Werewolf Wedding

An Alpha Werewolf Romance –––––––– Lynn Red

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Copyright 2015 Lynn Red

Copyright Page

Also By Lynn Red

Dedication

-1- | “Someday, all of my lumps will be in the right place. Yeah, right.” | -Delilah Coltrane

-2- | “Wait, did you just say ‘growly’? Is that even a word?” | -Delilah

-3- | “No, I’ve never read any romance novels. Why do you ask?” | -Jake

-4- | “I don’t know what to tell you. I just never liked Baywatch.” | -Delilah

-5- | “This is just all too much.” | -Delilah

-6- | “No, only four potatoes. You must be watching your figure.” | -Delilah

-7- | “I’m really not into salads.” | -Jake

-8- | “I’m not sure I’m into this werewolf war thing. It’s exciting, sure, but... jeez it is confusing.” | Delilah

-9- | “I know you said you’re not Dracula... but are you sure you aren’t some kind of royalty?” | -Delilah

-10- | “Why can’t they just be NORMAL brothers that hate each other and only talk on Thanksgiving?” | -Delilah

-11- | “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had bad dates before, but that was... special.” | -Delilah

-12- | “I have no idea why the neighbors didn’t call the cops, I’m gonna be honest.” | -Delilah

-13- | “It sounds like a hell of a cliché, but I mean it. Murder really IS too quick.” | -Jake

-14- | “Not quite the way I imagined meeting the family.” | -Delilah

-15- | “I’m so, so, so tired of this.” | -Jake

-16- | “You’re never going to believe this.” | -Delilah

-17- | “I have to admit, sometimes I impress myself.” | -Delilah

-18- | “This is really happening right now?” | -Delilah

-19- | “I guess things always happen for a reason, but this one’s real hard to figure out.” | -Delilah

-20- | “Ain’t no party like a werewolf party.” | -Delilah

-21- | “That... was certainly something.” | -Delilah

Lion in Wait

Bearly Hanging On

To Catch a Wolf

Two Bears are Better than One

Further Reading: Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

Also By Lynn Red

About the Author

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I
took a deep breath that burned in my chest. My nostrils flared as I gazed up from the field, all the way to the top of the stadium.

One more time.

Just one more hellish, awful, painful, terrible trip up the stairs and I could rest.

The walls of the Jackson Community College stadium loomed over my head like a boogeyman with hunched shoulders waiting to suck the soul out of me as soon as I closed my – wait, wait, that’s not right at all. They were just walls and I am
not
a ridiculous drama queen when I’m making myself run the stadium stairs.

Not at all.

One more breath, Dilly
, I willed myself.
Stop saying one more breath and just go
.

I don’t remember taking the first step, but then I never do because I take so many of them. What I do remember is my ponytail flopping, heavy and wet, against the bare skin at the top of my back that my bunched-up shirt didn’t cover. I remember that halfway up the stadium stairs, somewhere around seating section D, my legs started to burn.

Blood pumped into the muscles, tightening them, squeezing them into wonderfully painful knots of potential, and then kinetic, energy. They were pistons, I was a V-8 engine that couldn’t be stopped.

That is, until my toe caught the loose bit of step just above seating section KK and made a loose bit into a missing bit.

Those V-8 pistons didn’t stop for a second, but physics meant that the rest of the car did. I fell into a heap, although luckily I caught myself with an outstretched hand and didn’t suffer anything worse than a skinned knee, a scraped palm, and a bruised ego.

Briefly, I had a fantasy of some big, shaggy-haired man catching my flailing ass and hauling me back to my feet before laying me down on the cold metal benches of section KK and kissing me so hard that the back of my head left a dent in the aluminum. I imagined that after he kissed me, he ripped my shirt a little on the collar, sucked at my neck and put his hands places that would usually make me reach for the pepper spray.

But the guy in my fantasy wasn’t just a guy – no, no, no – he was something different, some unchained id that couldn’t be contained. He had fierce eyes, of some indeterminate color; but the color hardly mattered because after mauling me with his hands, he had my shorts around my ankles and was pulling my hair while he— And then I remembered the stinging in my left knee.

There was no mysterious alpha male with a cocky grin and an improbably large, er, pair of hands to catch me. There was no head-forcing kiss, or libido-throbbing caress. There was just me, Delilah Coltrane, Dilly to all my friends and my single enemy, alone in a stadium with a bleeding knee and a slightly embarrassing flush on my neck and chest.

“It could be worse,” I told the fitness tracking shackle strapped to my wrist, which didn’t reply except to beep and tell me that I’d stopped moving and that I needed to go faster. “I could have broken my leg and fallen off the side of the stadium.”

It beeped again, the humorless son of a bitch. This time it beeped to tell me that I had been motionless too long. It was going to switch off, and then seconds later, it made good on the threat as I poured water onto my knee. The bleeding mostly stopped. The wound on my palm was more of an impact scrape – the kind that throbs and hurts like hell, but just kinda gives the skin an agitated gray color instead of breaking it.

Thank goodness for small miracles. The last thing in the world I needed was to feel guilty about getting blood all over a stadium step that some janitor would either have to clean up, or more likely, would choose to ignore.

By the time I’d gotten back down to the field and to my duffel bag, my knee had mostly stopped throbbing, and I wasn’t limping anymore. Any more than I normally did, at least – the souvenir of an old car wreck that hadn’t gone away in the four years since I got it, so I had sort of placidly assumed it’d be with me forever.

Of all the things that a person can carry around – guilt, regret, anxiety – a limp wasn’t the worst. Although I had pretty good helpings of those other things too, come to think of it. But somehow I kept on. Maybe it was the fact that without me, my dog would have no one to feed him, or maybe it was my constant fantasizing about being caught every time I fell by some hunk of man who would ravish me in all the right ways.

Who knows?

But I kept on going, day after day. Maybe it was just to see what was going to happen next. That sounds sort of pitiful now that I think about it, but I mean it in a more exploratory way than a woe-is-me way. For me, life is just a story that keeps telling itself the longer I go, and I love stories more than anything in the world.

The funny thing is that as much as I love them, I never seemed to have many good stories of my own. I mean, sure, I had some times in high school that would make pretty great Cameron Crowe movies, but for the most part I did my thing and interesting events never much got in the way.

Then again, as is usually the case with me, when things get interesting? They get
interesting
.

For a girl who never had many stories, for a girl whose main fantasy was being caught when she fell down and scraped her knee? I was about to be pulled into one
hell
of a story, and I’ll tell you right now – it didn’t take long at all for my fantasies to get a whole lot dirtier.

Dirtier is the wrong word for it.

Hairier? Furrier?

Either way, my Prince Charming turned out to be a lot more beast than beauty. Which, come to think of it, is perfect for a girl like me.

By which I mean I’m always finding hairs sticking out of my pantyhose. Er, the two times a year I wear it, anyway. Look, what I’m saying is, there are a lot of things in the world to think about, and honestly? I never got real excited about shaving.

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“W
here the hell have you been?” Jeanette, my lone employee and best friend, had her feet up on her desk when I walked back into my studio with nary a sniff of the agony I’d been through a half hour before. “The phone’s been ringing like crazy and you’re out sweating.”

“Running the stadium,” I said, dropping my gym bag on the floor and taking off my shoes, which I placed on the hat rack. Who the hell needs a hat rack these days? And who the hell needs shoes when you’re indoors? “Bare feet get my brain blood going.”

“Gross,” she said flatly. “Anyway, why don’t you just use the elliptical you bought three months ago? You know, the one sitting in your studio? I feel like if it was in a house, it’d be used for storing laundry. Instead of boxes of clay, I mean.”

“
I
feel like we’re married sometimes,” I said.

Jeanette snorted a laugh. “I’d make you shave your damn legs if we were.”

With a smile, I shook my head and pulled the elastic out of my ponytail. I’d forgotten to let it out in the car, which is a lot better for drying out one’s hair. But as it stood, my coppery-blond mane had one hell of a kink in the middle of it. Jeanette tilted her head, in the same way that normally precedes your grandmother saying “you’re a mess” but meaning it in only the best possible way.

“Anyway, you said we had orders?” I asked.

“No, I said we had calls.”

“You’re... going to need to clarify that.”

I make things. Sculptures mostly. Sometimes I get a commission for a stained-glass window, and I do it because I’m not too proud or too picky to take the money, but I really hate it. All the dye and the lead caulking and everything, it’s just such a damn mess. One time I got a call from someone who wanted me to do an ice sculpture at their wedding. I was supposed to show up with a chainsaw and carve a huge block of ice into the shape of a dolphin. Speaking of stories I have, there’s a hell of a story.

That middle-aged lawyer
desperately
wanted some wild stunt that he was sure would impress his twenty-two year old secretary-cum-wife. The ponytail he’d grown and the convertible Porsche he’d bought weren’t enough, so somehow he decided to move on to ice sculpture. Don’t ask me how that train of thought goes. Anyway, I told the guy that I had no idea what I was doing, but he was about as into listening as I am shaving.

Turns out, using a chainsaw isn’t all that much different from what I normally do, so the statue was fine, if a little South Florida Kitsch for my taste, and Mr. and Mrs. William J. Kelly III, Esq. were married for at least three months. I know that because he called me to do the next wedding, too.

Like I said, I’m not proud enough to turn down work.

“No ice sculpture dolphins,” Jeanette said, reading my mind. Then again, that was the most memorable work I’d ever had, so maybe it wasn’t so much that she was a psychic and more that I was just sorta boring most of the time. “Although, uh, this one is pretty unique.”

“Unique’s good,” I said with a shrug. “It pays, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well. Really well.” There was a peculiar look on my long-term best friend’s face that said more than her words. Her lips were drawn tight and she was blinking a lot, the way people do when they think they’ve seen a UFO but aren’t the sort to believe in that kind of thing. “Like, so well that I kinda think the guy was bullshitting me.”