The Alpha Claims A Mate (2 page)

Marigold deserved better than that.  Sure, she came off as flighty and frivolous, but she was a fiercely loyal friend and deep down, her whole flirty femme fatale act was just a cover up for her insecurity.

Ginger half-watched him making his way through the crowd, while pretending not to look. He moved with a slow, rolling sensuality and perfect self-confidence, and people parted before him like waves in the wake of a mighty ocean liner.   Women stared at him adoringly. Men watched with admiration and envy.   As he reached their table, his gaze swept the women from head to toe,  and a sensual, self-assured smile curled his lips. His eyes gleamed, and he glanced at Marigold, before his gaze slowly drifted to Ginger.

Unfortunately, his proximity had a strange physical effect on Ginger, one she’d never experienced before, even in the company of the best-looking of men. It was like someone had flipped on a switch to all the erogenous zones in her body and sent lightning bolts sizzling down her neural pathways.  Also, her no-no parts tingled and went damp.

She squeezed her thighs together hard and tried to look away, but his golden-brown eyes were strangely hypnotic and she sat there staring at him helplessly, her heart pounding against her ribcage.

“Dance with me,” he commanded, holding his hand out to her to help her from her seat.

What?

Dance with me?
He’d actually just ordered her to dance with him? He’d come over to the corner of the room to graciously grant the chubby girl a pity dance, and he couldn’t even ask, he just commanded? Of course he did, because what were the odds that a wall-flower like Ginger would ever say no?

Pretty damned good, as it turned out.

“Excuse me? No!” she spluttered.

Marigold choked on a French fry.  Winifred turned to stare at her with avid interest.  The waitress dropped her tray and half a dozen drinks crashed to the floor, but she made no move to pick them up, standing and staring at Ginger in astonishment.

Ginger suddenly realized that the music had paused and the entire bar was staring at her. It was like a scene out of a movie. And she had always loathed the spotlight.

The sheriff’s jaw was hanging open and his eyes were wide with surprise.

“I’m sorry…what did you say?” he asked.

“Are you heard of hearing?  I said…No!” she said indignantly. “No, I will not dance with you.” 

She quickly climbed to her feet, fished in her purse, and threw a twenty dollar bill on the table to cover  their tab.

She pushed her way through the crowd, cheeks heating with embarrassment as
Marigold and Winifred followed in her wake. Her original plan before she’d come to the bar was to drink enough beer that maybe, just maybe, she’d loosen up and flirt with a few guys, but that was going to be hard to do now that everybody in the bar was staring at her like she’d just grown a third boob.

Walking to the little table in the back of the bar had taken about a minute when they’d arrived earlier. Walking back out, now…that was an entirely different story.  Decades passed and new presidents were elected as Ginger made her way through the crowd, who were mostly frozen in poses of complete astonishment.

Outside, bathed in the blinking neon red light of the Hoot Owl Hoedown sign, Winifred glanced at the bar behind them with interest. “That was fascinating. I feel that you may have unintentionally violated some type of implicit and yet unstated cultural mores in your rejection of the Alpha male’s advances.”

“You know, you keep talking like that, you’re never going to get laid,” Marigold said from behind them.

“I fail to see the connection between my speech patterns and the future possibility of my indulging in coitus,” Winifred said. “Then again, I frequently have a difficult time comprehending and correctly processing the thought processes of the non-academic crowd.”

“I think she just called you stupid, but I’m not actually smart enough to be sure,” Ginger said. “Did I ruin things for you and the bartender?”

“I don’t think it was meant to be,” Marigold shrugged.  “I looked into our future. It doesn’t end well.”

The night air was warm and humid, and a fat yellow moon hung overhead.  Ginger could swear the man in the moon was glowering down at her with disapproval. 

They walked across the parking lot towards the pickup truck which Marigold had borrowed from her great-aunt for their visit.

“You know, I think Winifred was right,” Marigold added as they climbed into the truck.  Did you see how the crowd stared at you when you said no? I mean, I’m only human, but I’m just wondering…is it a good idea to publicly insult the Alpha like that?”

“Publicly insult…oh, please, he publicly insulted me! Did you hear how patronizing he was when he asked me to dance?”

“Still.
He’s the Alpha, you’re not.”

“
Hmmph. He needed to be taken down a peg or two,” Ginger grumbled.  “Besides, I’m sure it will all have blown over by tomorrow morning.”

“Why is everyone staring at me?” Ginger said self-consciously, running her hands through her rumpled hair. “Do I have major bedhead?” She hadn’t slept well at all; she’d tossed and turned all night, dreaming fitfully of the sheriff, imagining him running his hands over her body, his hot tongue tr
acing the curve of her neck...

Funny, in all the time she’d been with
Ashmont, she’d never had a single sex dream about him.

Then she’d dragged herself out of bed at 6:00 a.m. because Marigold’s great-aunt Imogen needed someone to help her gather eggs from the henhouse for breakfast and her handyman had recently quit.

Then she’d gone back upstairs to catch a quick nap while Imogen and Marigold made breakfast. She was not, by nature, a morning person.

When she went downstairs to join everyone for breakfast in the dining room, they all turned to stare at her as if
she’d accidentally turned and was walking in on all fours.

“Is it true that you actually shot the sheriff down when he asked you to dance?” Miss Lamont, one of a pair of elderly twin spinsters who’d lived at the boarding house for forty years, asked Ginger. “In public? In front of everybody?”

“Yeah, I can’t believe you did that,” added Brenda, one of the archeology students, who all sat together
with the professor at the end of the long dining room table. There were half a dozen of them, all girls.  “I’d totally have danced with him.”

“You’d
dance
with anybody,” Tallulah, one of the other archeology students said snidely, earning a dirty look from Brenda. There was some odd kind of rivalry between the two of them; Ginger suspected it had to do with the handsome archeology professor Emerson Reese, who was leading the dig.  He had wavy brown hair and wore glasses, and had kind of an Indiana Jones vibe going for him.  He sat reading the morning paper, apparently oblivious to all the commotion around him.

“Everyone knows about it?” Ginger asked, sitting down at the table next to Tallulah, who scooted her chair over to make room.
Tallulah was pretty in a washed-out, nerdy way, her hair scraped back into a French braid that she wound around the top of her head, her eyes made owlish by huge glasses with thick lenses. Brenda was her complete opposite, with stylish streaks in her flat-ironed hair, clothing by Hollister and a full face of makeup even at the breakfast table.

“Of course they do. It’s the talk of the town,” Imogen said cheerfully, setting down a steaming stack of pancakes at the table.
She wore a floral a-line dress and her hair was styled in a white bouffant, courtesy of twice-weekly visits to the Kurl Up And Dye beauty salon.

“Eat up, dear! You’ll need your strength to deal with this fiasco.” Her eyes were sparkling with excitement.

“Who could have seen that coming? Oh, me. That’s who,” Marigold muttered into her eggs. Then she flashed a bright smile. “Who said that?”

Ginger felt a ripple of unease run over her.  She used her fork to spear a couple of pancakes, plopped them on to her plate, and poured a generous helping of syrup on them.

“How did word get around so fast?” she asked, shoveling a forkful of pancake into her mouth. 

“Social experiments have determined that in smaller communities, this type of salacious news travels in a manner similar to a contagious virus,” Winifred observed.
“Only faster.”

“Also it was in the gossip column of the Tattler this morning.” Brenda waved a copy of the town’s newspaper in the air cheerfully.

“What!” Ginger choked on her pancake. Damned small town busybodies!

She poured herself some coffee and hastily took a swig to wash down the pancake. “Uh…I’m sure this will blow right over, right?” she said, looking around the table anxiously.

“Sure thing,” Reese said absent-mindedly, still reading his morning paper.

“Really?”
Ginger asked hopefully.

He glanced up at her and shook his head.
“Nope.  Sorry, my dear. He’s an Alpha. You’re an out of town werewolf from another pack. You made him look like a fool in front of about a hundred people, many of them from his own pack.  He’ll never live it down.”

Brenda nodded eagerly in agreement. He could have read the horoscope aloud and she would have nodded in agreement. Tallulah shot her a lot of contempt, and speared a sausage with a vicious stab of her fork, staring
at Brenda coldly as she ate it with sharp little bites.

Reese
turned to Brenda and smiled benevolently. “Would you be a dear and get me some more coffee?” he asked, holding up a half full cup.

Brenda and Tallulah both jumped to their feet.  “He asked me,” Brenda hissed, grabbing the cup and rushing off to the kitchen.

Ginger swallowed hard. Damn it.  She’d made the news?  So much for a relaxing, get-away-from-it-all vacation.

“How’s the dig going?” she asked the professor, desperate to change the subject.

“Oh, can’t complain, can’t complain.  We’ve made some excellent finds,  and incited the ire of small-minded locals. The usual.”

She hunched over her plate and attacked her pancakes, but before she could swallow another bite, her cell phone rang.

Puzzled, she fished in her pocket and pulled it out. Who would call her at this hour?  Only her mother – but she had a special ring tone for her mother.   It was the wedding march, which was a private joke between her and Marigold, because Ginger’s mother had been trying to marry her off since at least kindergarten.  Probably since birth.  Ginger could picture her mother wheeling her around in her stroller, cooing at the mothers of other babies, “Ginger’s single, you know.”

The phone number was unfamiliar, but it had a New York area code.

Quickly, she stood up, pushed “talk”, and moved away from the table. Could something have happened to her parents? It wasn’t anyone from the school, it wasn’t any of her friends, it wasn’t Ashmont Cheating-Pig-lowlife-scum Warburton…

“Hello?” she said anxiously, as she opened the dining-room’s side door an
d stepped outside into the  yard. Marigold followed her out the door.

“What the hell do you think you’re up to?” the furious voice of the Alpha of her pack crackled over the phone.

“Uhhh…good morning, Mr. Cruz,” she said nervously. “Whatever are you talking about?”

But she had a sinking feeling she knew.

“Publicly insulting the Alpha of the pack? Is that what you think is a good representation of the Red Wolves of the Upper East side?” he snarled. 

“You mean when I turned him down to dance?
Seriously?”

“Yes,
seriously
. The news travelled down here immediately and everyone is up in arms about it! You practically neutered their Alpha!  This is not a small matter, Ginger.”

Ginger’s heart sank to the bottom of her stomach. Her father worked as an accountant for Mr. Cruz’s public relations firm.  Anything that she did had implications for her family, as well as for her entire pack. She just couldn’t
believe that saying “No” to some stuck up, admittedly sexy as hell jerk, would have affected her pack up North. If she’d known, she’d have danced with the jerk and then hightailed it on home.

“I’m sorry,” she said,
appalled. “Is it really that bad?”

“Is it really that bad?” Reynaldo Cruz echoed in horror. “Let me put it to you this way. Do you want to see me, as Alpha, challenged by the Alpha of Blue Moon Junction because one of my
pack insulted him?”

“What?” Ginger gasped, stunned.
That would be a disaster. No, actually it would be a bloody massacre. The red wolves were the smallest of the wolf species.  Sheriff Armstrong was twice Reynaldo Cruz’s size, and Cruz was a fuss-budgety, designer-suit wearing little city wolf. A Chihuahua shifter could probably kick his ass without much difficulty. In New York, the prestigious Alpha position tended to be held by those who excelled in business and social climbing. That clearly wasn’t the case here in the more rural areas of the country.

“I’ll apologize to him, for God’s sake!” she spluttered. “This is being blown way out of proportion!”

Marigold was eavesdropping avidly, arms folded, with an “I told you so” look on her face.

Ginger glanced at the boarding house.  The dining room windows were open and everyone was leaning out, craning to hear. 

“You’ll do more than that,”  Mr. Cruz said icily.  “When I asked him what we could possibly do to make up for your terribly inappropriate behavior, he said that he needs a new assistant because his assistant is out on maternity leave.  I mentioned your particular talents to him, as well.  You will be working for him for the next two weeks, and you will be VERY deferential. Do you understand? I do not want to hear any more complaints about you, or the implications for you and your family will be…unfortunate.”

“What?” Ginger protested. “But I’m supposed to go back to the city next week!  I can’t stay here – they don’t even have dryers! We have to hang our clothes out back on a clothes line!  I ruined my best shoes stepping in a cow patty!”

“Consider yourself lucky there was such an easy solution,” Mr. Cruz said, ignoring her protests.

“I’m supposed to be teaching summer school in two weeks!”

“That’s been cancelled.  And the renewal of your teaching contract will depend on your ability to repair relations between our two packs.”

“Cancelled?” Ginger wailed. This couldn’t be happening to her.  She’d been counting on that money from the summer school job to pay off her credit card debt.

“The sheriff will come by shortly to pick you up at the boarding house, so I suggest you get ready and make yourself presentable. Good day.”

Ginger stared in horror at the phone, listening to the dial tone.

“Wow. I will have to admit, I did not see
that
coming,” Marigold’s eyes were wide. “I thought we’d be ridden out of town on a rail, or tarred and feathered. But not that.”

“How do you ride someone out of town on a rail, anyway? It might be a better alternative. I mean, if I got to choose,” Ginger said, mind reeling.

“I always assumed that it’s like taking Amtrak. Probably a one way ticket.”

Then, simultaneously, the wedding march ring tone sounded and the sheriff’s patrol car appeared, steering round the bend, heading right towards the boarding house.

Sheriff Sexy-butt sure hadn’t wasted any time in coming to rub her nose in it.

She heard the door to the dining room open, and the boarders trooped out onto the lawn, some of them still holding their coffee cups.
This had to be the best entertainment in town, next to the drive in movie theater.

She quickly put her cell phone on silent. Her mother would, of course, have heard about Ginger’s bad behavior and was now calling her up to have a lon
g-distance conniption fit.   Ginger didn’t have time for a conversation with her no-doubt-hysterical mother at the moment; she was too busy panicking.

It suddenly occurred to her that s
he was still wearing her pajamas and slippers. Should she run inside and change?

Too late.
He was already out of the car.