Page 108 of My Big Fat Shifter Wedding

I couldn’t believe that it had been a year and a month since Keith had proposed to me in that fried chicken shop. The same chicken shop that had supplied the food for my bachelorette party. Not exactly the normal fare but considering that all my guests but one were shifters, I’d needed some heavy-calorie dishes available.

Plus, I liked food. That had never changed.

But what had changed was that my pack no longer had to pretend not to be pack. Keith had learned about shifters and hadn’t run screaming into the hills, nor had he held my lying against me. I still didn’t understand that, but I wasn’t going to question it.

We still had our miscommunications, our snafus, and I had a small chunk of fringe relatives who talked as much shit as they could while giving dirty looks. But there were perks to being the alpha’s daughter, and if he said my mixed-species love was okay, then it was okay.

The hardest part had been getting Miss Angela to meet with my family again. I had left that to Keith, because every time I thought about it, I got so embarrassed I swore my cheeks wanted to burn right off my face.

But she’d eventually come around after all the cousins, except Toni, showed up at her retirement home, volunteering for a litany of tasks from reading, to teaching a workout class, to moving furniture for anyone who wanted to shake up their room. They’d also apologized to her both verbally and with carefully written letters. I was ever so grateful for that, because I didn’t want her to have to be afraid for her son every time he was with me.

And as for Toni… well, he had been given a position with our warehousing business, at my suggestion, naturally. That job happened to be in our Italy location. Whomp, whomp. Maybe some time being the lone American who barely spoke Italian would give him a little bit of perspective. Travel broadened the mind and all that.

“So, how does it feel?” Serafina murmured tiredly. I had to admire her for sticking it out as long as she had. Cillian was watching the kids, including the twins, and he told her she wasn’t allowed to call and check in on them until she was ready to leave. All she had to do was turn off her brain and have fun. But when you gave a mother of two under two a chance to turn her brain off, that mostly meant her body was really trying to make her sleep.

“How does what feel?”

“Knowing you’re about to be a married woman.”

“Oh, I thought you were gonna ask what it feels like to be the first wolf in our pack in like three hundred years to ever marry a human,” Ginna drawled before making kissy faces at Rosemary, who had finished the special-diet pâté my sister had put out in her pup’s custom rhinestone food bowl. “Did you finish your meal already? Who’s a good girl? Who’s a good girl?”

I decided to answer Serafina’s version of the question. “It’s… strange,” I said, so many feelings rushing through me that I wasn’t sure if I could tell one from another. I was bubbling. I was fizzing. There were butterflies in my stomach dodging lightning strikes.

It was a lot.

I couldn’t be happier.

“It’s crazy to think that I spent thirty years of my life thinking no one could possibly ever want me, ya know? That I was going to be the spinster aunt who helped raise all your kids and who everyone went to whenever they needed help.”

“A lot has changed, hasn’t it?” Ginna mused, taking a break from heaping praise on her furry babies. “You and Keith are so romantic, it almost makes me believe in true love.”

“Love, twuuuu love,” Amanda added, flopping back onto the couch, hand in the air. “I can’t believe all dis has-had-has happened because of a woodworking thingy.”

“What are the chances, right? My happily ever after came along with a safety lecture about a lathe.”

“Hey, no one in our class got scalped, so I w-would call that a… uh… a…”

“A success?” I supplied.

“Yes! And that’s why we pay you the big bucks!”

“You don’t pay me anything.”

“That’s because you’re rich, bissssh. Pay my student loans!”

“Please, like you don’t make twice as much as I do in a year with all your fashion reviews and recommendations.”

“I am a journalist!” Amanda managed to declare with total seriousness, sitting up and giving me an affronted glare.

That lasted about three seconds before she started giggling, then choked on her own spit and coughed.

“Whoa there, Barbie, breathe for me,” Olivia-Two said, clapping my friend’s back. “You good?”

“No, I’m Amanda!” she answered before cackling and her joy was infectious, because Ginna and Olivia-Two joined in as well.

I watched them, nearly overwhelmed with happiness. I knew some people went to Vegas or Florida for wild bachelorette parties, but I’d rented an Airbnb and had a fully catered spread of all the foods my family didn’t tend to cook but I’d grown to love.

The aforementioned dishes from the chicken place, some amazing oxtail from a Puerto Rican hole-in-the-wall restaurant Keith had introduced me to, all the Americanized Chinese food six wolves could stomach, and perhaps my own weight in different kinds of kebabs. It wasn’t exhaustive, as there was no Thai, Ethiopian, Vietnamese, Indian, or Greek, but that was fine. Even with the whole evening ahead of us, there was a limit to our shifter metabolisms and stomachs.