My Mate and Family's Choice novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Barefoot

Tegan walks into the packed lodge in her ruined gown and tells her mother in front of everyone she used her five minutes on the milk; Dalton takes her out under his coat, and Rodrick leaves her bow and boots on a fence post while her silent wolf lifts its head.

The road came out of the trees an hour later, and two Henshaw wolves were parked on it with their engine running.

They stood up out of the truck when they saw me, and neither of them looked surprised.

"Miss Haskins," the taller one said. "The Alpha told us to wait here in case you came down."

"He told you to wait," I said. "Not to come up the mountain and get me."

"The truce, miss. You know how it is with the MacAlisters."

He put a blanket around me and opened the truck door, and I was too cold to ask what else a truce had stopped him from doing.

Moon Rise Lodge was lit from the roof beams to the steps.

Nobody had left.

Two hundred guests had been sitting for six hours with the wedding dinner going cold in front of them, waiting to see what the Haskins girl would do.

I took off the blanket on the porch and walked in barefoot.

My hem was black with melted snow, and there was a cut across my shin I hadn't felt.

The talking stopped from the door to the head table, one table at a time.

My mother sat at the head of the room with a wine glass she wasn't drinking from.

My father sat beside her, with his beard combed and his good suit buttoned over his stomach.

I walked the whole aisle.

Nobody moved to stop me.

"Tegan," my mother said, and stood.

"You put something in the milk."

The silence got heavier.

"Not here," Annette said. Her voice was very low. "Come into the kitchen. Five minutes, alone, and I will tell you."

"You had your five minutes," I said. "You used them on the milk."

Somebody at the back of the room made a small, shocked noise.

My father pushed his chair back.

"That's enough, Tegan."

"Did you sign me over to Rodrick MacAlister?"

"I signed a paper that closed a debt," Edwin said. "It's finished, and I'd sign it again."

I looked at him for a long time.

My father had taught me to string my first bow.

He had carried me home on his shoulders from the Midsummer run when I was seven and too tired to walk.

"For what?" I said. "What did he give you for me?"

He looked at the table.

"Tegan." My mother came around the table fast and reached for my hand. "Please. The Henshaw wolves are in this room."

"Then let them hear it."

"I can't," she said, and her voice cracked down the middle. "Not with them listening. Please, Tegan, trust me one more time."

"You had that too," I said. "Two hundred people watched you hand me the glass."

Then Dalton was beside me.

I had not seen him cross the hall.

He put his black coat around my shoulders and the smell of cloves and cider wrapped around me, warm, familiar, and enormous.

"No one asks her a single thing tonight," he said, to the whole room, in a voice that carried without lifting. "She's home. That's all that matters."

He turned me by the shoulders so that I faced him and not my parents.

"I'm so sorry," he said, close to my ear. "I should have gone up the mountain myself. The Council would have called it war."

I nodded against his collar.

It was easier than speaking.

"The ceremony is postponed," Dalton told the hall. "We'll take the vow at the Moon Rite at Henshaw Hall, with the Council watching. No one will ever question it."

My father looked up at that, and I saw something cross his face I could not name.

Junie pushed through the crowd and caught my wrist.

"Tegan, call me. I mean it, call me, I've been calling all day."

Dalton set his hand lightly on her shoulder.

"Go and sit with your mother, Junie."

He said it gently, and Junie's face went blank, and she went.

He walked me out under his arm.

The cold hit my face on the porch, and I breathed it in.

"I'll bring the truck around," Dalton said. "Wait right here."

He went down the steps.

I stood at the rail with his coat around me and my teeth chattering, and I looked at the dark line of pines at the edge of the lot.

Someone was standing in the trees.

He was so big I took him for a trunk until he stepped into the light from the porch.

Rodrick MacAlister carried my grandmother's bow in one hand and a canvas bag in the other.

He walked to the fence post at the edge of the lot and set both down on it, very carefully.

The bag was my own, with my hunting boots sticking out of the top.

My mother had packed them.

She had put my boots and my bow in his truck at noon, next to her unconscious daughter.

Rodrick looked at me across the lot for the length of one breath.

Then he turned and walked back into the trees without a word.

Inside my chest, something I had not felt in four years lifted its head.

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