“Yes, of course,” Holly said and stepped into her mother-in-law’s house, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her gut.
“What is the goddamn hell are you doing?” Cassidy asked once the door swung closed behind them.
Holly blinked. Cassidy looked like she might burst into flames in any second. “Is this…about your beer?” she tried. “I only left it for a second—”
“What? No!” Cassidy snapped, her voice hushed but her tone pointed. “What where you doing bringing Jacob his drink like that?”
Now Holly was truly lost. Her heartbeat fluttered as her head swam to figure out what she’d done wrong. “I’m sorry?”
“Look,” Cassidy growled, “we don’t keep honeypots around because we like the view. It’s about hierarchy. You get that? I know you’re a human, but…you’ve got kings, right? Queens, nobles…yada yada. Jacob here is king of our clan, which makes you queen by default. Don’t get too excited about that, because what I saw out there was a queen jumping around in a jester suit. You think it’s flattering on you, doing the work of honeypots?”
Holly was speechless. “I didn’t mean to…offend anyone…”
“Well, you did. When you go out there and mess up the order of things, you make yourself look like an idiot. And when you look like an idiot, Jacob looks like an idiot for making you his mate. We’re the strongest bear clan this side of California. You think we got here looking like idiots?”
Holly was fighting a losing battle with her tear ducts. “No,” she said shakily, “I understand all of that, I just…Miranda said—”
“Miranda?” Cassidy spat the name like it was poison. “Don’t listen to a thing she says. Honeypots are one thing, but Miranda is a…a…” Cassidy waved her arms as thought she could catch the word out of thin air. “A honeybee.”
“Is that a thing?” Holly asked cautiously.
“No!” Cassidy pinched the bridge of her nose, exasperated. “Just…find a corner and stay there so you don’t embarrass this clan any further. Please.”
Holly’s throat felt tight, like she’d been hung from a hangman’s noose. She nodded and barely mumbled out the, “Yes, of course,” before she was out the door.
Chapter 23
By time Alice answered the phone, Holly’s voice was already shaking with bridled tears. “What if I’ve made a mistake?” Holly whispered once her old friend had quieted her down a peg.
“I thought things were going well with tall, dark, and cowboy?” Alice’s voice echoed sympathetically over the line.
“They are,” Holly said as she bowed her head. Even in the passenger side of Jacob’s dark truck, alone, she kept her voice down just in case the clan could hear her with their shifter ears. “They’re going really…really well. He’s great. It’s just…everything else.”
“Families are always hard to deal with,” Alice said. “Especially when they’re not your own. Does he have some, like…crazy tiger mom or something?”
“More like bear mom,” Holly muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing…it’s just…” Holly sighed and rubbed her hand over her face. She hated that she couldn’t just come out and tell Alice, Hey, so my new husband is a bear and wants to put a permanent bite mark in my neck. Plus they have a harem of sluts called honeypots and, get this, I got honey-trapped by the ringleader. “There are a lot of rules in their family,” she explained. “A lot of rituals and…ways of being that I’m just not familiar with. And I don’t know if I ever will be.”
“So you just have to assimilate. Fast. C’mon, you’re a quick learner. You’ll pick it up in no time. Have a cram session or something. Make index cards. I’ll help.”
Holly laughed through wet eyes. “God, I wish you were here, Alice,” she said. “I would definitely take you up on that.”
“It’s because I’m a genius trapped in a middle-aged mother’s body. Hey, remember that book where that girl was trying to assimilate so she had sex with her husband in front of all his friends and everything? It was a classic or something?”
Holly chuckled. “Game of Thrones isn’t technically classic literature, Alice. But I see your point.”
“So you should do something like that. Or group orgy. That’ll get you all real close, right? Just go crazy. What do you have to lose? Remember, they’re the ones getting the prize here. They should be working to impress you, not the other way around.”