“Dude,” she said with her characteristic bluntness. “Weren’t you dead?”
“It seems to be the consensus,” Joseph said. “I must say I am vastly grateful that seems not to be the case.”
Shayla offered Joseph a clammy hand, which he took, and kissed. She shot me a side-eye of the this here is a whole-ass daddy snack variety.
I covertly nodded my agreement.
“You wouldn’t, perchance, be dating a werewolf?” Joseph asked.
“She would, as it happens,” I answered on her behalf.
“Ahh.” He nodded, a knowing smile fixed on his handsome face.
“Ahh what?” Shayla blinked.
“Traditional birth control methods are somewhat ineffective against…em…” Joseph hesitated, presumably searching the air above his head for a polite way to say werewolf jizz.
“Were-spunk?” I asked.
Shayla stifled another gag.
“Sorry,” I said.
She waved a hand, as much to silence me as to ask Joseph to continue.
“Hanna is correct,” Joseph said. “although it’s not necessarily the substance in question that’s the culprit. Regular proximity to a werewolf often proves a powerful stimulant to female reproductive systems.”
Didn’t I know it.
“My mother warned me against dating non-humans.” Shayla groaned.
I sure wished mine had.
“Hey fine people, what’s shakin’?”
Steven Franke, my long-lost brother and Shayla’s significantly odd other, hitched up the plaid pants covering his bony thighs and snapped his suspenders for emphasis.
Joseph looked at Steven’s face, then to mine, comparing. I nodded, confirming what he already knew.
He had sprouted past my proportions, the male expression of my long limbs protruding from the black Def Leppard t-shirt just as his feet stretched the mint green boats of his Chuck Taylors. He’d inherited our father’s fine blond hair and thick sable brows rather than the auburn mop I’d drawn from our mother’s side.
Joseph, Shayla and I all exchanged nervous glances.
“Whoa,” he laughed. “Why do I feel like the guy that baked an air biscuit in the middle of the party?”
“How could you not tell me?” Shayla accused, punching his upper arm. “What were you thinking?”
“Look, Nicholas Cage’s career has been over for a long time,” Steve said. “I didn’t exactly think it was a secret.” His face took on a boyish cast that could disarm the Roman legions.
“Don’t even start with the jokes,” Shayla warned. “Not this time.”
“What?” He looked honestly alarmed now, his face innocence incarnate.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
I watched Steve’s face for signs of shock, but found only pure, uninhibited wonder.
“Slap a trout and call me daddy,” Steve exclaimed. “No shit?”
“No shit,” Shayla said.
“Me?” His long, bony fingers pointed at his own bony sternum. “I’m gonna be a dad?”
“You.” Shayla pointed a red-lacquered nail at him.
Steve let out a whoop and galloped across the space between to scoop Shayla up and swing her in a circle.
“Stop!” She begged, laughing. “Do you want me to yark again?”
An unfamiliar expression crossed Steve’s usually playful face as he looked down into Shayla’s eyes. “You wanna get hitched?”
“What?” The features of her face curved like a question as he set her down.
“You. Me. With the ring and the thing and forever,” he said.
“You’re out of your mind!” she insisted. “We’ve only been together for a month!”
“In the physical realm, perhaps. But in here,” he paused, tapping his skull. “We’ve been together always.”
Shayla shook her glossy blue bob, her Betty Page bangs sticking to her forehead above the slim silver hoop piercing her eyebrow. “You don’t want to marry me. You’re just trying to be all honorable and shit.”
“I don’t?” he asked, dropping to one knee. From the back pocket of his skinny jeans, he pulled out a velvet ring box.
Shayla looked at it goggle-eyed, disbelieving. “How did you—but you didn’t know—when did you—”
“I was gonna propose at the gallery show tonight, but, under the circumstances...” He snapped the box open, revealing a gleaming white gold band with diamonds winking around a sapphire bluer than the ocean’s depths.
“You planned this? Even before—” she glanced down at an abdomen that had not yet begun to swell.
“I’ve planned this since the moment you shoved a menu at me and told me I was wasting your best table,” Steve said.
My heart ached with the memory of our first meeting, ages ago, it seemed, on my first day as Mark’s assistant. Before she’d run the antiques shop, Shayla had been a waitress at The Dusty Dahlia, a nearby tearoom Mark and company frequented. Owing to her ass-grabbing letch of a boss, Shayla had marched into the gallery and informed Mark he’d be hiring her to run the shop. It hadn’t occurred to him to argue.
Now here she stood, my brother on one knee before her and a life changing proposition to consider.
“Okay,” she said.
“Really?” Steve asked, his eyes like sun-lit emeralds.
“Really.” Deep dimples appeared at the corners of Shayla’s mouth as she broke into a wide grin.
Steve slid the ring onto her finger and shot up from his knee, crushing her in a hug once more.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Joseph’s dark eyes scanning my face. “I’m not crying,” I said, dabbing my leaking nose with a wadded tissue. “You’re crying.”
Joseph began to applaud, and I joined him, feeling the heat as I slapped my palms together, clapping with all the excitement I couldn’t express.
“I’m going to regret this,” Shayla said.
“Not a day in your life.” Steve drew a cross over his heart and winked.
“Okay,” Shayla said, seriousness drawing her features tight. “If we’re going to do this, it’s going to be before I’m all fat and bloated.”
“Fine by me,” Steve said. “The sooner the better.”
“Where will you have the ceremony?” Joseph asked.
“I know you wouldn’t think it,” Steve said, glancing to his worn Chuck Taylors, inscribed in blue ink with his best ideas and favorite quotations. “But I’ve been saving for years. We can get married anywhere you want. Rome, Paris—”
“Here,” Shayla said. This unfailing practicality of hers was the perfect complement to Steve’s whimsical impulsiveness.
“I can take care of the food,” I said. “The caterers we use for the gallery shows would leap at the opportunity.”
“I’ll do the invitations,” Steve insisted. “I’ve had them drawn up for a while.”
“How long is a while?” Shayla asked, her artfully shaped eyebrow arching.
Steve shrugged. “A year or so?”
“Okay, you know that’s super creepy, right?” Shayla’s face flushed a sudden vibrant pink, the thin blood-red slits at the base of her jaw rising. “Did I even have a choice?”
“Of course you did,” Steve said. “But I didn’t. I’d met the girl of my dreams. I gave you my heart a long time ago. The rest,” he said, flexing one long noodle-like arm, “is just a bonus.”
There was more affection in Shayla’s eye roll than some people manage in a full body hug.
“Well, we have invitations and food sorted,” Joseph said. “What about the date?”
“That one is all yours, doll,” Steve said.
“March 21st,” Shayla said without hesitation. “Spring Equinox.”
“That’s less than two weeks away.” Joseph pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and opened the calendar app. Clearly, he had been a more eager adopter of technology than his son, who had been known to gnaw gadgets out of frustration. “We have a lot of work to do.”
“We?�
� I asked, surprised and pleased to have a willing accomplice.
“Call me a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, but I love a wedding,” Joseph said. “I hope you won’t object to my helping you plan. In addition to certain…contacts.”
“Oh,” I asked. “What kind of contacts might that be?”
“A decorator, for example.” He turned his eyes to the gallery’s void. “It’s raw, of course. But the gentleman I have in mind could do wonders with this space. If, of course, you are amenable to this suggestion?” Joseph looked from Steve to Shayla. “The bride has final say, of course.”
And then he winked at her.
“Oh yes,” Shayla said, perhaps a shade too eagerly. “I am very amenable.”
Steve cleared his throat. Though he was no alpha, I could scarcely imagine any male not being at least mildly threatened by Joseph Abernathy.
“Good. If you’ll excuse me,” he said with a polite nod. “I ought to make a couple calls. Time is short.”
Shayla and I watched him beat a path out the gallery’s front door and down the sidewalk.
“Welp.” Steve snapped his suspenders by way of punctuation. “I’ll just finalize the invitation design then. Should probably get them printed sooner than later.” He shuffled off toward his studio, only to be arrested by Shayla’s hand in his back pocket. Reaching a hand around his neck, she pulled him down to plant a kiss on his lips.
“You make me happy,” she said, then gave his narrow rear end a swat. “Now get working, mister. This wedding isn’t gonna plan itself.”
“Speaking of invitations,” I said, “do you have any ideas about the guest list?”
She exhaled a breath and her shoulders sagged. “Oh gods,” she groaned. “This is gonna get ugly.”
“Ugly?” I asked. “How?”
Her gaze rose to meet mine. “Let’s start with the most basic question. Who would be first on the list?”
“Your mother and father, I would think.”
“Right,” she agreed, giving me a meaningful look.
I blinked in confusion, utterly failing to catch her meaning.
“I’m a Nereid. Which means my father is a primordial sea god that predates Zeus. We’ll need to invite him too, of course. He gets real jealous about that kind of slight.”
“Zeus, like the Zeus?”
Shayla nodded.
“With the...” I mimed throwing, my mind suddenly a desert bereft of words.
“Lightning bolts?” she said.
“Yeah, those.”
“Yep.”
“And the...” My hand drew a path from my shoulder to the opposite hip.
“Toga?”
“Toga! Right.”
“No!” She laughed. “Are you kidding? No one wears those anymore.”
“Huh,” I mused. “But your father is a god?”
“I mean, kinda? I guess it depends on how you’re defining the term.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
She seemed to consider this as we returned to the shop where she gingerly tied up the plastic bag in the wastebasket and held it at arm’s length. “Walk with me?”
We strolled down the hallway where I held the door that opened on the alley. Shayla tossed the bag of barf into the nearest bin and ducked into the newly built restroom to wash her hands. I congratulated myself once again on insisting upon its construction. Before my arrival as Mark’s assistant, they’d gone God knows how long without a bathroom in the building.
My legacy: a toilet.
“The god part depends on what you believe, I suppose,” she said. “If you were a human being living in ancient Greece and you ran across a guy that could occasionally control the tide cycles, what would you call him?”
“A god, I guess,” I said.
“Exactly.” She dried her hands and flipped off the light. I followed her back into the shop where she grabbed a dust rag and some lemon oil. “Does that make him a god, or just a letch with a few bonus skills?”
“Good point,” I admitted. Bonus skills was a concept I was becoming increasingly familiar with, whether they be the odd transformation into a canine, the ability to suck life through a couple neck holes, or command water through a wiggle of the fingers—this last being one of Shayla’s quirks.
Exceptional organization was another.
In the time since she’d taken over running the oddities shop, she’d changed it from a hoarded junk room to a boutique befitting even an upscale shopping district.
Between the two of us, we’d managed to beat back the tide of clutter and put some order to this patchwork colony of males.
“You have a lot of work to do for tomorrow?” Shayla asked from behind a row of shelves. The flash of her blue hair was visible through the glass case housing a collection of delicate animal bones.
I sighed, reviewing the list that stretched out between me and the upcoming gallery show.
“Cleaning the gallery, setting out the furniture, helping the caterer set up, and then, there’s hanging the paintings, of course.”
“Damn, lady,” Shayla said. “You’re making me tired. At least there’s only Steve and Scott showing now. That’s got to ease the burden, right?”
“Wrong,” I said. “Ever since Kirkpatrick hooked up with Helena, he’s been painting like a wild man. He sent twenty canvases over to be framed.”
Once upon a time, Helena had been hot to trot on Mark, but had accidentally got herself killed by a geriatric half were-lady with a blood-grudge against Abernathy. Somewhere in the process, she’d been turned into a werewolf and slept with Scott Kirkpatrick, the gallery’s resident misanthropic ginger munchkin, to wheedle information about Mark’s whereabouts. The “mated for life bit” had been an unintended consequence.
“Twenty?” Her almost feline eyes widened in surprise. “I haven’t even seen him around here lately,” she said, polishing a bell jar that held a withered human hand.
“Where the hell has he been painting?”
“Best I can tell, somewhere beneath Helena.”
Shalya shuddered. “What the hell she sees in him, I’ll never know. Are they coming tomorrow? No pun intended.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “And thanks, by the way. That’s a visual I totally needed.”
She wiggled her eyebrows at me around a display of 19th century wigs.
“Hanna!” Mark’s unmistakable baritone rattled through the gallery. “Get up here. I need you!”
“How true that is,” Shayla said.
I shot her the stink-eye as I turned toward the stairs.
Chapter 7
“We’re pregnant!” Helena stood before me, irritatingly even more gorgeous than I remembered. Her eyes, the exact shade of melted milk chocolate, were bright with the joy of her news. With her flushed cheeks and glossy curtain of black hair she looked exactly like Snow White, freshly roused from restful nap on the forest floor.
Kirkpatrick stood behind her, beaming like a squatty red-headed lighthouse. Patrons milled around them, pausing in front of paintings like hummingbirds arrested by pops of color that might be flowers.
I handed her a heavy vase I’d been wrapping. “Do me a favor?” I asked.
“Of course!” She agreed with chirpy brightness.
“Hit me,” I said. “Hard.”
“Hit you?” she asked. “Why on earth would I do that?”
In earlier days, she wouldn’t have hesitated at such an invitation for the space of a gnat’s fart. Mostly she had called me names and tried to ruin my life.
“She’s not feeling well,” Shayla said, taking the vase from Helena. “She doesn’t mean it.”
“Oh!” Helena laughed. “I thought you’d gone batshit.”
I laughed too. A high-pitched, edgy sound that did more to confirm her amateur diagnosis than deny it.
Kirkpatrick scrutinized my face.
“Congratulations,” I said through gritted teeth. “I’m so—” I paused and swallowed a gag “—happy for you.”
> Helena surged forward and crushed me in a hug. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
She bounced up and down, shaking me like the martini I badly needed, then darted across the gallery to Mark, who was surrounded by the usual conglomeration of adoring female satellites.
I watched as Helena delivered the news.
Mark glanced across the crowded gallery space and found my eyes, then looked away to shake Kirkpatrick’s hand.
Shayla finished wrapping the vase for me, then slid it into one of the brown paper bags she kept under Mark’s antique cash register. The very pregnant wife of a young husband reached across, grabbed it, and thanked her.
“How are we doing?” Shayla asked after they were gone.
“Great,” I answered without hesitation. “Fine. Excellent. So good.”
She laid a hand against the back of my neck at the precise moment I sank to my knees.
“Breathe,” she said, pushing my head toward my knees.
“Babies.” My lungs remained stubbornly flat as I desperately tried to drag air into them. “Everyone’s having babies. They’re everywhere. I’m not...I can’t, my mom—”
“Shhh.” She rubbed a hand over my back in reassuring strokes.
Everything in my field of vision took on a sudden brown patina while a thousand needles scrambled across my scalp.
“But I’m going to be twenty-eight and all I have to show for my life is three cats and a mild cheese addiction.”
“Don’t do that comparison shit,” she said. “You’re under no obligations to follow a prescribed path. Just because—”
My chest hitched anew, conjuring darkness to the edges of my vision.
“Good Christ. Are you okay, Hanna?”
Glancing upward from my humiliating station on the shop floor, I met the amber eyes of Joseph Abernathy.
“Of course she’s okay,” Shayla said. “It’s just ridiculously hot in here.” She tugged me to my feet and Joseph caught me mid-wobble, strong hands gripping my biceps.
“I heard,” he whispered, a shade too close to my ear.
“I’ll be fine, I promise. I just wasn’t prepared I guess.”
“Well it is spring, after all,” Joseph said. “Breeding season and all that.”
“Yeah, for like mice, and birds, and deer and shit. But—”
Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3) Page 6