Werewolf Wedding(7)
He shrugged. “Big, I guess.”
“Isn’t that a little bit, I dunno, ancient Egyptian of you? A colossus of yourself in front of your palace?”
Jake smiled, a smug grin on his lips that made George laugh, but made pretty much everyone else in the world a little weak in the knees. “If it was good enough for Ramses, it’s good enough for me.”
“Good job, you watched a documentary. So you do remember that he was the God-King of an entire empire, right? And you’re just... a pack alpha?”
He scoffed. “I’ve got one thing going for me Ramses doesn’t.” He thought for a moment. “At least one.”
Tapping her fingers against her chin, “a chariot pulled by lions?”
Shaggy brown hair shook from side to side.
“You and your elite body guards destroyed an entire army by yourselves?”
“Close, but no.”
“Father to a hundred some odd children?”
He laughed. “I hope not, anyway.”
“Then I give up,” she said. “What is it?”
“I,” Jake announced dramatically, “am not dead.”
George stared at him for a moment before she began slow-clapping. “You are also a master at deflecting reality. So I’m to take it that your entire derail there was to hide that you are, in fact, upset about Dane?”
Jake was frowning deeply, but didn’t realize it until George made a remark about how he looked like he’d just eaten a lemon, rind and all. George laughed after her comment.
“So it is about Dane, huh?”
Jake grumbled a yes. George stared at him for a second, and he realized he wasn’t going to get away with being vague. “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with him. Why am I even meeting him in the first place? He’s been gone... what, five years? Since he just up and left?”
She looked at her phone. “Yup. Well, five and a half. And to be honest with you, I don’t know why you’re meeting with him. Part of me being me, and keeping my job, is that I don’t mess with pack politics.”
Jake hunched his shoulders, squeezing his hands together so hard the knuckles cracked. “I mean, what could he possibly want?”
George had a look on her face that said she knew more than she was saying. “Well,” she said, “I don’t mess with pack politics, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any ideas.”
He leaned heavily on his desk, fists balled up and shoulders tense. “I’m all ears.”
“Well,” she began, “you remember why he left, right?”
“Sure, because pops named me the alpha.”
She nodded. “And do you think that might have something to do with this meeting?”
“How could it?” Jake shot at her. He was angry, though he didn’t mean to be – at least, not at George. “He’s the one who left. I didn’t have a single thing to do with that. And anyway, even if he is somehow still angry, what the hell good is it going to do?”
A silky voice wafted through the open door. “I’m going to challenge you to a mating. And if you don’t manage to succeed, the whole thing is mine.”
“Dane,” Jake hissed. He went to slam his hands on his desk like he’d practiced, but somehow, that didn’t properly express the venom he felt coursing through his veins. Instead, he just clenched his fists and glared. “How dare you come back here after abandoning the pack? Who the hell do you think you are?”
Dane, with his short-cropped brown hair, clean-shaven dimpled chin and startlingly blue eyes, just smiled. “I’m the real heir to our father’s fortune. You’re a pretender who decided to play funny business with the pack.”
The corner of Dane’s left eye twitched. Jake didn’t remember very much about his estranged brother, but he did recall that when Dane lied, his eye twitched. Of course, that didn’t seem to matter much.
“You gonna try me?” Jake snarled.
George started to feel a little flushed. Both wolves were hunched over, flexing their huge muscles and apparently about to rip one another’s throat out. She backed up to the single chair in the office, and tried to make herself as small as possible.
“It’s my right,” Dane said. “You find a mate first, or I do. Whichever of us does? He’s the rightful alpha.”
Between clenched teeth, Jake hissed, “What are the stakes?”
Dane swept his arms in a grandiose way. “Everything, brother,” he said with a smug, arrogant chuckle. “Everything.”
-4-
“I don’t know what to tell you. I just never liked Baywatch.”
-Delilah
––––––––
“The thing is though, he wasn’t trying.” I said, placidly as I slapped a wad of clay on a model to figure out exactly how I was going to make a statue of him. The details didn’t matter, it was just the general size and shape I was aiming for. I had a pretty good memory, and anyway, him? I remembered every line and angle.
Jeannie and I had been talking about the growly guy – Jake – more or less since he’d walked out the door with that delicious swish in his step, and slid that beautiful ass across the motorcycle’s saddle. “If he was trying too hard,” I said, “he’d... I dunno, wear a bunch of cologne, or have a bunch of chest hair sticking out the top of his shirt. Maybe a big, gold pendant?”