Fool for Love Bloghop

Welcome to the "Fool For Love" spring blog hop! If you get lost, just click on the banner and it'll bring you back on to the hop. Remember to follow all the way through for your chance to win all kinds of goodies, including our grand prize, a Kindle Paperwhite!

For my stop on the hop, I have for you a little bit of a scene from a short story. Last hop, I had a free story you could down load, and I was trying to do that again for this hop, but I didn't get it all the way edited in time. If you keep an eye on my Face Book author page, I'll let you know when the full story will be available for download. In addition to the gift certificate I'm offering for the whole hop, I'm going to be giving away one copy of my latest novel, "Catching the Hunter" in trade paperback to one random person who leaves a comment.

Special thanks on this story to Ken Rolt, who so graciously let me have custody of his polt device, the white hanky of anti-doom. He suggested it as a story idea on a sci-fi writer's group I belong to and my imagineation ran with it. I hope you enjoy this sneak peek of it!

So, without further ado, I present a story of a young soldier with dreams of grandeur and an apprentice mage with little talent but enough moxie to see the job done anyway:

"The Troll and the White Hanky of Anti-doom, Chapter 2"

The troll sneezed and a wave of noise echoed through the valley like a peal of thunder, made more ominous by the fact the sky was a lovely cloudless blue. Watt quickly ducked behind a large boulder and waited for the debris to clear—he had already learned the hard way not to stand in the open when the troll sneezed, lest he find himself covered in things best left unmentioned. Once he felt it was safe, he peered cautiously out from behind his shelter. The troll hadn’t moved. It was still sitting on a tree stump next to the only bridge across the River Tam that the spring rains hadn’t flooded out. Its presence effectively barred safe travel along Trader’s Road and cut off all commerce to Kernow.

“Tell me again,” he said with quiet dread, “Why, exactly are we doing this?”

“Because we want to eat,” came the reply form the Lisa, an apprentice mage who had volunteered to accompany him on this damn fool mission. “Kampton hasn’t received any supplies in a fortnight, so there’s nothing to eat if you didn’t grow it yourself.”

“Yeah,” he said with a nod. “But why are we doing it?”

“Really, Watt,” she said with a huff. “You know why. The captain of the city guard said he had no need of another untrained soldier, but you were welcome to go try your hand at killing trolls.”

“And you volunteered to accompany me because your master kicked you out of his house after saying that he didn’t want to feed an apprentice that wasn’t any good,” Watt said, picking up the thread of her statement. “But why are we doing it, and not some gallant knight in shining armor or a fully trained wizard or something?”

“I’m a very good mage,” Lisa shot back hotly, ignoring the last few words and focusing on the easily debated portion. “I’m just not flashy, is all. I prefer to use one well-thought-out small magic rather than a huge spell that makes a lot of noise. It’s more efficient,” she added with a sniff.

“And about the small magic you promised,” Watt said. “What have you come up with? Or do you need me to get you even closer than this to figure out how to defeat that smelly lump of snot?”

“This is close enough,” she muttered. He turned and looked at her, just now realizing that she had been up to something while he kept an eye on their query.

“What are you doing?” he asked when he saw her grinding what looked like twigs and dirt into a handkerchief. He carefully peaked out to make sure the troll hadn’t moved since the last Earth-shattering sneeze—it hadn’t—before slipped back far enough to look over her shoulder.

“Spelling this cloth to ease his allergies,” she mumbled as she gathered the corners together into a pouch and shook the bundle vigorously.

“You’re making… a what? A white hankie of anti-doom? And I’m supposed to just walk up and offer it to the troll?” Watt asked incredulously.

“More or less,” she agreed cheerfully. Watt stared at the short blonde haired girl, flabbergasted, as she muttered a few magical phrases of gibberish before flinging the herbs out of the handkerchief with a dramatic flick of her wrist.

“There!” she said, handing the now dirty white hankie of anti-doom to him as if offering him the sword Excalibre.

He didn’t take it.

“Watt,” she said sternly.

“What?” he asked back, belatedly realizing how silly he sounded. Really, it wasn’t his fault that his name rhymed with ‘what.’

“Go give this cloth to the troll,” she said slowly, as if talking to a backwards child.

“Say I manage to get him to take your magic hankie,” he hedged, still not accepting the scrap of linen, “then what? The troll will still be blocking off access to the only passable bridge in the county. And it’ll probably still be sneezing since it’s a troll. Trolls don’t blow their noses, Lisa! It won’t even begin to understand what it’s supposed to do with the bloody thing!”

“Well, do you have a better idea?” she asked with a sneer.

“Yeah!” he huffed back at her. “Make me a potion of something that will turn him into stone when I dump it on him or something!”

“I’m sorry,” she snapped back. “I can’t do that kind of high magic. It would take a real wizard to do something like that and you haven’t got a wizard to help you. Just me, a level two apprentice mage.”

They sat there, crouched behind a boulder, glaring at each other while the troll sneezed and then sneezed again. As one, they realized that the second sneeze had sounded much closer than the first. Watt gulped nervously and peeked around the top of the boulder. The troll must have heard them bickering, because it had gotten up from its tree stump and was shambling their way, swinging its brutish head from side to side as it looked for them.

“Right then,” Watt said, reaching blindly behind him for the white hanky of anti-doom. “I need to find some way to get the troll to blow its nose.”

“Just get it onto the troll’s face so it covers his mouth and nose,” Lisa whispered as she shoved the hanky into his groping hand. “His breathing should be enough to get the spell into his sinus cavity, where it’ll go to work and end this bout of hay fever.”

“And then what?” he hissed. She shrugged once, looking terrified.

“I assume the troll will go on about his business once he’s not feeling so poorly. He doesn’t usually sit next to the bridge, after all.”

“Right,” Watt muttered. “Right, I’ll just slap the hanky over his nose and then somehow get him to retreat back under his bridge, where he belongs.”

“You might try tripping him when his face is covered with the hanky,” Lisa pointed out. “He looks pretty clumsy.”

Watt looked at her, realizing belatedly that she had moved up and was peering at the troll over the top of the boulder. She looked back at him and shrugged again.

“It can’t be that easy,” he said in awe. “If it were that easy, someone would have tried it by now.”

“Most people think big problems need bid solutions,” Lisa replied. “The fact is, that troll’s always been here, sleeping under that bridge and bothering nobody. We don’t need to get him to go away, just go back to sleep.”

“And since he’s sneezing, it’s probably just hay fever that woke him up,” Watt said back, finally realizing the brilliance of her plan. “White hanky of anti-doom, indeed!”

They grinned at each other and then ducked behind their impromptu shelter when the troll sneezed again.

“Here goes nothing,” Watt muttered before darting out from behind the boulder. “Oy! You, there!” he yelled at the troll.

Witches, Werewolves, Elves, and Lent

Did you hear that one about the Catholic who writes romance? No? That's probably because there isn't a joke about it.

Anyway. So here I sit, proof reading a manuscript filled with very steamy sex scenes and I have a smear of burnt plant matter on my forehead. Like most random thoughts, it eventually dawned on me that most non-Catholics would consider this a contradiction. "She writes steamy stories about dreams, elves, witches and shape shifters?" you might think.

Blasphemy!

No, not really. Faith is what you make of it, after all. I choose to base my beliefs on something other than self-righteous anger, which means I am not only content with my way of life, but I also don't much care what other people do with theirs. It's not about the trappings of church for me. It's about hope, faith, and... medieval traditions.

Yep. I'm still a practicing Catholic because I love history. Tell me, what other Western faith still burns crap and smears it on your head once a year? That's a throw-back to times when people only gave lip service to Christ while still following the old ways if ever I saw one. Find me one western story about demons that doesn't revolve around a priest trying to exorcize it. Go ahead; I dare you!

See, the Catholic faith, in an attempt to convert the masses, didn't eradicate to old ways. It usurped them. Today is not only Ash Wednesday, it's also Woden's Day. We eat hot cross buns for Easter, the same as the Anglo-Saxons did, using recipes that are pretty much exactly the same as they made them fifteen hundred years ago, when the buns were made in honor of Esther every spring.

Be honest, that's kind of cool.

Now, people are running around trying to recreate the lost traditions of our ancestors. They try to guess what Druids were like, and they often get it wrong. They say, "We are doing the best we can! The Church wiped out all traces of the Druids!"

Not so. Why else do we decorate our homes with the Druidic holy symbol of peace and fellowship (holly) every Yule Tide if not because of the Druids? You want a peek at how our ancestors worshiped and lived? Take a long look at Catholicism. It's still pretty much the same now as it was back when the Romans were conquering and assimilating everyone. Heck, they didn't even start killing witches until that butt-head, King James, started on a rampage in the late 1500s out of self-righteous boredom.

And I love it. All the medieval pageantry, the incense, the knowledge that the mass I went to this afternoon was the same one St. Patric conducted. Knowing that the guy who saved Ireland once smeared burnt crap on the foreheads of my forefathers. It feeds my soul. What else is faith, after all, but a renewal of the soul?

All of this comes full circle in my writing. Witches, werewolves, elves, lent; it all gets blended in that messy thing I call my mind. It stews and bubbles until stories start forming and then I write them down, mostly to get the stories out of my head so I can sleep at night.

And that is why it's not heresy when if sit down to a good paranormal romance after going to church. The end.

~ Rebecca

Happy Marti Gras!



Amazon Purchase Link




Happy Marti Gras, everyone! In honor of this day of wild parties and gastric torture, I am going to share a chapter out on one of my back list books, Equal Partners. This book takes place about this time of your, and the chapter in question takes place on Marti Gras. Alas, no special discount to buy the book, if you haven't already read it. That's up to my publisher, not me. But it's still a fun read and does sport a small discount on Amazon.com right now!

~ Rebecca

Chapter 6

Cissy found Lleu staring intently out the window, growling under his breath. She’d just come from the back porch, with the chicken in hand, to find her mate acting like a territorial dog. Apparently, he didn’t like seeing the drunken Courir de Mardi Gras working its way down the rural road she lived on to beg permission to chase the chicken. She laughed out loud, trying to figure out who looked sillier, the elf lord growling like a dog at passing cars or the mob of drunks dressed in psychedelic medieval costumes stuffed in horse trailers.

“Calm down, cher!” she admonished. “The Courir de Mardi Gras has been trying to catch this old chicken of mine for years. And every year, they leave covered in mud with nothing to show for their efforts but a pound of sausage out of my freezer.” He flashed her an annoyed glare then returned to his staring, though he did stop growling. Cissy moved to the window and watched beside him for the Capitaine on his horse to ride up to the front porch to beg entry for his troupe of revelers.

“Now, remember, you don’t get to chase the Mardi Gras,” Cissy said. “The Capitaine will come up and ask permission for his troupe to come onto the property. When we agree, he will raise his flag, and the mob will spill out of the trailers. They will run around acting like fools. You don’t beat on them if they try to steal me away, okay? They won’t take me far. They are just going to try to get me to drop the chicken. It’s all in good fun.

“Once they have a good run about the place, I will toss the bird into the air, and they will try to catch her. They never do, though. They manage to catch everyone else’s bird, but never mine. You will then tease them about being bested by a brainless chicken—nicely—then offer them the sausage as a consolation prize. Okay?” Cissy waited for his agreement then elbowed him. “Okay?” she repeated sternly. Lleu rolled his eyes at her.

“Fine,” he relented. “I won’t chase the stupid apes.” Cissy elbowed him with a frown. He glanced down at her, a slight smirk dancing at the corners of his mouth. “We had similar traditions in my first life, only at the winter solstice. I wandered drunkenly from house to house begging for vegetables as a lad myself. I’ll keep my wolf in check while they are here,” he reassured.

“You know,” Lleu said casually a moment later, “they might actually have had a chance at catching that stringy old bird if you hadn’t had me hose down the pasture.”

Cissy giggled. Mardi Gras was her favorite time of year. They didn’t celebrate Fat Tuesday the same way in the rural parishes as they did in New Orleans. In the Big Easy, revelers would beg the Mardi Gras, usually a dignitary riding a float in the parade, for favors. Here in the country, the Mardi Gras were the drunken revelers, and they went from farm to farm begging contributions for the communal gumbo. The prize of all prizes was a live chicken. The more chickens the Courir de Mardi Gras, or the Mardi Gras runners, brought back, the more successful the coming year was said to be.

In the four days since she’d accidentally life-mated herself to the fierce shifter lord, Cissy had managed to come to terms with it. But she was Creole, not just Southern. They didn’t let bygones be bygones. She wanted Donnella’s head on a platter for duping her. Lleu—her mate—was the best person for the job. She had to find a way to convince him she accepted that they were bound so he would continue his hunt for the murderess.

“Here they come,” she said, shunting aside her internal deliberations. “Wait for the Capitaine to hail us. Then we will go out to meet him.” Just as she finished speaking, a giant of a man dressed in a violently orange set of coveralls with fuchsia and purple fringe sewn along every hem turned into her driveway riding an equally huge roan horse.

“What is that song they are butchering?” Lleu asked, disgust warring with amusement in his tone.

“They are singing the Mardi Gras chant. It translates roughly as ‘Capitaine, Capitaine, raise your flag, we want to run, to catch the chicken.’ Every town has its own chant, though all of them say about the same thing.” Cissy chuckled at Lleu’s fake annoyance. She had discovered that the stoic warlord actually had a well-developed sense of humor, which he tried very hard to hide. She could tell through their deepening mate bond, though, that he was secretly enjoying the spectacle. He’d been growling earlier to tease her.

“Hail, the homestead!” shouted the drunken rider. He managed to startle his horse and nearly fell off when it jumped. Hysterical giggles filled the air from the small army of spectators who’d been following the Mardi Gras as it snaked its way up and down country roads. Shaking his head, an actual grin on his face, Lleu pushed the old, wooden screen door open and stepped onto the porch.

“Well met, Capitaine. Peace be to you and your troupe,” he answered the rider in a formal tone that reminded Cissy that he’d lived in a time when hailing a home had been more than a quaint custom. His kind had once done it to assure those within that they meant no harm. The horse startled again, and this time the rider dropped the flag. The intoxicated man stared down at it for a moment.

“Merde,” he spat, and a new round of giggles filled the air. He stopped glaring at the hapless flag and shot a disgruntled glare at the followers in their horse-drawn buggies and hay-stacked flatbed trailers pulled by trucks. He turned and started to glare at Lleu. “And who are you?” he asked belligerently.

“Remy Giroux, be nice!” Cissy cut in, pushing past Lleu. “This is my new husband, Lleu.”

Her announcement was met with startled silence for a moment. Slowly, a happy grin spread over Remy’s face.

“Is that right, baby girl?” he asked gleefully. Remy dismounted his horse like a sack of potatoes falling. He managed not to get trampled by his dancing mount, scooped up the dropped flag, then unsteadily got to his feet. “I am Remy Giroux,” he introduced himself to her mate as formally as his drunken state allowed. Lleu bowed respectfully, visibly struggling to tamp down his amusement.

“I am Lleu Llaw Gaffys,” he responded, his deep voice resonating through the unnaturally still morning air.

“Clay—Clayton Jeffries?” Remy repeated, making the same pronunciation error Cissy had when she first met the shifter lord. The old man turned and addressed the expectant crowd waiting at the road. “Cissy Trahan has taken a husband!” he bellowed. “Join me in welcoming into our community Clayton Jeffries!” He stopped suddenly then turned back, confusion on his face. “When did you all meet, anyway? I ain’t seen you around town with a beau.”

Cissy laughed. How typical of the retired parish pastor to skip right past the obvious question and go for the gossip. And it was a good thing, too—Louisiana didn’t recognize common-law marriages, and marriage license requirements sometimes caused problems for people who wanted quiet, secret weddings. Nor had she been out of town long enough to have slipped off for a secret wedding.

“Lleu is a bounty hunter. He works with my friend, Aubry, from time to time,” she said casually, hoping her mate would go along with the story. “We met when he was hunting a serial killer who’d gone there to try and hide.” That wasn’t really a lie, she mused, merely a misrepresentation of facts.

“Cissy Trahan married to a law man?” Remy bellowed in disbelief. “If I didn’t see him standing right here in front of me I’d never believe it! Ha-ha-ha!”

“Remy Giroux, you take that back!” Cissy demanded, genuinely offended. Her grandpapa’s younger brother had been a bank robber. But other than him, the entire Trahan clan had been squeaky clean.

“Ah, baby girl,” Remy said, looking sheepish and casting furtive glances toward Lleu. “I was jess funning. You not going to hold that against an old man, are you?” Cissy followed the old man’s worried half glances and found Lleu had lost all signs of being amiable. She had a feeling she was seeing the warlord side of her teasing, attentive mate. It wasn’t hard to figure out why Remy had changed his tune so quickly.

“Perhaps it is time to let those poor fools out to have their fun, yeah?” Lleu commented quietly, his displeasure with the unintended insult mostly hidden. Remy grasped the escape gladly.

“Right, right, the Courir de Mardi Gras! Right!” he stammered then cleared his throat. “I beg permission for my troupe to come onto your land and beg a prize for the communal meal!” Lleu nodded his head in an odd sideways gesture that looked like it belonged to the Dark Age warlord he’d once been.

Remy tried in vain to calm his horse down and failed. Lleu, seeming to have forgiven the old man somewhat, shook his head in bemusement and stepped off the porch to hold the skittish beast’s halter while its rider mounted. By the time Remy was remounted, Lleu was actually chuckling a bit, the runners, still stuffed in their horse trailers, were howling with laughter and drunken impatience, and Cissy was out of breath and giggling. She was sure she’d seen a few flashes from cameras, too.

Finally, after a fresh swig on the bottle of bourbon he’d tucked into a saddle bag, Remy turned and theatrically waved the ceremonial flag in the air. With a loud roar of approval, dozens of drunken, garishly dressed people spilled out of the trailers. Old men, young men, and even a few bold women came mad-dashing across the yard. Within seconds, every corner of the property was crawling with gigging folks acting like fools.

Lleu apparently forgot his promise not to chase any of the Mardi Gras, because she saw him a few minutes later running down one young man. She started to hiss at him to stop when she noticed that they were both laughing too hard to run properly—and the runner was wearing one of her sexiest bras on his head!

“Give that back!” Lleu yelled with a sloppy lunge. “You can’t expect a man to spend his honeymoon with nothing to strip off his wife, can you?”

Cissy forgot everything in a blinding flash of embarrassment. She didn’t realize at first why everyone, including Lleu and the kid he’d been chasing, stopped running around aimlessly. They turned to her almost at once.

“Get the chicken!” a nameless voice shouted, closely followed by a drunken cheer. Cissy looked down to see her prize chicken pecking the ground in front of her.

“Run! Fly away!” Cissy squealed, trying to flush off the bird she’d accidentally dropped. I can’t believe I dropped the bird! she thought hysterically, blocking a rather determined runner from getting around her. In the mêlée, the bird finally decided to escape, though it didn’t go very far. As Cissy stood looking on in embarrassed horror, her mate joined the mad scramble and actually managed to catch the bird.

“I got the bird!” he shouted triumphantly.

“Ah, that’s no fair!”

“It’s our bird!”

“You want the bird. I want my wife’s lingerie back. Who’s willing to trade?” he shouted over the catcalls.

“Lleu! Don’t you be trading my chicken for that muddy scrap of lace! I’d never wear it again, not after it’s been on Jacques’s nappy head!” Cissy yelled. He looked over at her, pretending to be hurt.

“It’s the principle of the thing, m’bandraoi. What kind of a protector would I be if I let them carry off a trophy like that?”

“You’d be the kind who gets to sleep in his wife’s bed, not on the couch!” she retorted, much to the amusement of the onlookers. “They are supposed to catch the chicken, not haggle my underwear for it. All they’ve earned is some sausage.”

“I’ll trade you your underthings for that sausage,” said Jacques, “but I also want a kiss.”

“I’m not rewarding you with a kiss!” Cissy spat, giggling too much for her retort to have any real venom.

“Ah! But I am bribing you with your underwear!” he replied. “I get the sausage and a kiss on the cheek, or I wear my fancy new bonnet all day!”

“Fine,” she laughed. “Come get your kiss, then.”

“What about my kiss?” Lleu asked after the trade was done and the Capitaine was herding his now muddy, tired drunks back toward the road.

“You don’t deserve a reward. You tried to give away my chicken!”

“True,” he said, acting like he was thinking it over. Cissy could see a bit of mischief in his eyes, though, and started backing slowly toward the door. He grinned evilly. “I guess I should be giving you the kiss, then, to atone.” With that, he jumped the porch rail and snagged her up before she could make good her escape.

Cissy found herself being swept back into a Hollywood-style kiss, the kind women always dreamed about. She vaguely realized they were being cheered as he picked her up, still kissing her, and carried her into the house.

I Am Not Normal

So I was walking down the hall at my day job when I saw someone I get along with pretty well. I said “Hi!” He smiled, got an ornery look on his face, and then said “Lo!”

This may sound like a normal interaction between two people who are friendly acquaintances, at least for most people. For me, it was one of those ah-ha! moments. Why? Because I realized that hi, as a greeting, and ‘lo, another fairly common greeting are opposites that mean the same thing when you change the context.

And that pretty much sums up why writers are strange people. I sat and thought on it for some time, am now writing a blog about it, and eventually will probably figure out how to work that bit of silly, useless trivia into a book. A “normal” person would have thought about it, maybe chuckled, and then forgot all about it.

There. I admit it. I am not normal. But I am also never board.

~ Rebecca

Lazy post

Hey guys. It's my birthday. I posted a preveiw of the first chapter of "Witch's Moon" over on Shape Shifter Seductions. Feel free to drop by and have a read. Here's the link: http://shapeshifterseductions.blogspot.com/2014/02/witchs-moon-first-chapter-sneak-peek.html


~ Rebecca

Because I haven't posted in a while...

I am posting today, because I haven't posted in a while, and I didn't want anyone to think I had died. I did not. I have, however, been madly writing and re-writing my Talbot's Peak story, "Witch's Moon," over and over. The main goal of this is to have something publishable as a selfie by the end of Feburary. So, not dead, just burried up to my arm pits is re-writes. Have a great day!

Just.Romance.Me Blog Hop - Baby, It's Cold Outside

Happy January! Welcome to my stop on the JustRomance.Me winter blog hop! My offer to you is the first chapter of a free novella I released on Christmas day. If you like it, you can head over to Smashwords and download the full story for free.


~ Rebecca L. Gillan

Chapter 1

Jock slumped down in the pew and tried to ignore the hollow, gnawing ache in his belly. The fact that he was here, at the wedding of his paternal cousin Amelia’s maternal cousin Amanda, said worlds about how desperate he had been to get out of attending the moon-mating ceremony. It was not something that came to wolves naturally, dammit, and he wasn’t going to go along with it!

Of course, nor was he the alpha, which meant having to have a good reason not to be in town during the holidays so it didn’t look like he was disobeying when he didn’t show up on New Year’s Eve to be paired off.

The moon-mating ceremony was his alpha’s invention, an attempt to address the high number of unmated wolves in the pack. In real wolf packs, only the alpha pair mated to keep the population of the pack at sustainable levels. In a world that was hostile to shape shifters, larger were-packs also had adopted that practice, so they didn’t have packs too big to sustain or, most importantly, to hide. The alpha had decided that in this day and age of birth control and expanding social tolerance, mating lower wolves—but not allowing breeding privileges—was the answer to a different problem. Tail chasing.

Since when was chasing tail considered a problem, Jock wondered. So long as there was no unwanted sexual contact and no leaving of litters of pups everywhere, who cared if wolves humped willing partners when the urge struck? It was good, harmless, if not exactly clean, fun.

But no. The alpha wanted his wolves to settle down and pick mates. There weren’t enough females to go around if the mated pairs were strictly male-female, but the alpha hadn’t specified that. He said “non-breeding mating groups”, meaning however you want it, fine, but everyone had to be in a group of some kind. During the moon-mating—why not just say circle jerk since that was clearly all it was?—everyone had to pick a partner or three and they were stuck in that group until the next New Year’s Eve. Or, moon-mating ceremony, rather.

See? Not at all how werewolves work. Besides, he just wasn’t into that stuff. He liked one-on-one long term monogamous relationships. Instead of going to that stupid made-up ceremony, he’d called his cousin Amelia and begged her to invite him to her house for the holidays. She had a wedding to go to and no date, so she was fine with that. He’d get out of being matched up with someone he didn’t really want to sleep with and she wouldn’t have to go to a family wedding dateless. Or worse, alone.

So that’s why he was sitting here in the pew of a church in a town he’d never visited before in the company of a cousin he didn’t see very often waiting for a wedding to start. It was late, too. He checked his watch again and then tapped it. It was now almost three and the wedding was supposed to have started at two. He frowned and looked around. The church was decked out with swags of greenery, huge red bows, and creamy white candles. The whole thing gave off a festive yet reverent ambiance as befitting a Christmas Eve wedding.

Uh-oh, he thought when he spied a crowd of people spilling out of church vestibule. No one looked happy, least of all the bride, whose face was covered with a heavy white veil. Her shoulders were scrunched in, making it clear that she wasn’t in a good place, emotionally.

“Dearly beloved,” the priest said sonorously at the front of the church. “It would seem we have no groom for this joyful celebration. Unless someone else would like to take this fine young lady as his wife, we are going to have to cancel.”

Jock looked at the cringing young woman, whom he couldn't even see properly. He looked at his cousin Amelia. She was looking back at him, eyes just as wide and shocked as his. He looked back up at the girl and whispered to his cousin, “Is this for real? Did the priest actually offer her up like day-old bread to anyone who wants her?”

“Um,” Amelia said, chewing on her lip. “Amanda kind of agreed to an arranged marriage. Her father’s will stipulated that she couldn’t inherit unless she’s married by her twenty-fifth birthday.”

“When’s her birthday?” Jock asked.

“Today.”

He looked at Amelia. She shrugged and then said, “Her dad was a no-show for most of her life and then he died a few years ago. Her grandfather’s an ass and messed with the will since he was the executor of it. The family lawyers checked. It’s all legal and binding. She has to be married by the end of the day or…”

Jock looked at the cringing girl, stunned by how backward that was. Then he had a thought. Married wolves were exempt from the moon-mating ceremony…

Amanda was miserable. She had suspected this hair-brained idea wasn’t going to go as well has her mother had thought it would. Get a quickie marriage to satisfy her grandfather’s medieval stipulations. After a year, they’d get a divorce. Sounded simple. Then her grandfather got wind of the plan and said it had to be a real wedding, not a paperwork one. And that, of course, had freaked out her Pablo, who had agreed to a marriage-in-name-only. She was quite possibly the only woman in history to be stood up by her gay friend at their fake wedding. As if that wasn’t bad enough, then her maternal uncle, who was officiating the ceremony, solicited a new groom for her from her own wedding guests. Oh, just shoot me now, she thought.

“I’ll do it,” a deep voice said from somewhere in the middle of the packed pews. She tried to look, but the veil was too thick. All she could see were vague shapes, like ghosts in a fog bank. As she watched, a very large shape seemed to rise above the other moving shapes. Whoever he was, he was tall, Amanda thought. The crowd murmured and Uncle Charles cleared his throat.

“And you are?”

“I’m Amelia’s cousin Jock on her father’s side. Her dad and mine were brothers,” the deep voice replied calmly.

“Do you understand the circumstances involved?” Uncle Charles asked, sounding exactly like the stodgy old priest he was.

“Yeah—uh, yes, sir,” the unseen man said, now sounding a bit flustered. “Amelia explained it to me just now. Amanda has to be married by the end of the day or her sperm donor was going to deny her her rightful inheritance. I’m not married or planning to get married any time soon.” The hulking shape seemed to shrug as the crowd started tittering. Sperm donor, huh? She was going to have to remember that. It fit her father perfectly. He’d stuck around long enough to contribute to her DNA but that was about it.

She tried desperately to remember something, anything about Amelia’s cousin. She didn’t think she’d ever met him, though he was Amelia’s last living relative on her dad’s side. She and Amelia shared maternal bonds, so he wouldn’t have been around the family. Then she remembered Amelia commenting that her cousin had called up asking if she minded if he visited for the holidays. And so here he was, saving Amanda from her grandfather, if not from total embarrassment.

“You’ll do fine,” Mother said from Amanda’s left side. “Places everyone! Young man, go up to the front of the church. Do you have a ring? Oh wait. Of course you don’t—”

“Well,” he said, sounding very bashful. “I do have my great-grandmother’s wedding ring. My grandmother wore it on a chain around her neck and when she died, I started wearing it that way, too. Because it reminded me of her,” he finished lamely.

Amanda felt for him. Her family was very intimidating. Not in a bad way, of course, but they were more than a little batty. She didn’t have to actually see them to know they were probably staring at the poor guy, polite smiles on their faces and nodding as if crazy stuff like this happened every day and was totally unremarkable. Amanda had to admit that she was already starting to like him, sight unseen. But then again, Amelia was one part cousin and one part best friend. If she brought Jock to a family wedding, he had to be good people.

He mother grabbed her arm and steered her into place without warning. “Just keep calm, baby,” her mother said quietly in her ear. “It’ll all be over soon. You’ll have a husband to shut your grandfather up with and then you’ll have the casino fair and square.”

“Mamma?” she asked nervously. “What does my groom look like?”

“Don’t worry about that, baby,” her mother said dismissively. “He’s only going to be a paper groom.”

“But Mamma, I have to sleep with him!” she hissed.

“Think of it like a one night stand,” he mother muttered as she dragged Amanda into place at the center of the vestibule. The organ started playing Pachelbel’s Cannon in G Major and everyone turned to look at her. This was it, she thought. Time to go meet my future husband or friend with benefits or whatever he was going to end up being. Time to go thwart her grandfather’s plans.

For a woman who had been raised to be strong and independent, these last few weeks since learning of her grandfather's change to her father’s will had been hell. She had almost come to terms with being forced to marry, and only because she loved Pablo like a brother, when Dearest Grandfather found out that Pablo was gay. All she could think was that while Pablo had been fine with the idea of hood winking “the man”, he was not alright with the stipulation that he had to actually sleep with her. Publicly. As in medieval bedding rituals. They had to be witnessed doing the deed.

This wedding was turning out to be more gothic than medieval. Medieval people considered weddings to be little more than business transactions that resulted in babies. The bride and groom usually knew each other, and certainly would have met each other, before the wedding. No, marrying a cousin’s cousin sight unseen was straight out of an Elizabethan Goth novel, complete with the evil bastard of a grandfather. Amanda sighed, wishing she had not spent quite so many hours devouring Ann Radcliff’s gothic novels as a teen. It had clearly put a few crazy ideas into her head. Next thing she knew, she’d be looking at her mysterious groom, trying to figure out what deep, dark secrets he was hiding from her!

She looked up at his very large form, blurred by the heavy lace of her veil, and squinted. Nope, nothing out of the ordinary so far as she could tell. Uncle Charles cleared his throat meaningfully. Amanda jumped, realizing she had missed her cue.

“Do you promise to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, ‘til death do you part?” he repeated.

“I do,” she choked out, ignoring the odd thrill that ran up her spine at “’til death do you part.” That was silly. This was still only a temporary marriage, even if it was to her cousin’s cousin rather than to a guy she’d grown up with. It was more like a one night stand that would linger a bit.

“Do you have the ring?” Uncle Charles asked. Her groom fumbled a bit, finally pulling something small out of his pant pocket. At Uncle Charles’ urging, he slipped it onto her ring finger. Another thrill of something other-worldly ran down her spine as the thin gold ring, warm from his body heat, slid past her knuckle. She felt a little giddy when he lifted her hand and kissed it softly. She shivered when he folded her small hand into both of his much larger ones, a feeling of destiny settling heavy on her shoulders. She tried to ignore it, thinking it was a product of her earlier musing about gothic romance novels, but she couldn’t quite manage to set the feeling aside.

Finally, he lifted her veil and she got to see her groom for the first time. If she had to come up with one word to describe Jock Hancock, it would be “chiseled.” He hand a square rugged jaw, high sharp cheek bones, and piercing blue eyes. His brown hair was over-long and curling around his ears just a bit, clean but not overly tidy, the type of man who didn’t care much for what was fashionable. His tall frame looked hard with muscle from his huge shoulders to his trim waist to his mile long legs. Then he bent down to give her the traditional kiss and any thoughts of what he looked like fled.

Jock looked down at his bride and gulped. Oh, Sweet Luna, she was lovely! He reminded himself sternly that this was a quickie wedding of convenience. He didn’t get to keep her. Oh but her scent! It whispered to him of hearth and home and crisp winter snows laying heavy on a pine forest. She was dainty, coming not quite to his shoulder, with a waist so tiny he could circle it with his hands. When he lifted her veil and saw thick dark hair, light olive complexion and velvety chocolate almond-shaped eyes, he knew he was lost. This may only be a temporary thing for her, but his inner beast was howling that she was his. His one and only, his mate. ‘Til death would they part in truth, it sang.

He smiled at her and dropped down for a second kiss to keep himself from howling in pride out loud. There was a whole church filled with people who knew full well that he was a stranger who’d never set eyes on her before five minutes ago so he kept the kiss chaste and quick, though he did allow himself to breathe deeply of her enticing fragrance. He lifted his head back up and noticed how tense she seemed to be.

Aw, no. He couldn’t let his precious new mate be uncomfortable around him! So he grinned, stepped back and theatrically bowed over her hand, which he was still holding on to for dear life.

“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Hancock. My name is Jock and I will be your husband for the duration of this marriage. If there is anything I can do for you, do not hesitate to let me know.” The sound of bawdy laughter filled the small church, but he didn’t care. He saw her sweet, bow-shaped lips quiver with repressed mirth. That was all that mattered to him, that Amanda was put at ease by his tomfoolery.

“Pleased to meet you, Jock,” she murmured shyly. He nodded his head back toward the crowded pews and winked.

“Shall we?” he asked. She nodded and blushed. Jock gave her his most encouraging good ol’ boy grin and turned, tucking her hand into the crook of his arm. He was pleased to see that his new mate was as susceptible to good ol’ boy charm as most women. He spent most of his time working the back country on the Pack’s ranch so that was about the only kind of charm he could claim to have. That and wolfish charm, but that usually only worked on female wolves. As good as she smelled, he could tell that Amanda was plain vanilla human. That was just fine by him.

He was startled into laughing when he saw what was waiting for them outside the church. He looked over at Amanda to find her chuckling, as well. Honestly, it was the only response most people would have come up with at the sight of a turkey-drawn sleigh. Or rather, a horse drawn sleigh with the horses decked out like turkeys.

“Sorry about that,” she said. “It was supposed to have been a joke for Pablo, the guy I was actually supposed to have married.”

“No problem,” Jock said gamely. “You drivin’ or am I?”

“You... know how to drive a sleigh?” she asked uncertainly. Jock laughed again.

“You could say that,” he replied. “I was born and raised on cattle ranches. The teams I usually drive pull hay wagons but I’m sure I can manage a little two-horse sleigh just fine.” He handed her up just as a pack of younger people spilled out of the church at a dead run. Jock noticed that Amelia was in the group and that each person was holding a red velvet bag and grinning maliciously. He met Amelia’s eye and shook his head. “Catch us if you can!” he hollered back at them and jumped into the driver’s seat as the cat-calling group began pelting them with handfuls of bird seed.

“Shouldn’t you be going faster than this to outrun them?” Amanda asked, laughing and shaking seed chaff out of her eyes.

“Where’s the fun in that?” he asked. “Besides, the horses were cooling their heels for a good long while. I don’t want to push them too hard.”

“Good point,” she replied.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

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