Okay, let me get this straight. You live in a mansion, and your family has farmland of... thirty acres? Forty? How many did you say?”

“Hundred and ten,” he said, grumbling. “Little more.”