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Zeb rolled his eyes. “No. It’s a werewolf thing. The average wolf pregnancy is only about sixty days. Werewolves sort of split the difference with five months.”
“Wow. So, you have very little time to get ready for this baby—babies? How many kids is Jolene going to have? Is it going to be like a litter?”
Zeb looked horror-struck.
“Seriously, you hadn’t thought of that before?” I asked him as little beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. “There are four sets of twins just among Jolene’s first cousins.”
“I’m still processing everything!” Zeb shouted.
“Maybe I should drive,” I suggested.
“No, let’s talk about why you think Gabriel would suddenly start cheating on you. That will keep me awake.”
“Let’s not,” I told him. “I don’t want to rehash the whole thing. I just want to pretend it didn’t happen.”
“Because denial usually works so well for you.”
“I’m going to deny that I just heard that. Should we stop by the shop? I’d like to see the damages, know what I’m getting into,” I said.
“Your internal clock must be off, world traveler. The sun’s going to rise soon.” He nodded to the lightening blue-gray sky on the horizon. “We’ll have just enough time to get you home.”
As the sky turned toward lilac, I snuggled under a blanket and dozed the last hour or so before we reached the family manse, River Oaks. More English country cottage than sprawling Georgian plantation, River Oaks is at its heart just an old family farm home that happened to be built before the Civil War. Despite my having spent the last few weeks in buildings that were much older and far more elegant, my house had never seemed so beautiful.
I kissed Zeb’s cheeks, mumbled a good night, and dashed for the door with the blanket over my head. In my room, on sheets that were weeks old and slightly musty, I lay down and, for reasons I hadn’t quite processed yet, cried.
2
Successful relationships are about compromise. If you agree not to bring up his undead ex-girlfriends during arguments, he should agree not to seek out your old human boyfriends and kill them.
—Love Bites: A Female Vampire’s Guide to Less
Destructive Relationships
The problem with sleeping during the day is that people tend to overestimate the joys of early-morning visits.
It started about an hour after I finally fell asleep, when Aunt Jettie sauntered into the house and discovered my carry-on by the door.
“Baby doll, you’re back!” she cried, materializing at my bedside.
“Gah!” I screamed, leaping off the bed and clinging to the ceiling. “Knocking! Aunt Jettie! We have a rule about knocking!”
My ghostly favorite aunt/roommate placed her transparent hands on her hips. “Oh, get down from the ceiling and let me look at you. I haven’t seen you in weeks. Don’t make me float up there, it makes me dizzy.”
Jettie Belle Early, sister to my grandma Ruthie, took me under her wing when I was around age six and when Ruthie and I both figured out that we were basically incompatible. (Grandma Ruthie wanted to give me a home perm and enter me in the Little Miss Half-Moon Hollow Pageant. I hid in her attic all day to avoid the perm, pretending that I was Anne Frank.) I spent entire summers with Jettie at River Oaks, which she inherited after spending her formative years caring for her elderly father. This was a great shock to Grandma Ruthie, who had already made plans to overhaul the house in time for the local historical society’s annual tour of historic homes.
Aunt Jettie was a linchpin in every major moment in my life. It was Aunt Jettie who helped me fill out financial-aid paperwork for college. It was Aunt Jettie who persuaded me to stay in school and get my master’s in library science so the local public library would have no choice but to hire me. It was Aunt Jettie who helped me through that first night as a vampire. It was Aunt Jettie whose upside-down face was now smiling up at me expectantly.
“I missed you, too, Aunt Jettie,” I grunted as I disengaged my fingernails from the plaster and hopped down to the bed. “Is Mr. Wainwright here?”
She smiled as she thought of her beau, who also happened to be my recently deceased boss. “No, he’s really beating himself up over this break-in, so he’s standing guard at the shop. I told Zeb not to bother you with it, but he insisted you’d want to. Why are your eyes all puffy?”
“Oh, it’s just the French,” I said, wiping at the oh-so-attractive bloody tear tracks drying on my cheeks. “They were so damn rude.”
“I thought you were in Brussels,” Jettie said as I climbed back into bed. Outside my bedroom window, creeping fingers of sunlight were flirting with the edges of my blackout curtains. My internal clock told me it was almost six A.M., and I was so tired I could actually feel the drag on my limbs. Aunt Jettie pulled the covers up to my chin as she asked, “Where’s Gabriel?”
“Still in Brussels,” I said. “He had some things to take care of.”
Jettie studied my face in that unnerving X-ray method of hers. Fortunately, any penetrating wisdom on her part was cut short by my mother’s sudden appearance at my bedroom door.
