“Your monkey-man skills!” I yelled. “Just shut up and climb, damn it! I’m losing my grip!”
I felt the tension on the rope slack slowly. I peered over the edge to see Nick curling his fingers around a rough knob of rock. He let go of the rope entirely, digging his fingers into a divot. He found a foothold and pulled up. His eyes locked with mine as his hand stretched toward another hold. His grip faltered, and his right hand slipped.
“Don’t look at me! Look at the rocks! If you fall to your death because you were being all moony and sentimental, I’m going to kick your ass!”
“Which will be a bit of a moot point, since I’ll be dead!” he shouted back.
“Don’t say that!”
Ignoring me, he focused on finding the right place, the right hold. Again and again, until he was within an arm’s reach. I tucked my arms under his shoulders, yanking him up as his legs gave one last push.
I buried my face in Nick’s neck as he landed on top of me. He huffed, “How do you find time to yell at me, even when I’m dangling over my certain death?”
I clutched his face in my hands, looking him over for signs of permanent damage. I kissed his cheeks, his nose, his mouth, and clutched him close to the point where he had difficulty breathing.
If I hadn’t just inadvertently killed a distant cousin, I would have found Nick’s nearly bare ass and lost boots sort of funny. He’d been pantsed by a falling werewolf.
OK, that was sort of funny.
I started giggling, recognizing even as the laughter bubbled from my lips that it was a hysterical response. But damn it, I’d nearly lost my fiancé to a secret stalker, whom I’d been too blind to recognize, and the only thing that had saved said fiancé was really old jeans and his ability to channel Spider-Man.
Nick groaned.
“Nick?” I sniffed, pushing his bloodied hair away from the gash in his forehead.
He looked down and saw the frayed belt loops ringing his waist, belt buckle still intact. “I’m not wearing any pants.”
“I know,” I said, laughing as tears streamed down my cheeks, splattering onto his face.
He winced as he tried to sit up. He thought better of it and lay back down. “I love you.”
“I love you, too. So much. I just want to spend the rest of my life with you, loving you and doing stupid, girlie romantic crap until the day I die.”
He grinned, patting my head. “That’s nice of you.”
I laughed, pressing my lips to his forehead.
He closed his eyes and rested his chin on top of my head. “So . . . what happened to my pants?”
18
Going to the Chapel, ’Cause I’m Obviously Crazy
I HAD TO LOVE THIS guy.
Otherwise, I would not be standing here in this stupid clearing, wearing this stupid, foofy white dress, waiting for my brother to walk me down a makeshift aisle.
There was a light dusting of snow on the ground, which Mo assured me gave everything a sort of “fairy-tale quality.” I’ll be honest. I didn’t care much. I just wanted to be married.
I walked down the aisle. Clay, who was standing awfully close to Teresa, waggled his eyebrows at me. I waggled mine right back.
Clay and I were a lot more comfortable as co-pack leaders than we ever were dating. And it was a damn good thing, because between the online college classes I was taking and the honeymoon Nick had planned, I was going to need him to keep an eye on things for a while. I’d never been farther than Seattle, and now I was going on a honeymoon. I had no idea where we were going. All Nick would tell me was that we would start with a ferry ride to Bellingham.
A few of Clay’s younger packmates snickered at my Cinderella getup, earning them a smack on the back of their heads from Alicia. I winked at her. Blending the two packs hadn’t been easy. For one thing, we didn’t have room for everybody. We had to bring in a bunch of trailers for temporary housing, which were hideously expensive thanks to the difficulty involved in moving them to the middle of nowhere. Thank you very much, fiancé with unlimited financial resources.
Nick was also paying a huge crew of construction workers secret double overtime to finish the dozen or so new houses we needed for the new-arrival families. And then, of course, there was the jealousy over the newbies getting brand-new houses while some of our people had been living in the same cramped places for more than forty years. So when the crew wasn’t completing new construction, they were doing renovations.>“I thought if I came along and helped you, it would be a good ice breaker. But the lines failed before I expected them to. I was waiting at the halfway point, waiting for you to pass by so I could follow. But you never showed. I doubled back, and I found your truck. I found you with him—”
He turned on Nick. “What else?” I barked, demanding his attention. His head swung toward me, his eyes sharp and indignant. I softened my voice. “What else don’t I know about? I just—I need to know what I owe you, Lee. Please. I just want to make it up to you. Every single thing you did. I owe you. Did you set fire to my office?”