Love and Other Wild Things

by Molly Harper

  Trudy was heard giggling hysterically in the background.

  Dani chuckled. “I think I’ll do just that. Probably around Christmas. Talk to you soon, guys. I love you.”

  Grandad nodded. “And you tell that nice dragon boy that sprinkling a little vetiver and poppyseed around the entrance to his horde will make it much harder for other people to find. Oldest and simplest magic there is.”

  Dani’s jaw dropped low. “What?”

  Bael looked vaguely offended, as if he couldn’t believe someone had seen through his cover. “But I didn’t . . . dragon.”

  Grandad scoffed. “I’m a Nilsson, Dani-Girl, one of the oldest families in Sweden. My ancestors were responsible for carving the dragons for the ships that crossed the great sea. You don’t think I recognize a dragon when I see one?”

  Dani spluttered, “But we’re not . . . you never . . . you could have . . . What?”

  “Way to go, Dad, you broke her brain.” Trudy cackled.

  “There’s a lot more to the world than you or I could ever see, Dani-Girl. Hell, your great-great-great-grandmother on Abbigail’s side could make little balls of light with her hands and toss them around like a hot potato. She used to do it as a party game at Christmas.”

  “WHAT?!” Dani shouted.

  “Granny Newtsund said it was the oddest thing you ever saw.” Grandad’s train of thought was interrupted by a crash from the background of Trudy’s kitchen, followed by Trudy sighing and telling Jackson to get the mop. “Whoops. I better go clean that up. Jackson’s knocked over the maple syrup jug again. Love you, Dani-Girl.”

  Dani stared, still open-mouthed at her screen, then turned to Zed and cried, “What the hell?”

  Epilogue

  Dani

  Dani carried a shipping box through the entrance of Zed’s tidy stone house, and gave Zed a smooch as he took it out of her hands and carried it to the spare room.

  “Last one?” he called.

  “Last one!” she assured him.

  Dani’s moving into Zed’s house-slash-cave had taken all of fifteen minutes. She had a total of five bags, including her purse, and six boxes. After he answered several questions about Dani’s great-great-great-grandmother, the light ball tosser, Grandad had been happy to ship some of her things from home, the little knickknacks and bits of nostalgia that she hadn’t been able to pack around with her while she traveled—her yearbooks and the little wooden llama figurines she’d collected since she’d received one as a birthday present from a Peruvian shaman named Alois. Grandad had also included several framed photos of himself and Gram, Trudy, and her family. There were no photos of Journey and she was fine with that.

  She hadn’t heard from her father since his whiny call from the ashram. She suspected Zed had something to do with his lack of contact. She was also fine with that.

  She scooched the bowl of keys just a little left of center on Zed’s little foyer table. She also moved the table just a little bit closer to the nearby outlet, so she could plug in her phone charger there. She kicked off her shoes and left them in the shoe basket on the floor, meant to keep them from tracking bayou mud all over the house. She put her purse on the table and her key, situated on the little silver bee keychain Zed had given her, in the bowl. She stood back, observing the concrete evidence that she was now a resident of the cave, and gave a happy little sigh.

  “Well, it’s not like you had a lot of boxes,” Zed said. And no furniture. This is way better than the time Bael asked me to use my truck to help him move a gold statue of a hippo. A life-size statue, mind you, with ruby eyes the size of my fist. The thing was creepy. Dragons get very weird birthday presents.”

  Dani noted that during this little anecdote, Zed had glanced at the foyer table no less than three times.

  “I moved the table.”

  Zed cleared his throat. “Oh, no, no, no, no, it looks great . . . way over there, really. I was just admiring it.”

  “You literally just said ‘no’ four times,” Dani said, laughing lightly. “You know that if I’m living here, I’m going to have to occasionally touch your stuff, right?”

  Zed closed his eyes. “I’m trying not to be weird about this, but it’s challenging every one of my compulsive housekeeping nerves.”

  “If this is too much too fast, I can ask about renewing my lease at the maison,” Dani insisted.

  Zed’s eyes snapped open and went wide in alarm. “No!”

  He opened his arms and slung them around Dani, holding her close. “I definitely want you here. I don’t want you anywhere else. I’ve just been on my own for so long, it’s going to take a little time to get used to sharing my space.”

  “OK,” she said, kissing him. “I promise not to do anything permanent without talking to you first.”

  “Thank you. Besides, I’m sure there will be plenty of distractions to keep me from thinking on it too hard,” he kissed her, snaking a hand around her waist and giving her ass a little pat.

  Dani peered up at him and asked, “Like the fact that Mel is moving into your mom’s place this weekend?”

  “Yeah, like that.”

  Dani immediately regretted putting that frown on his face. It was, admittedly, a low blow. Zed was trying to be supportive of his mother’s relationship with the adorable little frogman. He didn’t begrudge his mother her happiness. He just didn’t want to think about it too hard.

  “He makes her eyes all gooey and her voice go giggly,” he sighed, hitching Dani over his shoulder fireman style and carrying her to the big granite-colored couch. “And he makes her salmon however she wants. And then he does the dishes.”

  Dani smacked his ass for treating her like a moving box, though she thoroughly enjoyed the novelty of a man who could pick her up like she was made of dandelion fluff. “Are you telling me or reminding yourself?”

  Zed gently dropped her on the couch, so she could lean her head back on the arm rest. “A little of both.”

  He flopped onto the opposite side of the couch and toed off his boots and socks. He took her bare foot in hand and pressed his thumbs into the ball of her foot. She made a noise that was positively indecent.

  “Ooh,” he said, pressing that spot again. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

  “If you keep that up, I’ll never leave,” she promised.

  “All part of my plan, darlin.’”

  She snickered and took his left foot into her hands, to return the foot rub favor. It was weird that for a guy who frequently ran around barefoot and occasionally sported four-inch talons on his paws, he had absolutely beautiful feet. They were long and narrow with a high arch and perfect little square nails. And he clearly knew about pumice stones, because his heels were soft as a baby’s butt.

  Except.

  Dani lifted Zed’s foot, so it was closer to her face. “Is that a birthmark?”

  She squinted at the small dark mark on the sole of his foot, just below his big toe. It looked like a Nordic rune, though definitely not one that she’d seen before, written in dark blue ink. It looked like an hourglass that had been squished and filled with tiny triangles. “Do you have a tattoo on the bottom of your foot?”

  Zed bit his lip. “Yeah, that was something I was going to show you eventually. Probably after we’d both recovered from the shock of moving in together.”

  “To show me how well you can withstand a crazy amount of pain?”

  Zed laughed. “No, it’s a bear-shifter thing, abeille. That is my secret tattoo.”

  “Meaning your mom has never seen it?”

  Zed snorted. “No, meaning, my uncle is the only one who has ever seen it. It’s the family sigil. He inked it himself after I was officially judged a man.”

  “I’m guessing you had a full beard when you were ten,” she said.

  Zed nodded. “I had a respectable amount of peach fuzz. Normally, a boy’s father would ink the sigil on his foot, but my own daddy had passed on.”

  “So how is this tattoo different from
the many other tattoos you have?”

  Zed pressed his thumbs into her foot to make her moan again. “Because the only other person allowed to see that mark, besides my patriarch, is my chosen mate. The person I’m going to be with for life. Bear clans are very secretive about their sigils, you know. We take this very seriously. Even more seriously than dragons and their ‘true name’ craziness.”

  “Oh.” She glanced back at the little squashed hourglass, and to her surprise, the idea of forever with Zed didn’t scare her. Zed was home now, just like Mystic Bayou was home.

  Zed grinned. “And now that you’ve seen it, that means you have to make an honest man out of me.”

  “You get through a sentence without looking over at the foyer table and we’ll talk about making an honest man out of you,” she told him.

  “Fair enough.”

  “And you’ll have to tell me what the other tattoos mean,” she demanded.

  “I can do that.”

  Dani started giggling without warning, and was soon wiping at her eyes, leaving her bear shifter confused.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “It’s just . . . it’s on your foot,” she sniffed, her cheeks flushed. “How have you kept it hidden all these years? If you were unsure about a girl, did you wear socks to bed?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  And she giggled even harder. “Well, thank you, for being vulnerable enough to share your foot with me.”

  “It was all a ruse to trap you into marriage.”

  “Worth it,” she wheezed, wiping at her eyes.

  She pressed the heel of her hand over the sigil and rubbed at it. He grinned and burrowed down into the couch. “So do you have any other secret tattoos I don’t know about?”

  Zed smirked at her. “You’ll find them eventually.”

  Dani tweaked his toe. “I look forward to it.”

  Dani's Comfort Applesauce Recipe

  And if you’d like to make Dani’s family applesauce recipe:

  * * *

  Comfort Applesauce

  12 Granny Smith Apples

  6 Gala apples or red apples of your choice

  2 tablespoons of ground cinnamon

  ½ teaspoon ground ginger

  ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

  ½ teaspoon ground allspice

  ½ cup light brown sugar

  * * *

  These measurements are all subjective. Honestly, I don’t measure most of the time. I’ll just add enough brown sugar and cinnamon until it “looks right,” and then add a dash of each of the spices. But I thought that might make first-timers nervous. This recipe is very difficult to mess up, so just find the mix that works for you.

  * * *

  Instructions

  Peel apples. (You don’t have to do it in one strip, just keep all of your fingertips and I’ll be happy.)

  Core and slice apples.

  Place apples in slow cooker and top with brown sugar and spices. Stir the mixture until the sugar forms a glaze over the fruit.

  Heat fruit on low for three hours. Stir occasionally. The fruit should puff up and reach what I call the “perfume” stage, where you lift the lid and the scent of the bubbly apple liquid hits you right in the face. (In a good way. It will smell better than any fancy candle you could ever buy.)

  Once the fruit has hit the puffy, perfume stage, it’s ready to eat. If you like chunky apple sauce, eat it as is. My kids don’t like chunky, so I attack it with a potato masher until it’s relatively smooth.

  * * *

  This is really good by itself, but I like to serve it over vanilla ice cream!

  Discover the Southern Eclectic Series

  From beloved author Molly Harper comes a romantic comedy and women's fiction series featuring the lives, losses, and loves of the McCready family as they manage their family's generational funeral home and bait shop (you read that correctly) on the shore of picturesque Lake Sackett, Georgia.

  Read on for excerpts from each book!

  Sweet Tea and Sympathy excerpt

  Praise for the Southern Eclectic Series

  * * *

  “This sweet tale of the city girl finding a home in the country launches Harper’s latest series and will go down as easy as honey on a deep-fried Twinkie.” (Library Journal)

  * * *

  "Harper writes characters you can't help but fall in love with." (RT Book Reviews)

  * * *

  "This book is funny and the characters engaging....Finished it in 24 hours and already looking forward to the next in the Southern Eclectic series." (BookRiot)

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  MARGOT CARY LEANED her forehead against the warm truck window as it bounced along the pitted Georgia highway.

  She closed her eyes against the picturesque landscape as it rolled by. Green, green, green. Everything was so effing green here.

  ***

  * * *

  GREEN WAS NOT her lucky color. It certainly hadn’t blessed the opening of the botanical garden’s newly completed Wesmoreland Tropical Greenhouse. Maybe it had been a mistake to carry the green theme so far. Green table linens, green lanterns strung through the trees, down to emerald-green bow ties for the catering staff. Weeks later, she still remembered the terrified expression on one waiter’s face when she caught him by the arm before he carried his tray of crudités into the party space.

  Despite her glacial blond beauty, the younger man practically flinched away from her touch as she adjusted his tie. Margot would admit that she’d been a bit . . . demanding in organizing this event. She had taken every precaution to make sure that this evening’s black-tie opening was as smooth as Rosaline Hewitt’s recently Botoxed brow. She’d commissioned a silk-leaf embroidered canopy stretching from the valet station to the entrance to prevent the guests’ hairstyles and gowns from being ruined by the summer rain. She’d researched each invitee meticulously to find out who was gluten-free or vegan and adjusted the menu accordingly. She’d arranged for two dozen species of exotic South American parrots to be humanely displayed among orchids and pitcher plants and a flock of flamingos to wade through the manufactured waterfall’s rocky lagoon.

  She was not about to have all of that preparation undone by a cater waiter who didn’t know how to keep a bow tie on straight. “Go,” Margot said, nodding toward the warm, humid air of the false tropical jungle. He moved silently away from her, into the opulently lit space.

  Margot turned and tried to survey the greenhouse as it would appear to the guests, the earliest of which were already filtering into the garden, oohing and aahing. Calling it a greenhouse seemed like an understatement. The glass-paneled dome reached four stories into the sky, allowing the tropical plant specimens inside plenty of space to stretch. Carefully plotted stone paths wound through the flowerbeds, giving the visitor the impression of wandering through paradise. But knowing how much Chicago’s riche-est of the riche enjoyed a nice soiree, the conservators had been smart enough to add a nice open space in the middle of the greenhouse to allow for a dance floor. She’d arranged elbow-high tables around the perimeter, covered in jewel-tone silk cloths. Gold LED lights cast a hazy sunset glow over the room, occasionally projecting animated fireflies against the foliage. And since society’s ladies would never do something so inelegant as visit a buffet, the waiters had been informed to constantly circulate with their trays of canapés in a nonobvious, serpentine pattern around the enormous shrimp tower in the middle of—

  Wait.

  “No,” Margot murmured, shaking her head. “No, no, no.”

  She snagged the next waiter to walk through the entrance and took his tray. The sweet-faced college kid seemed startled and alarmed to have the chief planner for this event grabbing him by the arm. “You, get two of your coworkers and very quickly, very quietly, very discreetly get that shrimp tower out of here. If anyone asks, just tell them that you’re taking it back to the kitchen to be refilled.”

  The poor b
oy blanched at the brisk clip to her tone and said, “But—but Chef Jean was very specific about—”

  “I don’t care what Chef Jean was specific about,” she said. “Get it out of here now.”

  The waiter nodded and pulled away from her into the gathering crowd.

  Margot stepped forward into the fragrant warmth of the greenhouse, careful to keep her expression and body language relaxed. She was aware that, while professionally dressed in her black power suit, she was not nearly as festive as the guests in their tuxedos and haute couture gowns, but she was perfectly comfortable. She’d attended hundreds of events like this growing up. She would not be intimidated by some plants and a pretentious wannabe Frenchman. She pressed the button of her earbud-size Bluetooth and whispered, “This is Margot. I need to speak to Jean.”

  She could tell by the way her words were echoing in her own ear that the head chef of Fete Portable had taken his earpiece out—despite Margot’s repeated requests to keep a line of communication open with her—and set it on the stainless steel counter in the makeshift kitchen. She blew out a frustrated breath. Jean LeDille was not her preferred caterer for high-profile events, but the de facto hostess of tonight’s opening—Melissa Sutter, first lady of Chicago and head of the botanical garden conservators’ board—had insisted on using him. So far he’d been temperamental, resistant to the most basic instruction, and a pain in Margot’s Calvin Klein–clad ass. And when she was done with this event and had secured her partnership at Elite Elegance, she would have Jean blacklisted from every Chicago party planner’s contact list. Theirs was a close-knit and gossip-driven circle.