“Lucas.” Her soft, husky voice turned his name into a delicate purr.

Even I wanted to sleep with her. How could I hope to compare or compete with someone who looked like sex squeezed into human form? Lucas nodded to her and placed his arm possessively around my waist, pulling me in closer. The redhead had cunning green eyes with smoky purple makeup that made them smolder, and now they were focused on me.

“Genevieve,” Lucas said, “this is Secret McQueen.”

I wish I had a photo of the way her perfectly groomed brows shot up. I’d been right in expecting my name would carry weight. It was nice that it had a different meaning here than it did in a vampire bar.

Genevieve eyed me incredulously, then a smile twitched across her red lips.

“Has the wolf king found himself a queen?” The casual, almost teasing manner in which she addressed Lucas was a definite sign she was not a wolf, and therefore not under the thumb of his leadership.

I did not smile back. She made me uneasy in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, especially when she was looking me up and down like a new menu item. Maybe I didn’t need to worry about her taking Lucas after all. I didn’t like how she said queen either. There was nothing special about her tone, but the word alone gave me a chill. The only queenly title I ever wanted was the one already attached to my last name.

The attention of every wolf in the room was glued on us, awaiting Lucas’s answer to her question.

“Secret and I are soul-bonded,” he announced. The official way in which he said it made it seem like it should be followed by you may now kiss the bride. A murmur spread through the room. “She is a McQueen and has a rightful place as a pack leader. However, as we have only just begun to date, calling her the new queen is a little premature.” He chuckled, and the wolves politely laughed with him.

This was bizarre to say the least.

“I do expect all of you under my rule to treat her with the respect of a princess being courted by your king.” There was no laughter in his tone, though being called a princess out loud certainly made me want to laugh. He was dead serious, and I knew every wolf in the room would respect his wishes.

He looked back to an expectant Genevieve. “The private room, please.”

“Of course.” She led us through the crowded room with such ease she did not so much as brush against anyone else.

I was willing to bet Genevieve always landed on her feet too.

Chapter Seventeen

For dinner we were served plate-sized, blue-rare Kobe beef steaks. They must have each cost more than what a family of five would spend on an average dinner, and they were bloody delicious. Literally. I sat with my eyes closed and sucked the juice from each thick bite of meat. It might not have been as satisfying as fresh, warm blood but my werewolf half was pleased with the offering.

I lingered in the soft red haze that followed a delicious meal, but deep in the pit of my gut my stomach growled for something more. For the time being I would have to ignore that urge and settle for an AB positive nightcap when I got home.

“That was the best steak I have ever eaten.” I paused between each word for emphasis.

Lucas put down his napkin and chuckled. “That barely qualified as a steak. That was still a cow.”

“Then it was the best cow I ever had.”

Desmond, who sat at a table near the door with Dominick, smiled with none of his usual stiffness. The smile was so honest it surprised me, but it dimmed the moment he saw I was looking at him.

I couldn’t understand why he hated me so much. Was my simplicity beneath what he expected from a princess or a queen? I didn’t think the same constraints of propriety applied to werewolf royalty as they did to human royalty. Especially if one considered that the Queen Mum was unlikely to strip off all her clothing on a full moon and run wild with her grandsons. I’d known I was a princess less than twenty-four hours, and no one had really explained to me what the expectations were.

Growing up, the only thing my grandmere had demanded of me was survival. I’d been born in Southern Louisiana, which is about as south as you can get in the States without a peninsula. She had told Elmore only what she’d needed to about me in order to secure my protection from the pack. I don’t know how much he knew, but it was enough that he respected our privacy and made others do the same. When he died, Grandmere knew she could no longer trust our safety so close to the pack. She left her three children, including her teenage son, and we fled the state. In later years, when she explained to me why we had been forced to move, she’d never told me anything about the finer points of how packs were run.

Knowing now that Elmore had been a king and had passed his crown to his barely legal son rather than his eldest daughter—Mercy, my mother—or his middle child, my aunt Savannah, I could see where the unrest would begin.

Grandmere had taken me first to South Carolina, where we remained until I was four, before deciding this was still too close for comfort. Then we left the United States altogether, to a place she felt would be outside pack law. I spent twelve years of my life in the southern part of the Canadian prairies, living on a fifteen-acre parcel in a large, old farmhouse.

One benefit of this upbringing was that unlike the boggy American South, the soil of the Canadian prairie allowed for houses to have real basements. It meant I had a room in which I could escape from the blistering sunlight every day. The land we owned provided me a place to run freely at night, burning off the pent-up energy someone of my unique genetic mix built up.

Raising me had been difficult for my grandmere. She was, however, uniquely capable of doing it. Being the mother of three children who had become wolves, and a powerful witch of some renown, she had knowledge others lacked. A human grandmother, feeding me formula or putting my crib in a light, airy room, would have made mistakes severe enough to kill just by doing what one was supposed to do with a baby.

Because my mother, upon abandoning me, had the foresight to leave a note explaining what had happened to me, Grandmere was able to brace herself for certain things. She’d already been aware that having any sort of silver near me would be disastrous, but that wasn’t an unusual problem for her since she’d had three werewolves come of age in her home.

It was the vampire blood that made things tricky. It meant I could not be exposed to sunlight and also that I lapsed into daytime sleeps that resembled death, complete with lack of breathing or pulse. Then there was the added difficulty of my lycanthropy being activated in infancy. In my youth and adulthood I had intuitively learned how to suppress the need to change forms. I buried the ability so deep within myself I didn’t know if it was possible anymore for me to shift. It was thanks to the calming effects of my vampire blood this suppression was feasible. As long as I was well fed I never felt the need to go furry.

As a baby that sort of control had been impossible.

My grandmere had a very memorable baby photo of me on the mantle of her fireplace. In a crib amid the shredded remains of a sun-yellow jumper and cloth diaper sits a puckish-looking wolf pup, tongue lolling happily, feet much too large for the body. It was only because of this photo I knew I had the ability to change at all. I did not remember the event happening and had no memory of how agonizing the pain must have been for me as a baby.

My grandmere said it only happened monthly from my first birthday up until my second. Before I turned one, the wolf inside was too small to force itself out. After that year the vampire in me learned how to put the wolf on a leash.

She knew, too, I needed blood to survive. Not many babies are given pig or goat’s blood in a bottle. Needless to say my upbringing had been unique. None of it, though, had trained me on how to be a princess.

I had, until now, existed on the razor-thin edge of two worlds, part of both and accepted by neither. I didn’t know how to switch from feeling unwanted to being considered among the ruling class.

“I’d say penny for your thoughts, but I think I’d have to offer you more than a million to get everything that just went through your head.” Lucas was leaning across the table with a tentative smile on his lips, waiting for me to come back down to earth.

“Sorry.” I was embarrassed to have been caught so lost in thought.

“Where’d you just go?”

“I was thinking about my grandmere.” I waited for the confusion that accompanied my French nickname for her, which was something she had insisted upon from her Louisiana upbringing and also something to set her apart from my grandfather’s Irish heritage.

“Is she…?” he hesitated.

“Oh! No. She’s alive and well in Southern Manitoba, probably bitching to herself about the late melt and what it will mean for her peas.” I grinned to myself, picturing her in rubber boots and rolled-up overalls, stomping around in the knee-deep snow and thinking of what type of spell she could use to speed up the melt.

Manitoban winters dragged on for longer than six months at a time, but once they were gone spring was a barely noticeable blip before summer swept in hot and humid. I missed it sometimes.

“She isn’t like us, though?”

No one is like me, I couldn’t help but think. “No, she’s not a werewolf. She’s a pretty tough witch, though.” I didn’t want to make it seem like she was a helpless old lady. Far from it. Now in her early sixties, she was more active than ever and showed no signs of slowing down.

“And she raised you alone?” He was a little surprised by it. Werewolves, from what I understood, were fans of the it takes a village approach to raising children. I’d told him yesterday my grandmere raised me, but I guess he’d assumed she had help.

“Because of, uh…” I tried to think of something that wasn’t a lie but wouldn’t tell him more than he needed to know, “…the in-utero trauma that caused my lycanthropy to activate early?” Okay, so I failed to mention that said trauma was my newborn vampire father force-feeding his tainted blood to my mother and turning me into a freakazoid hybrid. Not a lie, really, more of an omission. “My mother was young, only seventeen, and my father was…dead.” Again, not a lie, just a twist on the truth. “She didn’t know how to take care of a baby that wasn’t just a baby. She probably couldn’t have taken care of me if I had been normal. She left me with my grandmother and never looked back.” All of that was one hundred percent truth.