The Cold Breakfast Bride novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Nobody Eats Cold Eggs

Jess takes the grill and meets Abel Wilder and his daughter Ruthie over a plate of cold eggs, until Cordell's beta delivers a summons to return the Luna ring before the whole pack tonight.

I read his name twice.

Then I folded the letter along its creases and handed it back.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay?" Hatty put her hands on her hips. "Baby, he bought my roof. He bought my hospital bills. He bought the stool you're sitting on."

"I heard you."

"So what does okay mean?"

"It means where's your apron?"

She looked at me for a long second.

Then she laughed, one big bark that turned every head at the counter.

"Top hook by the walk-in," she said. "Same as when you were twelve."

The kitchen at Hatty's was a narrow galley with a flat-top grill, two fryers and a window to the counter.

My wolf lifted her head for the first time since last night.

The night cook was scraping the flat-top with his back to me.

He was a big gray man in his sixties with a trucker's belly and forearms like fence posts.

Packless.

I could smell it on him, that loose, lonely scent of a wolf with nobody to run with.

"You the niece?"

"I'm the niece."

"You the one who cooked for Iron Ridge?"

"Not anymore."

He handed me his spatula.

"Then I'm going to bed. Ticket rail's full. Waitress's name is on her tag, but she won't answer to it."

He walked out the back door and didn't look back.

I unrolled my knives.

By six-thirty I had eleven plates up and my hands had stopped shaking.

The waitress was nineteen, skinny, with a green streak in her hair and a pack of gum in her apron.

She was packless too.

She slid tickets onto the rail without looking.

"Boss, table four wants their eggs harder."

"I'm not your boss."

"You're holding the spatula, boss."

The truckers at the counter ate.

Nobody let their food sit.

At six-forty the bell over the door rang.

A man came in ducking his head under the frame.

He was huge, wide through the shoulders, with sandy hair that needed cutting and sawdust on his jeans.

An Alpha.

I knew it before I saw his eyes.

The whole counter shifted a little on their stools.

A little girl in a purple raincoat ran ahead of him and climbed onto the end stool.

"Hatty! Pancakes! The kind with the face!"

"Hatty's resting her feet," the waitress said. "New cook."

The girl leaned way over the counter and looked at me through the window.

She had sandy pigtails and a gap where one front tooth should have been.

"You smell like cinnamon and knives."

"Thank you," I said.

"Are you staying?"

"For now."

"Okay. Pancakes with the face, please. Blueberry eyes."

I made her pancakes with a face.

Her father ordered two eggs over medium, sausage, rye toast.

His phone rang before the waitress had even walked away.

"Wilder," he said.

He listened.

"Which ditch?"

"Don't pull it out yourself, you'll roll it. I'll send the truck."

I watched his plate sit in front of him for six minutes.

The yolks went flat.

He said "uh-huh" into the phone and cut one piece of sausage and never ate it.

Something hot climbed my throat.

Three years of mornings.

Three years of his chair empty at six.

I walked out of the kitchen, around the counter, and picked up his plate.

"I was eating that," he said.

"You were looking at it."

"I was going to eat it."

"It's cold."

"I like it cold."

"Nobody likes it cold. People just get used to it."

The little girl stopped chewing.

I walked back into the kitchen, scraped his breakfast into the bin, and cracked two fresh eggs onto the grill.

Over medium.

Sausage.

Rye toast, buttered to the edge.

When I set it down in front of him, he'd put the phone face-down on the counter.

"Eat it while it's hot," I said.

He looked at the plate.

Then he looked at me, longer than strangers should.

"Yes, ma'am."

He ate it.

All of it.

He didn't touch the phone once, even when it buzzed across the counter like a trapped bee.

"That's the best egg I've had in six years."

"That's a sad thing to say about an egg."

"It's been a sad six years."

His daughter licked whipped cream off her fingers and pointed at me with her fork.

"Daddy, she's mine. I smelled her first."

"Ruthie, that's not how it works."

"That's how it works for wolves."

He looked at me and almost smiled.

"I'm Abel Wilder. This is Ruthie. She's going to miss her bus."

"Jess."

"Jess." He put a twenty on the counter. "Do you make breakfast every day, Jess?"

"I do now."

"Then we'll see you tomorrow."

Ruthie hopped off the stool and waved at me with her whole arm.

The bell rang as they went out.

It rang again a moment later.

I thought it was Ruthie, back for her raincoat.

It was a man in an Iron Ridge jacket.

Cordell's beta.

He'd eaten at my table five nights a week for three years.

He didn't look at me when he set a small velvet box on the counter.

"The Alpha says a ring left by a plate isn't returned."

I knew that box.

"Pack law," he said. "A Luna gives it back by hand, at the moon run, in front of the pack."

"Tonight?"

"Tonight. Moonrise. The lakeshore."

He finally looked at me.

"Linnea wants everyone there to see it."

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