Hometown Pride, page 9
Angelica sighed. “I have never once seized anything or anyone by the balls.”
“Well, get out there and seize Freight Train Tremaine by the balls, then.” Macey sighed. “Listen, I have a meeting with my advisor in ten minutes, so I have to go. I love you, babe.”
Angelica said goodbye and hung up.
Tremaine had texted a simple, declarative, Dating.
Dating???? she texted again, but there was no reply. She pulled on her gloves and went back to reading the old diary, but kept checking her phone, fielding calls from Carol and Macey.
But an hour after her last text, her mind couldn’t stop circling around the great sex and how he’d claimed her in public. Dating?!?!? she texted him and put the phone out of reach to make calls on her burner phone to all the go-betweens and to the families that were fostering the pride’s children.
Tremaine heard his phone buzz as he was checking the plumb on a fence post and De was tipping concrete into the hole. He smiled a little to himself, sure it was Angelica, because no one else texted him. Maybe his sister, if she’d just heard the rumor. He frowned as he realized he hadn’t talked to his sister since the movie the week before. Probably should bring her up to speed, since there were significant changes.
DeAnthony wheeled the wheelbarrow to the next post they had pounded in and looked back at him. “You need to answer the text from your boo?”
“My… Boo?” He narrowed his eyes at the young man, who suddenly was very interested in stirring the wet cement, though he kept smiling for the rest of the day.
Later that afternoon, after cleaning up as much as they could and sending De home, he sat in his truck in the client’s driveway and pulled out his phone. Just the one text from Angelica, but ten from his sister, two from his brother-in-law, and a missed call from Ella’s daughter, Charity. He wondered if Ella needed him to fix something, write a check or two, or if she and her daughter were nosing around because they heard about him and Angelica.
He called his sister first. “Hey Ve-“
“Everyone is talking about you and Angelica.”
“Everyone? That’s a little hard to believe. Now a few people calling you up, that would be more like-”
“Yes, Tremaine. Literally everyone. Two people, OK? But if one of them is Mellie, who saw you all cozy in a café and then she called me half an hour ago to say you’d told DeAnthony about it and then she talked to Angelica herself. And you haven’t even told me.”
“DeAnthony asked me. I said ‘Yeah.’ I didn’t pour my heart out to him.” He connected his phone’s Bluetooth to his truck’s speaker system and started up his truck.
“Well, I didn’t expect you to wax poetic. Or even to wax graphic. But a text to tell me you were dating someone. Or a call.”
“Yeah, OK. Sorry. It only started last night, you know.” He changed the subject. “My birth father stopped by last night.”
“What? He did? Why did- Wait, don’t deflect. I want to hear about how happy you are with Angelica. Tell me about him afterward.”
“I’m happy. She’s still deciding if she’s happy. But my birth father stopped by. I kicked him out because Angelica was there and I hadn’t even told her about him yet. I haven’t told her much about what he wants. It’s pretty obvious he’s up to something and she’s not stupid.”
“No, she’s not stupid. She’s going to make you work for this relationship, isn’t she?”
“She’s…” She was going to be a pain in the ass. He’d have to be more convincing. “Anyway. I’m tearing down the walls little by little. I hope. But Old Russ wants to move up the timeline. He thinks the pride is vulnerable right now. I kicked him out instead of chatting, but how much you want to bet he stops by again tonight?”
“Move up the timeline? Like, now?”
“I don’t know. Sooner than I’m ready for. I’m ready to tear this pride down, but I want to rebuild, not create chaos and leave us all vulnerable.”
Vera snorted again. “Yeah, remember when you were renovating our master bath and it was torn up for three months because you kept taking other jobs? Total chaos.”
Tremaine would do anything for his family and it was true their bathroom had taken far too long. But still. “Jobs that paid, you mean. I’m still sorry about that, but most of the delays were the plumber.”
“Yeah, OK. And we were paying him.”
“Unlike me, who was doing it gratis. Still, you got a beautiful bathroom out of it at materials cost plus his labor.” Plus a hefty discount off parts that he’d thought of as Vera’s birthday present.
She snorted. “Yeah, and showering at the gym for three months was loads of fun. I was pregnant, remember? Then there was the whole week when the water was off.”
“Still the plumber.” And yeah, he’d changed up some stuff with the walls that made the plumber have to change his plans.
Vera scoffed. No one could scoff like a sister. “How’d we start talking about plumbing? An-gel-i-ca.”
“I’m tearing down the walls still. Like with the pride. Building a foundation. She’s going to be a key part of that, at least that’s the feeling I have. She knows everyone and even though she’s grumpy as all hell, people trust her.”
Vera’s laugh crackled through the phone. “Did you tell her she’s grumpy as all hell? That’s super romantic.”
“It wouldn’t be a surprise to her. She spends half the time scowling and the other half…”
“The other half what?”
He thought of the look of bliss on her face as she rolled her eyes back in her head and came apart under him. “The other half not scowling, OK? We had a good conversation last night about the things she sees the pride failing in, especially caring for kids.”
“Absolutely. Even over here in Middleton is too far for Ella to care, so they ignore us. But the apartments in Freiburg are kind of shitty and they’re not paying the best contractor in town to renovate.”
He smiled a little at her loyalty. At least he assumed she was talking about him. “We’re barely hanging on to building C. No one’s even living in it anymore and it should be condemned. Or gutted and rebuilt. Anyway.”
“And if I lived in our hometown, I’d be even more disappointed by the support services. Anyway.”
He was almost home. “Look, I have to call Angelica now to see what she’s doing for dinner.”
“Ooooohhhhh. Good. Go call her. Take her someplace nice. Don’t cook for her.”
“What? I cooked for her last night. I’m a good cook.”
“And she stayed? Let me guess; you made her steak. No: spaghetti.”
“Goodbye. Say hey to Jude for me.” He beeped off his phone before she could reply. A quick hang up was pretty much the only way he got the last word in with Vera.
He pulled into his driveway and spotted his birth dad standing on the front step, arms crossed.
Tremaine turned his truck around and parked with its nose facing out, laughing inside at the memory of Angelica rocking her tiny car back and forth trying to turn around the night before. He got out and grabbed his work bag.
“Good evening, Russ.”
Russ glowered.
“The alarm system didn’t call the cops or I would’ve got the notice on my phone.”
“The deadbolts all activated.”
“Impressive, aren’t they?” Tremaine unlocked the front door and entered the code on the outside pad to deactivate the supplemental deadbolts. He would change the code as soon as Russ was gone.
“The electric shock thing is a bit much,” Russ hissed out.
Tremaine snickered, then coughed to clear his throat. “Seems like just about enough, to be honest.” He entered the other code on the inside pad. Russ couldn’t see his hand from where he stood out on the step, but Tremaine would change this one, too, just in case. He wondered how good Angelica was at remembering codes. He could set a code for her that didn’t change every day, he supposed. Maybe once a week?
He glanced out at Russ, who was still scowling, but was reaching for the door.
“You sure you want to come in?”
“We got stuff to talk about, son.”
Tremaine hated being this guy’s son. “Fine, but I need to shower and call my girl.” She might hate that he referred to her as a girl. He’d have to watch that.
“I can live with the stink of you and she can wait another hour.” Russ sauntered past him toward the living room and flopped down on the couch. Her couch. That they’d had sex over.
“She can wait, but I don’t want to.”
Tremaine called her.
“Hi.” She didn’t sound thrilled.
“Hi. Yes, dating. My birth dad is here, so until I kick him out, I can’t talk. Where do you want to go for dinner?”
Silence for a moment. “That’s assuming an awful lot.”
“OK. Hello Angelica. How are you today? Would you like to go on a dinner date with me so we’ll be dating? Someplace fancy or someplace not fancy? I gotta kick this ass out of here because he’s sitting on your couch and I don’t want him to sully it.”
Russ turned and smirked at him.
Tremaine narrowed his eyes. “I mean it looks good with the curtains.”
She chuckled low and flirty and he thought he might be getting somewhere, making her think of sex over the couch.
“It’s been kind of a crazy day,” she said on a sigh. “Maybe someplace not fancy, but where we can talk and relax.”
“Sounds good. Casual. We’ll both think of what we want.” At least he would think of how much he wanted her. “And I’ll call you in a little bit when I’ve turfed this guy out and taken a shower.”
Chapter nine
“A pride is ruled over by an alpha. No, I take that back because it's more than that: a good, healthy pride is served by a benevolent alpha who will sacrifice and protect and, most of all, organize the pride (‘herding cats’ is apt) and its finances and other resources for the good of all. Many prides hand power down from mother to daughter with only occasional unwilling transfers of power.” Renard et al, 2025, p133-157.
Angelica barely slept that night, even though she told Tremaine she was too tired to go to his house after the Indian restaurant in Middleton. Apparently, she could no longer sleep without him. She hadn’t fallen asleep next to him the night before, and had in fact never slept beside him, but she’d slept deeply once she got back to Carol’s apartment. Maybe she needed orgasms. Or maybe she needed to stop perseverating on the question of if he would be a good mate.
Her phone rang with, “I like big books and I cannot lie” at seven the next morning as she lay dozing, so she picked up, yawning. “Good morning, Carol.”
“Rise and shine, sleepyhead!” Carol sang out. “I’ve been up for hours.”
“We’re going to have a long talk about time zones.” Angelica swung her legs off the edge of the futon and stretched.
Carol, who had been an early riser for as long as Angel knew her, just chuckled. “What I need is the log of when Ella’s mother came to power.”
“Why?” Angelica yawned, but stood up and shuffled to the bookshelf where the copies of the pride histories were.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, that’s all. Because it was in the seventies, somewhere around seventy-five. I remember it was before the US Bicentennial, but I don’t remember how much before.”
“November 1975, so immediately before the Bicentennial,” Angelica said. “Wait, let me find the page and I can tell you the day. She fought the previous alpha in single combat, right?”
She took down the book and set it on the coffee table and sat on the futon again. “Let me put you on speaker while I look it up.”
“No, that’s OK if you’re sure it was November 1975. And it was single combat, but it was more spontaneous. Just: boom.”
Angelica sighed. “I am sure.” She opened the book and leafed back a few pages. This was the short, dry version of the events of the pride that acted as an index for all the other volumes and journals and photo albums that were kept in the climate-controlled lock box in Carol’s bedroom.
“I was mostly testing you, honey.” Carol sounded pleased.
“I figured. November eighteenth. Nine days before Thanksgiving, because there’s a note in here that Diana presided over the pride Thanksgiving dinner on the twenty-ninth.”
“Eleven days, Angel. That was a crazy year. There were challenges and fights for rank all up and down the hierarchy into the new year. All while we were trying to cover them up to the outside world and everyone was going crazy with patriotism. A lot of odd fireworks accidents and lacerations from car accidents in the Middleton hospital. Only one death, luckily.”
“Death? Geez. Says here that Diana defeated her opponent, Frances Singh, who was fifty-eight at the time. Huh. Did the Singhs move away after that? Must have been Asian lion instead of African.”
“She had two daughters who married and took their husbands’s names, both average rank, nothing like Frances’ dominance. Their descendants mostly moved outside the area.”
“OK. So who are they?”
Carol huffed. “See, now I’m a bit disappointed in you. Your bestie, Macey, is Frances’ granddaughter. You think it’s an accident that Ella has always given her and her parents a hard time?”
Angelica thought about that for a moment, Carol giving her a bit of silence to process it. “I thought it was because Macey’s defiant and openly queer and strong.”
“The defiance is her natural dominance, which non-shifters refer to as a forceful personality. The queer is an excuse for people like Ella to give her grief.”
“Are there other descendants around?” Angelica stood again and got the genealogy off the shelf, too.
“Macey’s great aunt moved to Texas. I think they joined the Hill Country pride.”
“Well. That’s an interesting coincidence,” Angelica muttered, flattening out the page marked Singh, but thinking of Tremaine’s birth father. Was he sticking his nose in because he thought he had some sort of birthright? Or because he thought he could take over through Tremaine?
“Which coincidence is that?” Carol’s voice sharpened.
Angelica sighed. Tremaine’s true parentage was up to him to divulge or not. She wondered if he and Macey were cousins or something. “Just something that came up about Texas the other day. You know, this genealogy of the Singhs is missing a page. Or no one kept recording as Singh.”
“There should be a notation saying which families the daughters joined.”
Angelica squinted at a scribble. “Maybe in the full version, but this one’s lacking.”
“Hmph. So anyway, how are you? How’s Tremaine?”
“We had dinner last night at the Indian place in Middleton. We spent about four hours there.”
“And yet you’re home in the early morning hours?” Carol was obviously smiling.
“Still thinking about it. We…” she sighed, thinking of the heavy petting in his truck. “I guess we’re dating now.”
Carol laughed outright. “So I heard.”
“I don’t even want to know who told you.”
“Five people. No, six. Tremaine’s sister called me first. She’s very pleased. She hopes you’ll be a civilizing influence on her brother.”
Angelica’s face heated, thinking about Tremaine’s sister Vera knowing about her sex life. She liked Vera pretty well, considering she barely knew her. Vera was about her age, maybe a year younger, so they hadn’t been in the same class in school the few times their families had lived in Freiburg at the same time.
And if Angel and Tremaine mated, or even if they had a cub without forming the bond, Vera would be family.
I’m getting ahead of myself for sure.
“Anyway, the Singhs were a dominant force in the pride for fifty years or so before Ella’s mom took over.”
They discussed pride history a bit more and when they hung up, Angelica went and got the complete genealogy out of the lock box along with the record of pride events and the personal diary of her own grandmother who had died in the eighties.
So how did one go about overthrowing a powerful lioness and her dominant family, anyway?
Tremaine slept like a rock. He’d worn himself out physically and mentally over the last few days, but still, it surprised him. It took him a while to fall asleep after making out like a teenager with Angelica for half an hour before dropping her off. They’d parked on a side street and the windows steamed up. His erection certainly was as prominent as when he was an adolescent, though he wasn’t nearly as embarrassed as he walked her in, nodding to the few people they passed in the freshly-painted halls.
He crawled out of bed at his usual pre-dawn alarm, loaded his truck with as many fencing boards he could fit in, and met DeAnthony at the work site at six, where they unloaded boards stealthily and checked concrete and plumb lines until seven, when the ordinances said they could start making noise, at which point they took down the boards they’d used to make sure the posts stayed upright and drilled holes to bolt on the cross beams.
There wasn’t a way to nail boards on a fence silently, but they started on the back fence where the yard bounded the woods. The neighbors were probably all cursing them, especially anyone who didn’t have to get up for work. The steady thunk thunk of the nail guns was probably a headache, but they should be glad he and De only fired up the air compressor at eight-thirty when the battery-powered nail guns ran out of charge.
“Glad” was probably not the right word, but construction was not a silent job, no matter how sensitive their shifter ears were. He had his guys wear noise-canceling headphones, but he kept his own halfway off one ear so he could hear what was going on around them. He noticed De did that, too, which somewhat negated the purpose, but DeAnthony was always on watch – another sign of his dominance. Perry was usually happy to listen to music and let them watch his back, a sign of his lack of dominance. And his trust in Tremaine and De.
At nine, Tremaine’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket and he called a break. DeAnthony smirked at him, but managed to not comment – just barely.
