“Fuuuuck.”
“Gets better still. Grandmaliterallystartsscreamingat them, grabs Calvin by theear, anddragshim back into the wedding reception while Mel’s cousins and sister are trying to run interference for her with the mother and father.”
“Calvin’s?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
Ken was trying to follow along. “Question, how’d she know his name was Calvin?”
“I guess Grandma has the lungs of an opera signer with a megaphone and screamed it when she caught them getting tidied up in the bushes. He was in a tux and she was in a bikini.”
“Grandma?”
“Mel.”
“Ah, gotcha.”
Dewi snorted. “Grandma in a bikini would be funny as hell, though.”
“Not a visual image I want, but please continue.”
“I should add that, apparently, Calvin’s family is uber-Evangelical cultish religious. Like, they’re one sperm-fertilized-egg away from having their own ‘My Vagina Doubles as a Clown Car’ TV series. The whole parental-arranged courtship bullshit.”
He snorted. “Fuuuck.”
“Still gets better. Calvin’s parents apparently were in the process of ‘arranging’ a courtship for him with the daughter of friends of theirs. He’d never evenmetthe girl before, so it’s not like they were for-real engaged. Apparently he didn’t even want to do it, but there’s no saying no in that family. The girl’s father is a pastor with a fairly large local-access cable TV show. And she is only sixteen.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Uh-huh.” Dewi sat up. “So, for those keeping track at home, we now have a claimed clueless human mate, and a wolf shifter who is about one ‘you godless whore’ taunt from her new mate’s family away from shifting and ripping out their throats and solving her own problem even while causing a multitude of others.”
Ken nodded. “That would be inconvenient.”
“Ooooh, yes. Her cousins and sister dragged Mel away to her room. One changes really fast and—”
“Shifts?”
“Clothes. He writes down all of Mel’s contact info, and her room number, sneaks into the reception, and follows the guy. Literally ducks into a men’s room and hands him the paper and then beats paws without getting caught. Meanwhile, it’s taking all of the rest of themliterallysitting on Mel to keep her from trying to chase this guy down. Because they rightly suspected she’d likely get arrested for assault if the family intervened again. And, Igetit, I do.”
“Not ideal circumstances,” Ken said. “Like running into him in a crowded sports bar when she was there to shoot a fucker who sold out his daughters to be sex slaves to a drug dealer.”
Dewi playfully snorted and poked him in the stomach. “No, that would have been easy.” She pulled the elastic band from her long, auburn hair and started finger-combing out her messy bun. “Anyway. Here are Mel and the others thinking the guy’s going to come up to her room, right?”
“Except, problem?”
She nodded. “Problem, one of Calvin’s older thirty-dozen brothers apparently received the assignment to drag him the fuck out of there. Mel’s cousin saw it happen. He definitely didn’t want to leave, either. Calvin, I mean. Took another two brothers to help herd him into the car. I guess his family wasn’t staying there. Two days later, Melstillhasn’t found Calvin or heard from him and is just about going out of herfuckingmind, understandably. Doesn’t even know the guy’s last name. That’s when she misses a call from a strange phone number.”
“It was Calvin?”
“Yup. He got as far as leaving her his full name and address when someone started screaming at him and apparently snatched the phone away from him. Call ended.”
Ken loved listening to Dewi tell stories like this and had to actually focus on her words because it was nearly hypnotic watching her play with her hair. “And?”
“They lived six hours away. Mel’s parents are still at work. She grabs her two brothers, sister, and three of the cousins from that weekend, and they immediately head off on a caravan road-trip without telling anyone.”
Dewi sighed. “It’s sweetly romantic, in a way. If not for the batshit crazy humans. Mel and her posse roll up to the address at about one in the morning. Middle of nowhere, dusty, shitsville, busted-ass ex-farm town that’s starting to become an escape haven for obscenely rich Silicon Valley tech bros. These assholes are living in what looks to be a mansion. I mean, aliteralmansion. Instead of hitting the button on the gate, Mel and her two brothers jump the fence. She sniffs around, finds the guy’s scent, one of her brothers boosts her up to a second-floor bedroom window, and Calvin lets her in. The admittedly sound plan was for her to grab Calvin and immediately get the hell out of there with him.”
“That’s not what happened?” Ken asked.
