Page 66 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Orion tosses the second ring. Same flick. Same result.

“Sir,” the worker says weakly.

Third ring. Third bottle.

“SIR.”

By the time we leave the booth, a small crowd has gathered, the worker looks like he’s witnessed a crime he can’t report, and I’m carrying a stuffed wolf the size of a golden retriever. It’s gray. It has ridiculous golden button eyes and an expression of permanent mild concern.

“He looks like you,” I say.

“He doesn’t look like me.”

“He absolutely does. Look at his little worried face. This is you when I put a mug down without a coaster.”

“I don’t have a worried face.”

“You have seventeen worried faces. I have a catalog.” I hold the wolf up next to his head, comparing. Several bystanders laugh. Orion endures this with the long-suffering dignity of a king being publicly compared to a plush toy, which only proves my point. “I’m naming him Mr. Darcy.”

He stops walking. “You’re naming the wolf after a fictional romantic hero.”

“I’m naming the wolf after the blueprint, Orion. Proud, rich, emotionally constipated, secretly devoted. If the fur fits.”

“I’m not emotionally constipated.”

“You alphabetized my chaos shelf instead of asking me to dinner for two weeks.”

A beat. “The shelf needed alphabetizing.”

“Mr. Darcy,” I tell the wolf, “you understand me.”

The strength hammer is where he nearly breaks the town.

I only want to watch the parade of festival-going men crack their spines trying to ring the bell, because that’s quality entertainment and I refuse to apologize for it. But the guy running it, all handlebar mustache and showmanship, sizes Orion up, then slides his gaze to me and lets it linger a beat too long. “Come on, big fella,” he says, still looking at me, “win something pretty for the lady.”

Orion goes very still.

It’s fast, half a second, but I’m close enough to catch it: the flicker of gold flooding his eyes, there and gone, and a sound low in his chest that isn’t quite human, that I feel more than hear, a warning with three centuries of teeth behind it. The mustache man doesn’t consciously register it. But his showman’s grin falters, and he takes an involuntary half-step back from a display he’s stood behind all day, suddenly and inexplicably certain he’d rather be somewhere else.

Orion blinks the gold away. Rolls his shoulders like he’s putting something back in a box.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, just for me, a little rattled at himself. “He looked at you.”

“I noticed.” My heart is doing something absurd. Note to self: the unflappable king has a leash, and it is shorter than advertised. I file that away for later, in a folder I’m not going to examine in public. “Win me the sheep, caveman.”

And I watch, with genuine fascination, as three hundred years of restraint does math in real time.

Orion picks up the mallet. Considers it. Considers the machine. And then he taps it, taps it, the way you’d knock politely on a door, and the puck sails up and rings the bell, one clean, final note, a decision being made.

The mustache man’s whole face recalibrates.

“Again,” someone in the crowd says.

He does it again. One-handed. While looking at me.

“That’s the most obnoxious thing I’ve ever seen,” I tell him, taking possession of a second prize, a small plush sheep this time, which I hand to Mr. Darcy for emotional support. “Do it again.”

He does it again.