“Handle you?” Bela’s eyes seemed then to mist over, and he stared at her, puzzled. “Your heat,” she said, and he swore she was panting now, like an overeager werewolf cub after too much rough and tumble – no, he thought, don’t think tumble, don’t think, but I am thinking it! he thought dramatically, a tumble amongst the King Edwards with–
With a gasp, he dragged his thoughts away from his desires – that similarity to the hated name! He growled and hunched and drew closer to Bela again. “What were you saying?”
“Your heat,” she whispered throatily, and then she emitted a small, delicate cough that made him tremble in places he had never known could tremble, at least outside of tremors in the earth and a mouthful of a particularly rank kind of Jimson weed that werewolves would eat when they needed to get more into their werewolfish spaces, or purge to maintain their slim, muscled shapes. Bela waved a delicate hand delicately before her face. “Your heat,” she said a third time. “You’re so hot it’s making you steam.”
“I see,” he said.
“I don’t,” she replied, waving a little less delicately. She sniffed at the air. “You smell of burned potato, Jakob. Edwood never smells of burned potato.”
“Edwood!” Jakob snarled, feeling a sudden, inexplicable and curiously deep-seated urge to take the entire pile of potatoes, peel them, cook them, mash them and turn them into a giant sculpture of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming. “Edwood,” he hissed, turning the hated name into one long syllable that might have become a howl if he wasn’t hissing. “Edwood always has that second cup of coffee in the morning!”
Perhaps the desire to make a mashed potato sculpture of Devil’s Tower, Wyoming was due to a deep-seated feeling of emotional anguish and weary, worldly loss that felt like towering Deviltry.
“Edwood never drinks a second cup of coffee in the morning, Jakob,” Bela said, with delicate confusion. “Edwood never drinks…coffee.” She coughed again, waving at the air between them.
Sudden, deep, dark dread filled him and he stared at her, all thoughts of mashed King Edward – ah, the hated sound! – towers gone from his mind. “Bela, my precious one, my all –” untile Woeisme finishes growing! he thought quickly, to be safe – “are you unwell?”
“No, no,” she said, waving her hands at him with frantic haste now, “it’s just that the smell of burning potato has become so strong, and you are smoldering and shedding burning embers of potato and putting out little potato flames and –” she took a deep breath “– smoke gets in my eyes. And lungs. And up my nose. And, well, it’s uncomfortable, as uncomfortable as this situation is uncomfortable, and not to mention a fire hazard, and how dare you put my children in danger! Edwood would never – “
And now Jakob howled, but not because of the – aaaah, he thought, inwardly howling, how I hate that name – hated name, but because a glowing ember had found its heated way into a delicately sensitive part of his wolfiness.
• 
“And now Jakob howled, but not because of the – aaaah, he thought, inwardly howling, how I hate that name – hated name”
That was such an awesomely awkwardly constructed sentence that it made my brain hurt. But in a funny way.
Are you the Steven E. McDonald who wrote THE JANUS SYNDROME and the EVENT HORIZON novelization? If so, awesome. I like your work.