Claimed After Divorce by My Brother's Best Friend novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Wedding He Left

I couldn't sleep, so I went to the main hall.

Gilbert's safe and my mother's notebook were still going around in my head, and the healer's word, suppressant, along with them.

It was a long room with a stone fireplace at one end and an old couch no one had thrown out.

The fire had burned down to orange.

Dalton was there, sitting on the floor with his back against the couch and his boots off.

He didn't get up when I came in.

He only looked at me, and then at the bandage on my hand.

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

I sat down on the couch, a careful arm's length above him.

"I'm going to ask you something," I said. "And I want the real answer, not the one you think I want."

"All right."

"At my wedding you shook my brother's hand. You looked at me. And you turned around and walked out before I even got to the aisle."

His eyes closed for a moment.

"I stood at the back of the church and watched you come down it," I said. "And I thought, he can't stand me. Even today. Even on the one day I'd have wanted everyone there."

"Della."

"I thought it for six years. Every time you came to dinner at my brother's, I got a headache, and you got up and left early, and I thought, there it is. He still can't stand me."

My voice had gone thin.

"I never knew what I had done to you."

Dalton didn't speak right away.

When he did, he looked at the fire, not at me.

"I walked into that church and the whole room went white," he said. "You were in the doorway in your dress, and I smelled you. Not the headache. You. Rain and honey and something I'd waited my whole life to find."

I stopped breathing.

"I couldn't stay," he said. "You were about to marry another man, and my wolf wanted to tear the church down. If I'd stayed I'd have done something that couldn't be undone, in front of your family. So I went out and sat in my truck in the parking lot and listened to you say your vows through the doors."

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