“Some. I mean, you wolves sure have a lot of formalities to go through.”
Tara shrugged. “It makes everyone in the pack feel better to have formalities to go through when there’s a big change. It’s the same reason people have funerals.”
That actually made me stop. “Wait. Did the SoMa pack have a funeral for my uncle?”
“We did.”
“So why wasn’t I invited?”
“Well, for one thing, we didn’t know you’d been named pack alpha at that point.”
Right.
“And apparently, at least according to what Liam told me, your parents didn’t have any intention of telling you about your heritage.”
That really was odd. “I should ask them about that someday.”
“It’s not unheard of—it’s just not usual,” Tara reassured me.
I pulled on a two-piece lacy number in black. “Oh. I like this one.”
“Can I see?”
“Sure.”
Tara opened the door and peeked in. When she saw what I was wearing, she grinned. “I thought you might like that one. Wait here.”
She was gone for only a few minutes, and when she returned, she held the same item in two more colors—red and white. She pointed to the black one I was wearing. “Owen.” Then she held out the white one. “Liam.” And finally, the red.
“Dean,” we said together.
We cracked up laughing, and for the first time since I’d inherited my uncle’s pack, I felt almost normal.
Shopping with a girlfriend before a hot date. What could be more perfectly normal than that?
I simply had to ignore the fact that my hot date was designed to allow me to consummate my marriage to a werewolf.
To the first of three werewolves, in fact.
Yeah. That wasn’t the usual order of things in either the human or the werewolf world.
So much for normal.
Chapter 4
The pack held the ceremony at The Moon Moon, which I thought was a little odd. Especially given the fact that we were supposed to leave the ceremony and go straight to having sex.
There was a bedroom upstairs at the bar and grill. Apparently there was an entire apartment. My uncle Desmond had sometimes rented it out, and sometimes used it as a place for wolves to crash—both wolves who belonged to the pack and ones who belonged to other packs and were just passing through town.
I hadn’t even seen the apartment until just a few hours before the ceremony, when Tara showed it to me. It was nice enough. Small, but clean. And it had a queen-size bed in the bedroom.
Now I was using it as a place to get ready for the ceremony to make Liam my first alpha-mate, the one whose word was law in case I was incapacitated. I sat in my carefully chosen lingerie while Tara fussed with trying to get my brown curls to behave.
“They are pretty much unmanageable,” I assured her. “You want my hair to curl, it ends up straight, and if you want it to be straight, it curls.”
She laughed. “That’s okay. We’ll pin up whatever we need to in order to make you look gorgeous.”
She was right, too. By the time she finished my hair and I smoothed the slinky red dress we’d chosen for tonight’s ceremony over the black version of the lingerie I had chosen, I looked, at least to my own eyes, like a completely different person.
I was twenty-five years old and I’d spent most of my adult life so far working in retail. I’d never considered myself sophisticated, or even really all that sexy. I was pretty, and I knew it, but I had never thought of myself all that special.
Not until the day three werewolves suggested that they were willing to all marry me.
No matter nervous the entire situation made me—and it did—I was still in awe of this position I had been given.
I was also beginning to see the value of the wolves’ preference for ceremonies. Just preparing for it had impressed upon me how important what I was about to do really was.
It had been one thing to agree to this odd arrangement because it saved my own life.
And it did save me—the guys had told me that if I didn’t choose to marry one of them, I would be challenged for my position and the outcome would almost certainly be my own death. After all, I was not equipped to fight werewolves.
But agreeing to marry all of them came out my recognition that I really needed all their help. It wasn’t enough for me to bond with one of them, to have his help running the pack. All four of us together would be a much better fit for pack-alpha status.
So that choice I made for the pack. And the ceremony the night before had really cemented it. As we had made our vows to protect the pack, to think about the pack in everything, it had hit home how much I wanted to be the kind of alpha who could take care of all the people who joined us, who came to support us as they watched the ceremony.
And as I stared at my reflection now, I realized that the next three ceremonies were just as important. They would cement my loyalties to the three mates I had chosen, just as the one the night before had cemented my loyalty to the pack I had agreed to take over.
Tara brought me a glass of champagne to help calm my nerves and ward off pre-ceremony jitters. But I was quickly figuring out that my new werewolf metabolism burned off alcohol almost as fast as I could drink it. I wondered what other benefits—or drawbacks—might be included in the whole I’m-a-werewolf-now package.
No chance of STDs. My werewolf mates can smell whether or not I am likely to get pregnant. I can’t get drunk
