I Married the Alpha They Threw Away novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Pup

Hattie turned off the tap and handed me a clean towel.

"Sit," she said.

I sat on the stool by the scale.

She pulled up my sweater without asking, put her cracked palm flat on my belly and closed her eyes.

Then she bent and smelled my hair.

"Five weeks," she said. "Hunter's Moon. To the night."

I'd chosen it.

I'd stood in that quarry and looked up at the moon and chosen it.

It didn't help.

My hands started shaking so hard the towel fell on the floor.

The last time I'd been pregnant, I'd lived in the Kingsbury house and drunk my tea every morning and thanked her for it.

The last time, I'd felt a baby kick for five months and held her for one minute.

"Neve." Hattie took both my hands. "Look at me."

"She'll know."

"She'll know in about a week," Hattie said. "In a week every wolf in this village will smell it on you."

"So you've got a week to stop shaking and decide what you're going to do about it."

She picked the towel up off the floor.

"Not about the baby. About her."

I drove around the lake with the window down in the cold so I wouldn't be sick in Bram's truck.

He wasn't in the cabin.

The one-eyed man pointed his pipe at the trees without a word.

Bram was at the stones.

He had a tape measure out along the old foundation, and a pencil behind his ear, and a notebook full of numbers on the hearth.

He'd been doing it all week and wouldn't tell anyone why.

He looked up when he heard me in the bracken.

His face changed before I'd said anything.

Of course it did.

He was a wolf again, and he could smell it on me.

He put the tape down very slowly.

"Neve."

"Hunter's Moon," I said. "Hattie says to the night."

He didn't move.

I'd never seen Bram Kingsbury not know what to do with his hands.

"Say something," I said. "Please say something, because the last time I told a man this, he bought me a crib and planned the rest."

He came across the stones to me.

He didn't pick me up.

He knelt down in the frozen bracken, all six and a half feet of him, and put his forehead against my stomach.

He stayed there.

I felt his breath through my sweater, hot and uneven.

"Bram."

"Give me a minute."

I put my hands in his hair.

When he finally looked up, his eyes were wet and gold.

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