Page 17 of The Alpha and the Baker
“What are you waiting for?” Gammy teased. “We’re all starving!”
I looked down at her very full plate of fixings and raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure you are.”
I hurried to a spot between the food tent, the drink tent, and two of our seating tents. Putting two fingers between my lips, I whistled as loudly as possible. Maybe at a human gathering, people in the field wouldn’t be able to hear me, but we were shifters, so pretty much every head jerked in my direction.
“Hey, everyone! Scrub-a-dub-dub, it’s time for the grub!”
Was it cheesy? Probably. But my mom had used the saying when I was a kid, and I wanted to carry on the tradition. While I did believe in change when it was necessary or prudent, some things were worth clinging to.
Besides, no one commented on it. Suddenly everyone was flooding the tents and organizing themselves into a mostly functional line. I didn’t blame them—I wanted to eat my fill too. Even the young ones who hadn’t gotten their wolf forms yet still had far higher caloric needs than humans, so hunger certainly hit different for us.
Before I could join the line myself, though, I had a guest to attend to.
It wasn’t exactly easy moving counter to the crowd, but I made my way back to where Felicia was. None of the elders had gotten up, but that didn’t surprise me. They likely already had someone who’d offered to bring them food and knew exactly what they liked. It was one of the benefits of growing up in such a tight-knit community. While we weren’t all related, the majority of us were, which further strengthened our bonds.
Felicia, for obvious reasons, didn’t have anyone to do that for her, so I was more than happy to fill the position.
“You ready for a plate?” I asked, offering my hand to her. When she took it, I swore I could feel her heartbeat in her palm ricocheting through my body. My wolf wasdefinitelyinterested, and he raised his head in curiosity.
“You betcha!” she said as if she wasn’t driving my instincts haywire. “Lezzzgooo!”
The two of us walked over to join the food line, and I was keenly aware of so many eyes on us. None of them felt negative, but it was still quite a lot. Not that I could blame them. After all, I was strolling around with a human in the middle of a wolf-fest. Not exactly a usual scenario. It wasn’t like they were being unsociable, because many of them greeted us and introduced themselves to Felicia while I was trying to explain the spread to her.
“So, you wanna make sure you save room on your plate for the good stuff,” I said between interruptions and handed her a plate. While she swayed ever so slightly, she was mostly steady on her feet.
“Cas, if I’m being honest, italllooks like the good stuff.”
“Good point, but trust me, the brisket, ribs, the Asian cucumber salad, the toasted ravioli, and the cheese curds are the all-stars. During our summer parties, you can add the fresh fruit to that cause they’re freshly cut from our gardens and orchards.”
“You have summer parties too?”
“Oh yeah,” I said as I scooped things onto her plate. “We do the holidays, but we also tend to do one just because. And we have a post-harvest party, of course, and then a frost party.”
Maybe it was a little overboard, but I loved having all of the events. Seeing my community come together to make delicious fare, to eat and laugh together, to play and to run… it made being an alpha all worth it.
“That’s so much,” she said, but I could tell from her tone it wasn’t in a judgmental way. No, in fact, her tone was full of wonder.
“Is it?” I countered. “How often does your family get together?”
A strange expression darkened her features for a moment. “We don’t.”
Ah.
I’d stepped right into it, hadn’t I?
“I see,” I murmured, desperately scrambling for an exit to the sidetrack I hadn’t intended for us to get on. “Biscuits and gravy?” I asked.
“What? Oh! Yeah, that looks yummy.”
I didn’t know if she was just being gracious and accepting my fumble so we could move past it, or if she was just that tipsy, but I wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. “Oh, I assure you, they areveryyummy. Especially if you have them with any of the smoked meat.” She giggled slightly, and I sent her a curious look. “What?”
“Just remembering something you said earlier. You really do love smoked meats.”
“We all do,” I said with a laugh. “I think it’s a requirement of being in the McCallister pa—family.”
“I wonder what kind of familial gene leads to that.”
I knew the answer to that, but I couldn’t exactly tell an inebriated human woman that we were all shifters and craved vast amounts of protein, particularly meat. We could derive a lot from cheese, eggs, even tofu and other meat substitutes, which helped quite a bit in the modern age, but when it came down to it, we shifters were omnivores in our human form but largely carnivores in our wolf form, mimicking the wild animals that we were connected to.
