Chapter 18: Ember Creek Moves

Three nights to the full moon, and the Black Pine Alpha's ultimatum had ridden home in the truck with us.

Ewan did not say a word about it.

He fried eleven eggs, one-handed, in a skillet the size of a hubcap, with his jaw set the whole time.

I ate nine of them standing up at the counter, and his aunt watched me from the table with her tea held in both hands.

"Good," she said. "There's finally somebody in this house who eats."

The six-year-old climbed onto the stool next to me and looked at my stomach with great seriousness.

"Is there a baby in there?" she asked.

"Who told you that?"

"Nobody. You eat like Mama did."

Ewan put the spatula down.

He looked at me, and I nodded, and he crouched so his eyes were level with hers.

"There is," he said. "It's a secret for now. Can you keep one?"

"I'm very good at it," she said, and ate my tenth egg.

I spent the day in the workshop behind the trading post, because my hands needed something to do.

I cut a belt blank and stitched until the light went.

When I came back up the lane, the lamps were lit in the house.

Ewan was on the porch with his sling off and his sleeve rolled to the elbow.

The burn ran from wrist to crook, pink and shiny, and it was healing faster than any human wound would.

"You shouldn't have that off," I said.

"It itches."

"You took silver for me, and you're scratching it."

"I'd do it again." He said it simply. "But I'd like it to stop itching."

I put my bag down on the boards.

The guest room where I'd slept for two weeks had a narrow bed and a chair in the hall outside it, where he'd sat every night.

"Ewan."

"Mm."

"I want to move my things."

He went very still.

He had said, in his office, that nobody touches me unless I say so, and he had kept every word of it.

"Where?" he said.

"Your room. I carried my tools up this afternoon, before you were back. They're under your window."

Keep reading free with an account. Start My Alpha Told Me to Stop Needing Him. So I Disappeared from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.