The Alpha Signed Away His Pregnant Luna novel · Chapter 7 of 24

Chapter 7: Bess at the Fence

Maeve's POV

The bus let me off at the Hollow Creek stop a little after ten.

There was one streetlight, a closed feed store and a dog asleep in the road.

I shouldered my bag and walked the mile to my grandmother's cottage in the dark.

The wind smelled of cut hay and woodsmoke. It was the first time in five years I had breathed without a pack's worth of eyes on me.

The cottage sat at the end of Willow Lane behind a crooked white fence.

I stood at the gate with the brass key in my hand.

For six months I had not been able to come back here.

I opened the door.

The air inside was cold and sweet, dried lavender and old wood and something I could not name.

It was her smell. It was still her smell.

I put my bag down in the middle of the kitchen floor and sat on top of it.

Then I cried for the first time since the funeral.

I cried for her, and for the bond, and for the idiot I had been for five years.

I cried for ten minutes, which was exactly all I allowed myself.

Then I wiped my face on Toby's scarf and lit the lamp.

The kitchen was as she'd left it. A cup upside down on the drying rack. Her reading glasses on the windowsill. A blue shawl on the chair.

I was kneeling at the hearth, trying to coax a fire out of old kindling, when someone coughed outside.

"Whoever's in there," a gravelly voice called, "you're either her girl or you're a burglar with good manners."

I opened the door.

A woman stood at the fence with a pot in her hands and a dish towel over her shoulder.

She was sixty-odd, with gray hair in a bun, strong forearms and a housecoat under a man's canvas jacket.

She looked me up and down in the lamplight.

"Her girl," she said. "You've got her chin."

"Bess?" I said. "Bess Harrow?"

"Your grandmother wrote about me, did she? Bless her. Wrote lies." She marched through the gate and past me into the kitchen. "I've been watching that light go on and off for six months, waiting for you to turn up. Sit down. You're white as milk."

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