Chapter 7: The Stockroom

Jessa's POV

Monday it rained so hard the gutters on the feed store sang.

I was on the ladder in the back stockroom, counting sacks of chicken scratch.

The bell on the front door rang.

I knew the footsteps.

I had been learning them for three months without meaning to.

"We're closed," I called down.

"The sign says open."

"The sign is wrong."

"Your boss told me to come on back."

Rhett stepped into the stockroom, dripping.

"I need two hundred feet of fence wire."

"For what?"

"A fence."

"You have a fence."

"I need another one."

He had on a canvas coat and rain in his black hair, and he did not look like an Alpha.

He looked like a man who had been standing in the street for a long time, working up to this.

"You're lying," I said.

"A little."

"My father put you up to it."

His face did something fast and careful.

"Your father told me to keep you in sight until the wedding," he said. "He didn't say why."

"He told you that?"

"On the border road. Yesterday."

"My father doesn't talk to anyone."

"He talked to me."

I climbed down the ladder with the clipboard in my hand and my pulse making a mess of my breathing.

"You fished me out of a river," I said. "Thank you. We're even. You can go."

"We are not even."

"No?"

"Not by any count I can make."

He took a step toward me.

"You went under, Jessa. I saw the water close, and I forgot my own name."

The stockroom was narrow, with shelves of feed sacks on both sides and one bulb swinging overhead.

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