CHAPTER ONE
“So… you met him… online,” her best friend, Sam, began slowly, her words trickling out one by one in a slightly dubious line. “On a site for introducing sugar babies to their ideal sugar daddies. So you can date some geezer for his money.” Dark eyebrows rose steadily over equally dark eyes. “Am I understanding this right?” she sighed, one mocha-dark hand lifting so she could pinch the bridge of her nose between two fingers.
Charlemagne—Charlie, as she was more commonly called by anyone other than her father—lifted both tanned, golden hands to shrug broadly, her palms facing the ceiling. “Hey, don’t judge. A girl needs to do what a girl needs to do,” she replied smoothly, and she leaned her elbows on the table, laced her fingers together, and propped her narrow chin up on the backs of her hands, red lips pouting. “A fine arts degree costs a lot and brings in basically no money. Either I find someone willing and happy to hand me money, or I’m still going to be paying those loans off by the time I’m seventy-six. And he’s only like seven years older than me.”
She tipped her head to one side, loose auburn curls falling across the back of her neck as she did. “Unless you’ve got several thousand dollars in your back pocket and you want to give it to me…?”
Sam held her hands up as if in surrender and leaned back, before she shoved a few tight black curls out of her face. Slumping back in her seat, she folded her arms over her chest. “I take it the painting gig isn’t working out so well.”
Charlie rolled her eyes and gestured downwards, rather pointedly, to her waitressing uniform. “You think?” She straightened up with a sigh, palms landing on the tabletop. “Anyway, my break is just about done,” she sighed. “I need to go shovel down some lunch while I’ve still got time. I’ll call you tonight after the date.”
Sam pointed a finger at her sharply as she demanded, “And remember to send me a picture of the guy and what you’re wearing before you get there. And the name of the restaurant, too.”
With a snort of laughter, Charlie dragged the tip of one finger in an X-shape over her chest. “I will, I promise,” she assured her fondly as she shoved her chair away from the table and got to her feet.
Sam nodded once, satisfied. “Good. Because if he turns out to be a maniac and kidnaps you, I’d like to be able to tell the cops something a bit more concrete than ‘She was with a guy and wearing clothes at a place.’”
With a final scoff of laughter, Charlie turned to head back to the break room, waving over her shoulder as she walked away. “You worry too much, but I’ll keep you up to speed,” she offered over her shoulder with a sardonic grin, one hand on the break room’s doorframe.
“I worry exactly the right amount,” Sam called after her with a stubborn twist to her mouth before she waved Charlie away.
Charlie blew her a kiss before swinging herself the rest of the way into the break room.
*
Charlie looked good. That was important. Oh, sure, she wanted to actually be able to get along with the guy, but she was under no assumptions that… whatever was going to happen was going to be based purely on some deep, emotional connection. On the whole, she was pretty okay with that. She just wasn’t going to let her dad know about that little detail.
She looked herself over in her mirror one last time. The dress was a deep blue, faintly metallic halter-top, held in place around her neck with a silver collar. It hugged her broad hips, narrow waist, and ample bust well. The skirt flowed around her ankles, and one side of it was slit nearly the whole way up to her right hip.
On her own, she was a meager 5’2”, but with her red heels that consisted mostly of a complicated net of straps, she was a much more respectable 5’8”. Save for equally red lipstick, her make-up was done in blues and silver, making her already bright blue eyes even brighter. Her hair was up on top of her head in a complicated weave of braids, except for two small, carefully curled sections framing her heart-shaped face. Her earrings weren’t real diamonds because the only real diamonds she could afford were approximately the size of a microbe, but they shined well enough and looked pretty all the same.
She eyed herself critically for a long moment before she finally nodded once in satisfaction. She grabbed her phone from where she had carelessly tossed it onto the bed and snapped a quick picture of her reflection before sending it to Sam. She had already sent Sam the man’s profile pictures from the dating site. Almost immediately, she got a cheerful, ‘Looking gr8! :)’ in reply.
With that lovely bit of validation, Charlie grabbed her small red clutch, shoved her phone and her wallet into it, and headed out the door to meet the car that would be arriving within the next few minutes, with any luck.
*
The car was fifteen minutes late, and Charlie was very glad she had called for it to arrive a half hour early. Nothing made a worse impression on a first date than showing up late. And even if she wasn’t expecting the guy to fall head over heels for her, she did at least want him to like her.
Especially given how much he would be spending on dinner that night. Just staring up at the sign on the front of the small building, tucked unobtrusively away between two larger buildings, she was already expecting dinner to cost a fortune.
She pulled her phone from her clutch and took a picture of the sign, with its elegant letters spelling out The Hidden Garden and the swirling, floral metalwork surrounding it. She followed it with a picture of the nearest street sign and sent both of them to Sam. She got a thumbs-up emoji in reply only a moment later.
Content that Sam knew where she was for the evening, to a suitable degree, Charlie took a deep breath and stepped inside. She dithered in the small, cozy entryway for a moment before approaching the hostess. Clearing her throat, she asked, “Has anyone from the Croasdell party of two arrived yet?”
Chipper enough that Charlie couldn’t help but wonder what her boss was feeding her, the hostess reported, “Not yet! Your table is free, though, so would you rather wait here or at the table?”
Charlie glanced around slowly. Everyone in the restaurant was so much wealthier than her. She knew she looked just fine, but she couldn’t help but to think that if she was just sitting alone at a table, somehow everyone else would be able to tell just by looking at her that she didn’t belong.
Smiling politely, she backed towards a plush leather chair in the corner of the entryway. “I’ll just wait here,” she replied, lowering herself into the seat. “It will probably only be a few minutes, anyway.”
The hostess beamed pleasantly and nodded and left Charlie to her thoughts. Luckily, it really was only a few minutes before the door opened again and in walked the man whose profile she had accepted. She practically scrambled to her feet, smoothing her dress down needlessly as he looked at her.
“Ezekiel Croasdell?” she asked, though his features were rather striking and she doubted she was just going to coincidentally run into someone who looked just like him.
“Zeke,” he corrected plainly. “Charlemagne Harrison?” he asked in return.
“Charlie,” she corrected, in much the same tone.
Considering they weren’t exactly making those introductions in hushed tones, the hostess simply caught their attention and ushered them along, gesturing quickly for them to follow her. They trailed along after her, through the small dining room and out the back door, into the fenced-in yard. The ground was made of slate stones in mosaic patterns, the metal fence twined and twirled and swirled in floral patterns, and there were trellises leading up to wooden beams overhead, so flowering plants in blue, red, orange, yellow, pink, and purple crept across them, turning into a beautiful canopy.
A hidden garden indeed.
The small table they were led to and its two chairs were made of the same swirling metal as the fence, though the chairs were padded with black silk cushions. They took their seats, accepted their menus from the hostess, and took a moment to look around as the hostess breezed her way back inside. There were only four other people in the garden, sitting at two other tables. Neither of those tables was near theirs. It was quiet. Peaceful, even.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Charlie offered after a moment, toying idly with the edge of her napkin with two fingers.
“Likewise,” Zeke returned, nodding his head once. “You look lovely.”
“You, too,” Charlie mumbled, face heating slightly as soon as the words were out of her mouth. ‘Lovely.’ Who called a guy lovely? “I mean, very handsome.”
That, at least, was the truth. His features were sharp and angular, and his skin was lightly tanned. His eyes were a deep, calculating green, and his hair was black, slicked back, and just long enough that the longest ends came to nearly the base of his neck. He was broad and sturdy, but not to an absurd or comical degree, and he looked like he used his hands a lot, the tendons prominent in the backs of them. His red shirt, black jacket, and black trousers were all impeccably tailored.
Honestly, so far Charlie wasn’t seeing any downsides to a most likely strictly physical relationship, as long as he didn’t turn out to be an asshole. She would remain cautiously optimistic for the time being.
Conversation was largely harmless at first. Charlie explained that she was a waitress. Zeke worked in his family’s business, which seemed to have something to do with real estate. Neither of them had any particularly crazy hobbies that needed to be side-eyed. Both of them had lived in Crestholme for their whole lives, and they had even lived in similar areas a few times, though they had both gone to different enough schools not to know anyone in common. There was nothing enormously surprising, and that was a comfort.
When the most predictable question came, Charlie actually felt pretty comfortable answering it.
“What led you to try this?” Zeke wondered, gesturing around with one hand, though the motion seemed to encompass “this situation” rather than anything in the immediate setting.
“I was determined to be a fine arts major,” Charlie explained, shrugging one shoulder. “My dad was determined not to help me pay for it; said it would build character if I did it myself.”
“And now you’re in a lifetime’s worth of debt because of it,” Zeke guessed.
“Student loans,” Charlie confirmed. “Getting the degree was fun, but expensive, and as it turns out, when you’re a no name, no one’s really interested in buying what you paint.”
“You paint?” he wondered curiously, sounding intrigued.
“Less than I would like, but yeah.” She cocked her head to one side. “You do anything like that?”
With a slightly self-deprecating wryness, he returned, “I’ve never had much of a knack for the visual arts. I play piano, though.”
…Well. That was fairly attractive. But that was an observation that Charlie kept to herself for the time being. Serenading of any sort seemed like more of a second or third date sort of thing. Even so, she filed that detail away for later.
On the whole, things seemed to be going pretty well, and the food was amazing. Charlie had been holding onto some rather cautious pessimism ever since she agreed to the date, but everything seemed to be going well enough.
Once their desserts arrived, Zeke took a breath, and Charlie thought dryly, ‘Oh no.’
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” he began. “I’m expected to marry—and soon—if I’m to remain my father’s primary inheritor. But the matter is not as simple as just finding the right amount of money to throw at someone.”
“What, do you need someone who can behave in polite society?” Charlie wondered dryly, leaning an elbow on the table and propping her chin up on it. “Someone the family will approve of?”
Zeke paused for a second before he acknowledged, “Well, that is a factor, but it’s a small one. Whoever I marry needs to be alright with the fact that my family consists entirely of were-bears.”
Charlie stared at him for a very long time. Nearly a full minute, in fact. She thought about asking him to repeat himself, but frankly, she was pretty sure she heard him just fine.
Were-bears.
“Were-bears,” she repeated slowly. “As in people who turn into bears. You—have got to be fucking with me,” she decided, forgetting her manners in light of the evening’s sudden absurdity.
Zeke only watched her placidly in return. He did not look like he was fucking with her, or at least not knowingly.
So, he was crazy, then.
Heedless of the slightly gob-smacked look on Charlie’s face, Zeke carried onward. “I need to show intent to mate and have children in the near future or my father will disinherit me. Whether or not I actually do have children is slightly irrelevant, I suppose, so long as he is assured that I’m going to.”
“Won’t he notice if there aren’t any babies?” Charlie asked faintly, and she wasn’t even sure why she was playing along. It made no sense.
“He’s a very old man,” Zeke answered simply.
“Oh.” As if any of the conversation actually made any amount of sense. “Sneaky.”
There was a huff that was maybe supposed to be a laugh, though he didn’t say anything immediately. He pulled his wallet out as the waitress approached again and simply handed her his card before she could even pull out the black folder. As she bustled away again, Zeke turned his attention back to Charlie.
“I’m not expecting an immediate response,” he assured her, “but if you’re open to the idea, I would be interested in seeing you again.” He pulled a scrap of receipt paper out of his wallet, and as the waitress came back, he used the pen in the folder to scrawl his phone number on the back of the scrap of paper and handed it over. Charlie tucked it into her clutch.
Afterwards, he walked her to the door of the restaurant, and he looked slightly dubious as she assured him that she already had a ride home.
She watched him walk away, presumably towards his probably expensive car, before she called another car to pick her up.
*
Charlie dialed Sam’s number on her cell phone and brought it to her ear as she set about stripping down. She was already halfway out of her dress when Sam picked up, and she demanded instantly, “So, how did it go? Was he as hot as his pictures?”
“Hotter,” Charlie assured her as her dress fell down her legs and pooled around her feet. She stepped out of the circle of cloth and began pulling pins out of her hair.
Sam whistled lowly. “You know what that means,” she cautioned. “He can’t be too good to be true; he wants something.”
Charlie snorted. “He needs to show proof of intent to marry and procreate or he’s going to be disinherited,” she replied, and she ignored Sam’s sharp bark of laughter upon being proven right. “But hey, I wasn’t expecting this to just be because he had a hankering for spending money on a cute girl. He seems pretty nice, and you know what? I can pretty happily cordially coexist with him and occasionally get a good dicking.”
“Only occasionally?” Sam wondered dryly.
“More than occasionally,” Charlie corrected. “Anyway, I have ulterior motives. I wasn’t expecting him not to. He didn’t seem to mind.”
“Well, the lack of a double standard is refreshing, I guess. So, you decided?”
Charlie made a low, dissatisfied noise. “Not quite. I’m still debating.”
Sam snorted, the laugh turned into static somewhere between her phone and Charlie’s. “Of course. Well, I’ll let you go, then. You go stare at the ceiling and ponder, or whatever it is you’re going to do.”
“Uh huh,” Charlie agreed wryly. “I’ll let you know what I come up with.”
She hung up without ever mentioning the strangest detail of the night. That seemed like more of an involved conversation that she wasn’t really up for just then. Not when she already had plenty of things to ponder.
Aside from being a little crazy, it had been a pretty decent night. Talking to him had been simple enough. He hadn’t protested at the idea of paying off her student loans for her. He hadn’t seemed to think that it was ridiculous for her to paint. He had been pretty pleasant in general. And his brand of crazy had been… fairly benign, assuming that it wasn’t just some strange joke to see how far he could push before she ran off. If he thought he was mostly a person but could also be a bear, well, that sort of crazy seemed pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things.
She was pretty sure she was going to wait a while before telling Sam about that detail, though.
Aside from being a little crazy, she didn’t actually have any complaints about him. Oh, sure, she would probably have complaints later, because everyone had complaints about everyone, but she could feel those out later. For the moment, the fact that she had no real complaints seemed pretty promising. And if the little bit of crazy got to be a bit too much crazy, well, she could call things off later.
She picked up her phone and contemplated it carefully for a moment, before she pulled the slip of paper from her clutch and entered the number. Her text was short and simple; there was no need to make a giant affair out of everything.
‘What did you have in mind for a second date?’
*
Date Number Two, as Charlie was calling it in her head, was rather different from the first date. It was in the middle of the day, for one thing, rather than in the late evening. And they didn’t actually go anywhere in particular. Instead, Zeke had a camera dangling from around his neck when she met him at the strip district.
Charlie couldn’t say that photography was really her expertise, but when she was handed a very expensive camera, she certainly knew how to entertain herself. And that was all it was, really. The two of them ran around the most colorful parts of the city, taking photos of whatever looked the most interesting, or staging photos if there wasn’t anything in the immediate area that really screamed to have their pictures taken.
There were elaborately painted statues of herons all over the city, on street corners, in storefronts, in courtyards, in parks, they were everywhere. They managed to get pictures of at least a dozen of them, though it meant they had to flee a certain business’s courtyard before they could get pictures of anything else, because the security guard disapproved of Zeke taking a picture of Charlie riding the starlight heron like a horse.
They ate lunch at a tiny, Vietnamese hole in the wall wedged between a coffee shop and a fishmonger’s shop. The food was incredible and Charlie was pretty sure the iced coffee she got in the restaurant trumped anything she would be able to get at the coffee shop.
It was such a simple day when she held it up to what she would have expected a billionaire to do. But in its simplicity, she found she had no complaints.
They were waiting for the car that Charlie called to bring her home when she said, “I don’t think I’d mind giving this a try.” With something like levity, she added, “Worse comes to worst, we can just get a divorce later.”
Zeke snorted out a quiet laugh. “A fair point,” he agreed. “I’m glad to hear that.”
“I guess I’m going to have to meet your family, then,” Charlie mused quietly, standing up as a car slowed as it approached the curb.
“True enough,” he agreed, “but we can work out the details about that later.” As the car pulled to a halt, he opened the rear door and ushered Charlie in. “I enjoyed today.”
“So did I,” Charlie assured him, and she was actually a bit surprised to find that she meant it.
He offered a small, crooked smile as she slid onto the seat and he closed the door behind her, and she waved out the window as the car pulled away.
She supposed this was actually happening. In a strange sense, she was engaged. And she was going to meet his family.
…That thought seemed a lot more unnerving than it had when Charlie agreed to it.
*
Their third date was not so much a date as it was a cram session that just happened to involve lunch at a very nice café. If Charlie was going to be presented to Zeke’s family as proof that he was going to provide grandchildren, then they had to know each other. Or at least they had to be able to pretend that they knew each other.
Their hobbies were… complementary, in a way. Charlie’s visual arts against Zeke’s musical arts. He could also sing, apparently. He refused to give her a demonstration in public. They both knew how to ride horses, though in Zeke’s case it was because he had horses and in Charlie’s case it was because of summer camp.
Their lives, on the other hand, could not have been more different. Charlie was pretty sure one semester at Zeke’s university would have cost as much as Charlie’s full tuition, but that would only have happened if he hadn’t been granted a full ride on scholarships. He had no siblings, while Charlie had five. Charlie’s father cared reasonably little about getting involved in their lives unless they were in trouble, and Zeke’s parents never knew when to butt out.
If nothing else, by the end of lunch Charlie felt reasonably prepared to pretend they had been dating and getting to know each other for weeks already.
He gave her a ring at the end of it. They were engaged, after all. It was simple—a pewter band with a trillion-cut diamond wrapped in swirls for the setting—but in an elegant way, rather than a cheap way. ‘Engaged’ was still a strange thought, but she was rather enamored with the ring.
*
Zeke’s family was surprisingly small. As he pulled out her chair for her and she sat down, she took a moment to glance around the table, and there were only three other people there, aside from the two of them. She knew he had no siblings, but she had expected there to be a few more extended relatives.
The term “old money” was very literal, in their case. Zeke’s father looked as if there might have been a family resemblance once upon a time, but he appeared to be well into his eighties. His wife, conversely, barely appeared to be in her fifties. She was an attractive woman, who seemed to have passed both her hair and eyes to her son.
The third person was a man perhaps a few years older than Zeke. He was very pale and blond and his eyes were clear blue. Facially, he looked a bit like a ferret; he was very pointy, and his eyes looked like he was planning something. Those were Charlie’s first thoughts on cousin Richard, who Zeke’s parents had apparently taken in after his own parents passed. There was no elaboration on that, but if his parents had been as old as Zeke’s, Charlie had her guesses.
The look he gave her as she sat down was as if someone was holding a bag of dog shit under his nose; it was like he was objecting to a smell but didn’t actually want to say anything about it. After a few seconds, he forced a polite smile into place.
Nothing got any better from there, but Charlie was slightly gratified that Zeke seemed just as put out by it as she did.
Richard asked her if she was planning on going to college, as if it was the most logical assumption that she hadn’t gone. He didn’t seem particularly impressed when she explained that she already had a bachelor’s degree.
Zeke’s father went off on a tangent about the irrelevancies of art, until his wife slapped his arm and laughingly said, “Oh, stop. Honestly, I can’t take you anywhere.” Charlie couldn’t help but to wonder if Zeke’s dad even knew about Zeke’s music. Granted, she doubted it would change his opinion one way or the other.
But Charlie behaved herself. She was polite and gracious and she asked all of the proper questions. She barely tasted any of her food, but she wasn’t sure if that was because of how hard she was concentrating or just because the portions were so small.
*
Zeke’s family was… fascinating. That was the only word Charlie could think of to describe them without dipping into profanity. His mother had seemed nice enough, though the degree to which she was younger than her husband had been a little jarring. His cousin had been a downright prick and she sort of wished she had “accidentally” poured her wine in his lap. She couldn’t even pinpoint why he was a prick; he just got under her skin, like termites.
Charlie reflected on this as she scrubbed her makeup off and pulled the pins from her hair. Her dress was already in a heap on the floor as she wandered around her bedroom and bathroom in her bra and panties. She made her way into the kitchen. She was still starving.
Richard was basically like every stuck-up asshole in high school who always assumed that everyone was coming from somewhere below them. Zeke’s father wasn’t much better.
But, well. He really was very old. Charlie doubted she would see him particularly much, and if she wanted to be morbid about it, at least he probably wasn’t going to be around much longer. And once that came to pass and Zeke got his inheritance, hopefully Richard would just disappear.
Zeke himself, though… he had been perfectly sweet, craziness aside. (Strangely, she couldn’t actually tell if the rest of the family was in on the craziness or not.) A bit distant, maybe, but they were still getting to know each other. She supposed everything would work out well enough, if she was just allowed to avoid most of his family.
*
There were very few things in life that Charlie truly hated. Racism. Sexism. Being condescended to, especially by her father and his friends. Things like that. But ranking along with them at the top of the list was the late shift. True enough, she considered herself a night owl, but that was because she enjoyed having her nights to herself to relax and decompress. She couldn’t do much relaxing or decompressing if she was getting out of work at ten o’clock at night, and that was only on nights where all of the customers were scooted out the door at the right time so cleanup could begin on time. Thankfully, she only had to work the late shift once a week.
She lived in the suburbs, well away from the bustle of the middle of the city, but the restaurant she worked at was near enough to the duplex she lived in that she could walk, and there was rarely any reason for her to truly worry. Granted, she tended to keep her keys between her fingers regardless, but she figured caution was an admirable trait. On the whole, though, she typically never ran into anything more dangerous than a raccoon or her neighbor’s elderly terrier.
That night, though, was quiet. She was about halfway back to her duplex before she realized that it was a very intense sort of quiet. There were no bats, stray cats, barking dogs, raccoons, or opossums. Animals always knew before anyone else when something bad was coming, and it felt like that sort of stillness.
Charlie glanced around cautiously and picked up her pace to a jog. Right about then, all she wanted was her kitchen in front of her and her door behind her and for the night to be over.
She made it to the end of her street when a trashcan rattled and fell over, and for a moment, she was relieved—finally, some sign of life! But then she actually saw what had crashed into the trashcan.
She lived close enough to the city proper that big wildlife was largely unheard of. And yet, standing not six feet away, a brown bear the size of a car stared back at her. It was looking right at her. And then it started moving towards her, with a slow, purposeful lumber.
Charlie managed a few stumbling steps backwards, her purse falling from her hands, but as the bear advanced, she ground to a halt, as if her muscles had turned into cement, stiff and unyielding.
The bear was close enough that she could have touched it, had she been able to get any of her limbs to actually move. Then it stood up on its hind legs and towered over her. Tears streaked silently down her face, and as the bear opened its mouth wide enough that it could have crushed her head, and growled, all that went through Charlie’s head was a distant, tinny, ‘So this is how I die.’