Wrong Girl, Right Alpha novel · Chapter 40 of 48

Chapter 40: The Maid

Celia walked into the ford and did not stop until the water was at her shins.

She looked small.

I had never seen her small.

The cardigans and the pearl earrings were gone, and her hands were red and cracked to the wrist from lye.

Her hair was tied up under a gray kerchief, and a strip of it had gone white since the spring.

"Don't," Ronan said, behind me, very low.

He had come to the edge of the gravel, and I saw his right hand close on the sentry's arm.

Celia was exiled from every inch of Hollow Creek's ground.

She couldn't step on our bank, and Ronan couldn't step on Blackwater's.

The ford belonged to neither, and she knew it.

"Stay there," I said to him, without turning my head.

A pause.

"Yours," Ronan said, and he stayed.

I walked down the bank and out into the water.

We stood three paces apart, with the current pulling between us.

Boyd's wolves had drawn back along the far shore, and Boyd himself had sat down on a rock to watch.

"Mrs. Hallett," I said.

"I'm not that anymore." Celia's voice was dry and level.

"I scrub the pit house. I carry the slops to forty men who don't say thank you.

Mr. Satterfield calls me his scullion, and he means it kindly."

"You sold him my land."

"I sold him a deed. You burned it."

"You picked the man with the silver teeth."

She didn't deny it.

She looked at me for a long moment, and something worked behind her face.

"I looked over every wolf at Blackwater," she said.

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