Chapter 6: The Creek Paper

Cruz's POV

I left her asleep on the rock with my shirt around her and walked down the mountain before the sun came up.

I had a bite on my shoulder that throbbed with every step.

It was the best thing that had ever happened to my body, and I could not tell a living soul.

My father was at the corral at six, as he is every morning, feeding the dogs and breaking ice in the trough.

He did not look up when I came through the gate.

"You were out late," he said.

"I was checking the high pasture."

"Mm."

He tipped feed into a pan.

My father is fifty-five and slow-spoken, and he keeps his hat in his hands whenever he is troubled.

His hat was in his hands now.

"Papa," I said. "Tell me the whole price of the water."

He went still.

"I've told you."

"You've told me what you promised at the wedding. I want to hear what it costs if I say no."

He turned the hat once.

"The Westbrook lease runs ten years at a time," he said. "It comes due on Christmas Day."

"And if it isn't renewed?"

"They shut the headgate on Coyote Creek," he said.

"And then?"

"Then forty families lose their ditch, and the winter grass dries out, and the lambs die in February."

"And they'll renew it if I mate their daughter," I said.

"If you stand with her on Christmas Eve, at the Posadas, in front of the three packs."

He looked at me, finally.

"Nobody forces you, mijo," he said. "But I gave my word, and I have no other water."

I had a dozen answers.

I had the barn, and the truck, and the hot spring, and the sound that Lola made when she bit me.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Pack Law Made Him My Brother, So I Made Him My Mate from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.