The Forbidden Mate: Claimed by My Ex's Alpha Uncle novel · Chapter 8 of 32

Chapter 8: The Porch

"You walked here," I said.

"It's two miles."

"You were shot on Wednesday."

"I walked slowly."

I should have sent him home.

I should have called his guard and had him driven back to his house and put to bed.

Instead I stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me so Lucille wouldn't wake up.

The boards creaked under my socks.

It was cold, the first real cold of September, and I could see my breath.

I could see his too.

"Sit down before you fall down," I said.

"You sound like her."

"She's right about most things."

He lowered himself onto the porch rail instead of the swing, carefully, one hand pressed flat over his chest.

I leaned on the rail a few feet away.

Below us the town was mostly dark.

The hospital sat on its rise at the far end of Main Street with a few lit windows.

"Did you eat?" I asked.

"I don't remember."

"There's chili."

"I'm all right."

"It's very bad chili. You'd like it."

His mouth moved.

Then the smile went away, and he looked down at his hands.

"I lay in bed three hours," he said. "Every time I shut my eyes I could feel you over here. Like a light left on in the next room."

My face got hot in the cold air.

"I felt you too," I said. "Around ten. You were angry about something."

"My guard brought me soup."

"You were angry about soup?"

"It was the kind with the little stars in it."

I laughed out loud and clapped my hand over my mouth.

He watched me do it.

His eyes in the yellow bug light were very dark.

"Tell me about the law," I said. "Not the way Boyd reads it. Yours."

He was quiet for a while.

Somewhere up the ridge, a wolf howled once, long and low, and another answered it.

"My mother was mated to my father's younger brother," he said. "He rejected her for a woman with land. Stood up at a summer Council and said the words."

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