Werewolf Wedding(42)

“Thank you dear,” she said, with a benevolent, grandmotherly smile. “I thought it was quite sharp myself. Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes. I want you to stay in here with me. Dane can go enjoy himself somewhere else.”

My mate was growling, but he wasn’t saying anything. Big, obnoxious, over-confident Dane had been thoroughly put in his place. He knew better than open his mouth again, because almost certainly he wouldn’t come out looking any better for it.

“She comes with me,” Dane snarled. “She’s my mate.”

He snatched my arm, yanking me almost off my feet after him.

“No, she does not,” the woman said in that voice of calm, quiet, absolute command. “She stays right here, because I need to get to know my daughter-in-law. Is that clear?”

I looked in her direction and she gave me an almost imperceptible nod of her head. Obediently, Dane dropped my arm and shook his head, muttering a curse. “I’ll be at my house. She knows the way, get her a cab.”

He turned and tromped away, through a house full of laughing guests. His little posse, including drunk uncle Norton, gathered around the big man for a moment, and shot plenty of nasty glances back at us.

“I’m Greta,” she said. “In case either I forgot to mention it, or whatever he’s drugging you with is still fiddling around with your brains and you forgot.”

“The... what?” I asked, taken aback. “I... I’m sorry for being so rude. I’m Delilah Coltrane, I’m not sure what’s going on with my mind lately, but—”

“I’ll explain everything. And I know who you are already – my other son – the one I don’t wish would go get lost and never come back, told me all about you. Never seen him lose his mind quite like he did for you. That’s... quite a feat.”

*

It left me shaking.

Just an hour of simple conversation, something I went through at least a hundred times a week, left me actually trembling.

“I had no idea,” I said, trying to find something to play with to keep my hands from shaking like a two-day dry alcoholic. “I really,” involuntarily my throat closed in something similar to a swallow, but that had so little saliva involved that my tongue just stuck to the roof of my mouth. Greta sipped her tea, a faint smile on her lips.

“You haven’t done anything wrong. It’s Dane, he’s... well, I hesitate to say monster, so I’ll go with ‘headstrong to a fault.’”

I took a big gulp of the extremely strong black tea she’d handed me, which got another little smile. “You can handle your caffeine,” she remarked. “Jake gets jittery after a cup and a half.”

“Oh I’m jittering. I just have a deathgrip on the tablecloth so you can’t tell.”

“To the point,” Greta said, “because we’re going to have a gaggle of hungry wolves starting to get cranky in a few minutes unless I get this food out to them.”

When she mentioned it, I had noticed the growing din from the other room. Ever since Dane and his idiot brigade left, it seemed to calm down for a time, but they were starting to get cranked up.

“The fact is you didn’t mark him back. Right?”

I tilted my head slightly to the side. “Like bite him?”

She laughed louder than I expected, which surprised me enough to snort a little tea up into my nose.

“That certainly is one way,” she said, dabbing at the corner of her left eye with her napkin and taking away a tear. “A very base, brutish, obnoxious way of doing it. Which is probably exactly the sort of thing Dane loves. But no, marking is just our way of marriage. It’s a very solemn oath that is usually followed by an absolutely astonishing amount of alcohol.”

I giggled at that too, partially because I could really use that astonishing amount of alcohol right about then. “Well, then no, I didn’t do any biting or any swearing of oaths. He just made me agree.”

She took my hand, massaging my palm with her papery, but surprisingly powerful fingers. “Well, his forcing you is a very good thing. I mean, not that it’s good, but since he chose not to follow the traditions, which of course he didn’t, because he never has, Dane won’t have a leg to stand on if this ever goes to a pack council.” Suddenly, she looked away, though held tight on my hand. “I’m so sorry this happened. It’s my fault, after all. I’m the one who pushed his father to take Jacob over Dane as heir.”

I shook my head. “You didn’t do any of this – Dane’s the lunatic. You just did what you thought – what was – right. How could you feel sorry for that?”

She took a deep breath. She took another. With long, measured breaths that rattled a bit in her lungs when she exhaled, Greta calmed her nerves, and took another sip of tea. “Thank you,” she finally said. “But the guilt I feel is in my heart. In my soul. Until he either realizes what he’s doing, or...”

“He will,” I cut in. “I know it sounds either stupid or crazy, or maybe both – but in between his bouts of megalomania and wild ambition, he’s not really like this all the time. When he’s alone, he’s more calm and reserved. He worries, he questions himself.”

She laughed. “If only he’d indulge in self-doubt over trying to reignite a fire that’s been burned out for as long as,” her eyes and her thoughts wandered. “Well, a long time, at any rate.”