“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 and 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?”