by Lynn Red
*
“And here we are.”
Barney opened the door for me and offered his hand. Taking it, I stepped out of the completely absurd car stared at the equally absurd mansion that loomed in front of me like a perfectly-lit movie set.
Massive, ancient oaks towered overhead with a complex series of lights placed just perfectly to throw shadows at the most perfectly dramatic angles. The gates closed behind us when Barney nodded to a man sitting in a guard house and then a few moments later, I felt his hand on my back. It was warm, too, just like Jake’s and Dane’s were.
“Right this way, please.”
“This is... something,” I said as we entered the foyer, which was laid out in an elegant and very old style. Obviously old woodwork marked the walls, carved with intricate scrolling. “Wow.”
“Mmhmm,” Barney drawled, leading me to a sitting room. “Take a seat anywhere you’d like. Mr. Somerset will be around when he’s done with this unexpected bit of business. Would you like any sort of refreshment? A cocktail, a snack?”
I scrunched into a massive leather chair and felt myself sink down deep. “I could get used to this,” I said without thinking. The old man smiled. “One certainly can. May I get you a cocktail?”
“Oh, uh, sure,” I said, feeling thoroughly stupid afterward. “I don’t particularly know much about them, but...”
“Something sweet? Something more bitter?”
“Sweet is good,” I said. “Fruity. I had something that came in a hollowed out coconut once that was really good.”
Unconsciously I folded my legs up underneath myself before realizing with mortification what I’d done and quickly unfolding them.
“Don’t worry, Miss Coltrane. Mr. Somerset sits in the same fashion. I’m not sure if we have any coconuts in the kitchen, but I’ll come up with something. Make yourself comfortable, yes?”
I nodded, still blushing at my terrible social graces. At least he does the same thing, I guess. That’s gotta make it a little better.
When I looked up next, Barney had vanished.
And I’m starting to get used to people zooming around, so that’s another thing, I guess.
Shuffling through the magazines that I didn’t imagine matched anyone’s interest but mine, I started to wonder. I must’ve been enthralled with learning a new technique for buzz-sawing marble in the June issue of Sculpting Times, or maybe I was caught up in the results of the dolphin ice statue carving world championships that were held, apparently in May, in Rochester, New York.
“He’s very nervous,” Barney said, placing my bright blue drink on the table beside me, and adjusting the napkin underneath it. “He wanted to make a good impression.”
I laughed softly. “He’s nervous? I had so much lipstick on that my friend had to gently urge me to get rid of it. And there’s this, too,” I curled my finger around my single coil of hair. “Forgot a curler. He doesn’t have anything to be nervous about.”
“Neither of you do,” Barney said with a reassuring smile. “I apologize, I couldn’t find any large fruits to hollow out. “I think you’ll like it though. Oh! I almost forgot.”
He plunked a toothpick umbrella into the drink. “It’s called ocean water. Coconut water, creme d’menthe, and four different rums.”
“Four?” I asked. “Is this a good idea?”
Barney chuckled. “I’ll make sure he’s equally inebriated. Regardless of how much he can eat, his tolerance for alcohol is roughly the same as a sorority girl’s.”
The mental image of Jake Somerset, CEO, billionaire, and whatever else, doing a beer bong and screaming like I had done, oh, once or twice in my life, was just too much. To keep myself from doing anything embarrassing, or opening my giant mouth and inserting my giant foot, I took a drink. “Oh my God!” I said, “this is incredible! I can’t even taste the—oh there it is.”
What began as a wonderfully sweet boat drink quickly turned warm as it slid down my throat and settled into my belly. That, along with the wine I’d had a bit before, began to work its magic almost immediately. My fingers tingled, my toes tickled, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Actually, it was a lot like the first time Jake touched me and the warmth from his fingers made its way all the way down my back.
“Anything else you need? Mr. Somerset has asked me to prepare the dining room. I’m hoping you enjoy the arrangement. I’m sure you’ll enjoy the food – Mr. Somerset is—” he cut himself off. “I shouldn’t say too much. But if there’s nothing else you need, I’ll leave you to your magazine.”
“That was cryptic,” I said with a laugh. “Are you trying to tell me that the urgent business Jake is on is that he’s making dinner?”
All I got for an answer was a cryptic, Cheshire grin. “Mr. Somerset is very excited to show you his talents. I’m sure you’ll enjoy what he’s got coming along. But if that’s all...”
“Are you werewolves?” I asked, blurting out the thing that had been on the tip of my tongue since I first started thinking about it. “That sounds really stupid, it’s just that Jake was joking about it the other day, and I read a few books, I—ugh, sorry. How dumb can you get, huh?”
Another Cheshire grin. I was really making a great first impression. First with the stupid boat drink and now asking someone if he’s a werewolf? Jeez, Dilly, I chided myself. Boat drinks are excusable, but asking stuff like that? Get a grip woman, just get a grip.
“Sorry,” I said again. “I’m just excited, so I’m yammering.”
“Happens to the best of us, Miss Coltrane. Try not to worry. Enjoy your drink, please, and the magazines. He picked them out especially for you, if there was any question. It may sound difficult to believe, but he’s been planning this since years before he met you.”
With that, he turned and left.
His parting words – that Jake had been planning this for a long time – got me thinking. Did he just mean that he’d be waiting for anyone? Or was it just me? Was it somehow fate, or was I just heading into legit crazy town?
“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.”
I took a drink of the wine that had magically appeared with my free hand and cocked my head. “Did you just say alpha? That’s... kind of a weird word to use for the head a family.”
Jake cocked one of those smiles – the same kind of smiles that he gave me about thirty seconds before he made me come without taking my underwear off. “It’s... kind of a weird family to be the head of. But there’s plenty of time for all that kind of stuff later.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I took another swallow of wine. It was good – really good. Although, I can’t explain why. I’m a six buck bottle girl, I don’t taste oak or peat when I drink Malbec, I just taste wine. For while. Then I taste spinning and glee and giggling. Or wait, those don’t have a taste.
“Just...” Jake squeezed my hand. I looked up, into those steely, burning eyes as his skin burned against my palm. “Listen, I—”
“Master Somerset?” Barney broke in, with a slightly worried waiver in his voice. In the past couple of hours, I hadn’t heard him speak any way other than completely collected and together, so the switch was slightly worrying. “There’s something I need to, er, can you come with me?”
“Does this have to happen right now?” Jake asked, his eyes still burning into me. I could tell his mind was decidedly not on whatever serious business Barney wanted to discuss. “There are other things going on right now.”
The older man leaned in close and whispered something into Jake’s ear that made him stiffen up and purse his lips. The eyes that had seconds before been serene and charming, turned to raw rage. “He knows,” Jake growled. “That son of a...”
His hand was still in mine, so I squeezed it. “It’s just us here, Jake,” I said in my most soothing, calmest voice. “Just the two of us, three,” I said with a smile to Barney. “There’s nothing to be angry about. If your brother tries anything we’re safe, you can deal with him later.”
Jake blinked hard and pinched the bridge of his nose with the hand that wasn’t grasping mine. He turned his head to the massive bay window to our left, and stared through his reflection, into the infinite blackness stretching out from the house. There were spotlights about the grounds, and then the ones in the trees, but otherwise, there was no way to see anything between the splotches of light.
“Dark out there,” I said just to have some noise fill the air that wasn’t the whistling from Barney’s nose. “Although I guess it is night time, so that makes sense. Dark, you know, when the sun is down.”
“It isn’t dark to us,” Jake said. “We can see in the...”
Barney cleared his throat. “If Miss Coltrane’s suggestion is going to be followed, I’ll be back to the kitchen. The tiramisu needs to, uh, be fluffed.”
As he exited with a decent amount of grace, Jake smiled. “Now maybe we can do this right.”
“You’re being really cryptic,” I said, dipping my spoon in the pumpkin and licking the seductive, savory liquid off the back. “Oh God that was some kind of Emily Post faux-pas wasn’t it?”
“Hell if I know. This wasn’t ever the life I imagined, if that isn’t abundantly clear already.”
“What is?” I asked, having another lick. “I’m sorry, but this is really good.”
A snicker. “You’re apologizing for complimenting my soup? That’s a little weird.”
“No, apologizing for interrupting whatever it is you want to tell me, or ask me, or whichever it is. I’m terrible at taking social cues.”
Jake loosened the collar of his shirt, revealing a thin cord around his neck that I’d never noticed before. The cords in his neck were taut, which is when I realized he was gritting his teeth. “You okay?” I asked. “Seem nervous about something.”
He sucked his bottom lip into his mouth. “Nah, nothing anybody else wouldn’t be nervous about. In fact, I’m pretty impressed with how I’m handling it. After all, I’m just going to ask you to marry me and be the vita of a werewolf pack.” He shrugged. “No big.”
“Oh,” I said.
Before I knew what I had said ‘oh’ to, my hands started shaking, which I tried to remedy by swallowing the rest of the glass of wine. And then a pumpkin full of soup, and then a roasted duck.
“B-b-but why?” I asked. “Wait did you say vita? And you are a werewolf. That’s not possible, those don’t exist outside of movies and romance novels.”
“And creepy Carpathian myths involving thousand year old vampires? Ever heard that old axiom that behind every fiction is a kernel of truth?”
“And you want me to marry you?”
My heart started beating reasonably faster. “I hardly... you barely... I mean we’ve been together once! That’s not logical!”
“But you haven’t said no,” he growled. “I’ll take care of you. Your studio? The bills? The constant need to go to birthday parties and carve dolphins? Gone.”
“I don’t... wait, how did you know about that? About any of it? And it was weddings that I did the dolphin statues at – and by the way I was really good at them. Wait!” I said, “wait, no, you’re trying to trick me. Somehow... you wooing me with fantastic wine and incredible food, and you spending all this energy and effort to make me feel special is some kind of trick. It has to be.”
Jake narrowed his eyes. “That’s right, damn!” He shook his head. “My careful plan to let you know how I’ve fallen completely in love with you in the last week and a half, I can’t stop thinking about you, and I knew from the second we met that you... that I wasn’t going to let you get away. It’s true, you caught me.”
“But it makes no sense!” I continued protesting for basically no reason at all, except that I wanted to protest. “Why?”
“I just said why.” His eyes were getting dark again, but not in the scary, unhinged way. No, they were stormy and sexy and ridiculously hot and I was doing everything I possibly could to keep from jumping across the corner of the table and into his arms. “I need you. There’s nothing I can do. Every moment, every second, my heart reminds me that without you, I’m empty. Without you, all of this, the mansion, the business, it’s all for nothing.”
In a huff, Barney emerged from the kitchen with an entire pig on a tray. “Wolves are impulsive creatures,” he said. “But they are loyal unto death, and once they meet their life mates? I’d rather not get in his way.” He said all this in a short whisper in my ear, as though I needed any convincing about Jake’s impulsivity.
Then again, I was aching to just say ‘yes.’ I couldn’t though – everything going through my head about the stupid childishness of marrying some guy I barely knew? That’s what I was going to listen to. That’s the good stuff right there. Reason feels good, I thought. Being steadfast and logical and calculating. Spock would never have it any other way.
I closed my mouth as soon as I realized that it was hanging wide open and that I was lucky I hadn’t drooled. “But I mean,” I started. Jake took my hands – both of them this time – and stood up, pulling me with him. “It’s so... This is just...”