“I don’t want an ounce of doubt in anyone’s mind that you’re mine and I’m yours. No wolf, no human, no mage. Nobody. I want to marry you, and serve our guests so many canapés, and toast our futures. Soon. Not tomorrow, but let’s start planning it. I’ll hire someone. We’ll make it perfect. That’s what I want. Is it what you want?”
He could say no, that it was too fast. We were mated now. There wasn’t a stronger bond among werewolves, but despite knowing Dakota felt that bond too, a wedding was a different thing.
It was a public declaration of something shared between us, and yes, acknowledged by our pack. But this would be for us and for everyone.
Even the press would want a piece of it, and I wanted the whole goddamn world to know Dakota was mine. Fuck, I’d givethem access just so I could get a picture of him grinning spread across the centerfold ofVanity Fair.
I’d never cared much about that kind of thing before. Sure, I’d given interviews, tried to present myself well, but it had been work. I was growing a company and protecting my pack. There was a reason for it beyond vanity.
There was a reason beyond vanity for this too. Yes, I wanted Dakota surrounded by flowers and grinning like he was the happiest person on Earth, but I also wanted to honor the bond we had in every facet of my life—not just with the pack, but in front of the humans we kept secrets from, and witches on the other side of the world.
Fuck me, we’d have to invite every single member of the Igarashi family, wouldn’t we?
Even that sent a giddy little shiver up the back of my neck. I’d won. No, that didn’t mean, and would never mean, keeping Dakota from any part of his family or himself. But when it came down to it, he could’ve taken a place at the Igarashi Corporation like they’d pressed him. He could have moved back to Japan to learn more about the people he’d lost.
Instead, he’d chosen to stay with us. With me.
I was going to make every ounce of faith he put in me worth it tenfold. And I was going to get him an incredible tux.
Those long seconds, standing on the stairs and looking into Dakota’s eyes, I never felt enough doubt from him to worry. There was just a slow, swelling warmth that crept up on me, until it was all I could feel.
“Yeah,” Dakota whispered, leaning in to press his forehead against mine. “I do. Promise you’ll hire somebody though?”
I laughed. “Yes, definitely. Neither one of us has the capacity or experience to plan an event on this scale. I’ll find the best wedding planner on the west coast, and we’ll tell them what wewant, and they’ll take care of everything, and you and me? We’re just gonna have to show up and do the kissing thing and?—”
Dakota tipped forward, and his lips caught mine, and, well, we already had the kissing thing down pat, didn’t we?
20
Dakota
Weddings, it turned out, took a lot of work to plan.
Okay, yeah, fine, I’d technically known that before, but seeing it in action was a bit eye-opening.
Jax hired a popular wedding planner, but even with someone whose job it was to do all the work, there were a million decisions to make, places to tour, food to try, suits to be fitted for... It was no wonder weddings were a huge industry. Apparently getting married was harder than any job I’d ever done for a living.
“Does it actually matter what font we use on the invitations?” I asked Cheri, our official wedding planner. “I mean, honestly, we’re only inviting people we know. They’re going to know when and where it is. We all work at the same place.”
She lifted a brow. “Including all these addresses in Japan?”
Cringe.
“You forgot your own family, didn’t you?” Kosuke demanded from behind me. “Not only are you marrying abeast, but you forgot that you have to invite your actual family to the horrid event.”
Thankfully, Cheri was a fae, so when I turned and glared at him, she didn’t so much as blink hard. In fact, she turned toward where he was standing and lifted an eyebrow. “Big talk for a man who can’t even pour his own tea anymore.” He scowled at her, I supposed ready to go on a rant about how fae were also evil, when she waved him off. “This is all overwhelming. Give him a break. I once had a bride who forgot to actually mail her invitations.”
I stared at her for a moment, horror dawning on me, because... I would definitely do that. Shit. I was going to ruin my own wedding.
“That’s why I mail the invites now,” she said, reaching out to pat me on the sleeve. “As far as fonts go, you’d be surprised what the wrong font can do.” Then she proceeded to pull out an invitation that promised a “flickering candlelight ceremony,” only somehow, in the font they had chosen, it read “fuckering” instead.
“Holy shit. Did they send these?”
That brought back the chipper fae who wasn’t annoyed with my annoying great-great-grandfather. “Nope. We had them printed, took one look, and decided we were going to have to scrap them and start over. But I kept one because it’s a good example of why you need to pay attention to fonts.”
I wasn’t even sure why they’d needed to mention the candlelight, but it seemed like a lot of the language on the invites was overly flowery. So many adjectives I felt like I was back in middle school being told that my writing was boring and I needed to “jazz it up.” Which, of course, had been followed by high school writing classes where they told us that using adjectives was for chumps, and we should all be more like Hemingway.
Considering the guy’s life, I begged to differ.
