“Tell that to the White House circa 1812,” I told him.
“Oh? Why?”
“Because that’s the year the peace-loving Canadians burned it to the ground.”
Dominick grabbed an empty bottle and jumped onto his chair. The room got silent in an instant as everyone paused to look at him. “Cheers to 1812.” He lifted his empty bottle.
The whole room whooped and raised their full glasses, howling in unison.
I could barely hear over the sound of my own laughter.
After Morgan and Jackson were shown the way to the two-bedroom cabin they’d be sharing, the next stop on the Magnolia Plantation Tour was another dark path into the great unknown. Only this time I had a smashed werewolf king who was leaning on me as though a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle were easy for me to carry, and I no longer had Jackson’s help supporting Lucas’s weight. He was trying to sing me a song, but had come up with a weird mashup of “Endless Love” and “I Wanna Sex You Up”. It was endearing in the way really drunk romanticisms were, but I was too distracted by how heavy he was to appreciate it.
Magnolia interrupted his serenade with a “Here we are.” She and Dominick were doing an admirable job of ignoring the spectacle of a piss-drunk Lucas trying to be a smooth Casanova.
I wanted to defend him and explain that when he wasn’t eighty-percent whiskey, he was incredibly charming. But they didn’t care. He was royalty. He could shit in someone’s hand and they’d say thank you.
We had come to a stop in front of a single-level house built in the same style as The Den. It had been painted an antiqued turquoise color, giving it a fresh, beachy look, and had a porch swing hanging next to the door. I dumped my fiancé onto the swing, where he continued to sing loud and off key.
“I can give him the tour later,” I told Magnolia.
She nodded and opened the front door, letting me into a small but tidy cabin. Immediately inside the door was a kitchenette with a stovetop burner and a tiny bar fridge. To my left was a worn-looking couch sitting in front of a limestone fireplace. Throw rugs were scattered haphazardly across the hardwood floor.
&
nbsp; “The wood can feel real cold in the morning,” Magnolia explained. “The fireplaces don’t work anymore. We had to seal them up when critters started coming in and ruining all the unused cabins.”
“It’s okay, I know all about the joys of ornamental fireplaces.”
Along the back wall were two doors. She pointed to the one on the left. “The bathroom.” Clearly it was not a stop on our tour because she steered us in the direction of the right-hand door. “And this is your bedroom.”
Inside, the walls had been painted white, and the exposed beams ran the length of the ceiling and into the main room, showing me that the bedroom wall didn’t go all the way to the top, as if the room divisions had been added later. If these had once been slave quarters, that made sense. Why divide a room for comfort when you could cram people in on top of each other like cattle?
A king-sized bed with a soft white duvet took up most of the room. The only touch of color was a painting of waves rolling off an angry ocean, which hung over the bed. The grays and blue greens tied the stark whiteness back into the seaside color scheme the rest of the cabin had been decorated with.
“Thank you so much, Magnolia.” I saw our bags piled beside the door, my yellow weekender looking extra cheeky amongst all the white. “Thank you.”
“Anything,” she repeated her promise from earlier. “Will His Royal Highness be okay?”
I snorted. “He’ll have a royal headache in the morning, but yes, he’ll be fine.”
“Very good.” She nodded and turned to go. “We’ll see you at breakfast.”
“Oh.” Shit, how was this going to work with so many strangers around? “I don’t know what Lucas or Callum told you, Mags, but I have a…condition.”
She looked puzzled. Well, hell, I’m sure I could come up with something that would be believable to an eighteen-year-old wolf.
“I was born a wolf.” Lucas had told me this was rare to the point of being considered impossible. Only babies who underwent severe trauma in the womb could activate their lycanthropy early. Typically they didn’t and died instead. I was an exception, but I couldn’t explain to them the reasons for it. “I… Because of that I’m more connected to the moon. I’m fully nocturnal.”
“Wow.” Her eyes were wide with wonder, absorbing my words.
Dominick held back near the door, listening to the web of half-truths I was weaving. I hoped he was committing them to memory because Lucas was going to have to maintain the lie for everyone when I didn’t show up to any daylight events.
“I mustn’t be disturbed during the day, do you understand?”
She nodded vigorously. “Of course.”
When she walked out of the cabin, I could hear her muttering, “A born wolf…” like I’d told her I was a unicorn.