The Forbidden Mate: Claimed by My Ex's Alpha Uncle novel · Chapter 29 of 32

Chapter 29: Terms

I looked at his hand.

Big and scarred, palm up, perfectly steady.

I'd waited seven years for a man to decide I was worth a ceremony.

This one had decided in front of four hundred wolves.

So I took my time.

"I have terms," I said.

Somebody in the third row laughed out loud.

Stellan didn't.

"Go on."

"The clinic comes back," I said. "Not in a basement nobody visits. A stray wing. Paid."

"Lucille runs the floor, and she gets a salary with a number on it."

"A big number," Lucille said behind me.

"A big number."

"Done," Stellan said.

"Any stray who walks through the doors gets seen. No sponsor. No Alpha's name on a form."

"And any stray who wants to belong to this pack can ask, and gets an answer."

His jaw moved.

"That one's not mine to give alone."

The eldest leaned over the table.

"It's mine to put to the Council," she said. "And I will."

"Then done," Stellan said.

"I keep my name and my job. I'm a surgeon. If the trauma bay calls on a full moon, I go, and you hold the seat without me."

"Done."

"And you learn to boil a potato."

That time he laughed.

So did the hall.

"That one may take years," he said.

"I've got years."

I put my hand in his.

His fingers closed around mine, warm and careful.

"Yes," I said. "And I love you. I loved you on the porch too. I just wasn't going to be the first one to say it."

He made a sound in his chest that wasn't a word.

The eldest banged the leather book on the table.

"Then sit down, Stellan," she said. "My hip hurts."

He went up the steps and sat in the chair.

He didn't make a speech.

He looked out at the windows full of strays.

"First order," he said. "Every stray in this valley is home."

The noise the strays made went up into the rafters.

The old trucker put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

The kid climbed in through the window, and nobody stopped him.

By midnight the ranch was empty for the first time since September.

The strays had gone back to their bunks and campers and rented rooms in the valley.

Mirabel and Jarrett were back in hospital beds with nurses watching them.

Lucille had stood in the grange hall lot jingling her keys.

"I am sleeping in my own bed in my own yellow house," she said. "First time in a month. Nobody call me unless somebody's dying."

"What if somebody's just bleeding a little?"

"Then you're a surgeon. Figure it out."

The farmhouse had glass in all its windows now.

Stellan's old wolves had put it in one window at a time, at night, through all of October.

Upstairs was one room with a brass bed the trucker had pulled out of the scrapyard and polished for a week.

A quilt from the motel sisters.

A rag rug the old woman from exam room one had braided in her wheelchair.

Stellan stood in the doorway of it.

"There's a lock on this door," he said.

"I know. I watched the kid put it on. Upside down. Then right side up."

"There's nobody in the house."

"I know that too."

"There's no law."

I took off my jacket and dropped it on the floor.

Then I reached up and pulled the pins out of my hair.

"Stellan," I said. "You're being a very slow man again."

He shut the door behind him.

He turned the lock.

Then he looked at me across that little room, and he smiled, the whole smile, the one I'd only seen pieces of.

"I'm the Alpha of the Rutledge Pack," he said. "And you've got terms."

"I've got one more."

"Name it."

"Come here."

I crossed the room before he moved.

He caught me by the wrists, not hard, just holding me there in front of him, and his eyes had gone gold in the low lamplight.

"You set the terms all night," he said. "My turn."

"I didn't say I'd stop."

"Geneva."

The way he said my name, low and rough, made my thighs press together.

"You're still wearing too much," I said.

"So are you."

He let go of my wrists and reached for the hem of my sweater.

He pulled it up slow, his knuckles dragging over my stomach, my ribs, and I lifted my arms so he could take it off.

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