Werewolf fairytales

No complains

*Paisley*

As Theo’s horse paces toward me, I don’t even smile. My heart is too full for that: full of song and laughter and the love that will sustain me to the end of my life.

And Theo doesn’t smile either. He is as grave as a king as he brings his mount to a trot, leans down at just the right moment, sweeps out an arm, pulling me onto his saddle… and then gallops straight down the street and out of Little Ha’penny.

When we reach the edge of the town, alone now, since the royal party has stayed in Little Ha’penny, the better to dazzle the villagers, Theo jumps from the horse again and reaches up.

I fall into his arms with a sob of pure joy.

Theo drops to his knees there, in the dust of the road. “Miss Paisley, would you do me the very great honor of becoming my mate and wife?”

“Theo, oh, Theo,” I say, reaching out a shaking hand to bring him back to his feet.

But he waits. Had there been an observer standing in the ditch, that observer might have found his face impassive, unreadable. But to me, his eyes speak of deep love, a fierce passion, and just the tiniest amount of uncertainty.

I fall to my knees and wind my arms around his neck. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come!”

His arms are warm and strong about me. He kisses my ear and whispers something, but I am sobbing too hard to comprehend. At last he tenderly picks me up and carries me into a field of buttercups, well away from the road. There he sits me down and begins kissing every part of my face he can reach until I simply have to stop crying.

When he reaches my mouth, he kisses me until my breath is quick, not with sobs but with a quite different emotion.

Finally, he pulls back and says, “May I ask you again?”

“Of course I will marry you,” I say, turning to catch his mouth again. “Yes, yes, yes!”

“My real name,” he says, sometime later, “is Jonas. Jonas Theodon.”

“My mate and husband,” I say with great delight, “is a man named Jonas Theodon.”

He shakes his head.

“No?”

“He’s a future doctor named Jonas Theodon. And he owns an estate called Yarrow House, which was the gift of his brother.”

I swallow. “Oh, Theo.”

“Jonas,” he says. “Theo was a majordomo at a castle once upon a time. Jonas is a gentleman of unknown birth but obvious gentility, who lives in England with his entirely English and altogether beautiful mate. He is apparently connected to a royal pack, but because they are from a strange and small country, no one pays much attention to that.”

Tears are again sliding down my face, not from fear but from the deepest happiness.

“I love you,” he whispers. “I love you so much, Paisley, my future wife. The imprint of you is on my heart and will be there the day I die.”

“You sound like a doctor, diagramming your body,” I whisper back.

“I think you will not complain when I diagram your body,” he says, soft and low. The flame rises between us instantly, and when Jonas rolls his future wife over, sinking into a patch of buttercups so we can’t be seen from the road, indeed there are no complaints.