My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Mine

I had his coat off before we reached my father's bedroom door.

He stopped in the dark hall with his burned hand wrapped in a dish towel and his good hand on the frame.

He stopped at the threshold, where he had stopped outside the end room on the first night.

"Marit," he said. "The Book's ash. Nobody can hold you here but you."

"I know."

"The stand holds and you can walk any night. Nothing else is owed."

"You said that to me in your truck," I said.

"I did."

"Then I'm walking," I said. "Home. Mine. You followed, so come in."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then he stepped over the sill.

It was the big room at the back of the house, with the walnut bed my parents had bought the year they married.

My father had slept in it alone for fourteen years, and I had not lain in it once since he died.

I dragged the quilt off and threw it over the chair.

I wanted nothing in that room tonight but the two of us.

I unwound the towel from Rod's hand and turned his palm up under the lamp.

The blister had gone flat, and the skin around it was raw and pink.

In the middle lay the silver crescent, steady and bright, and it was warm.

"Does it hurt?" I said.

"It did," he said.

"Does it now?"

"Not much," he said.

"Liar," I said, and kissed the middle of his palm.

His breath went in.

The crescent flared against my lips, and silver ran up my own wrist in answer, all the way to the elbow.

"Do that again," he said, hoarse.

I did it again, slower, with my tongue.

He made a sound I felt in my knees.

I undid his shirt and he undid mine, badly, one-handed, laughing at himself.

"I can't work buttons with this hand," he said.

"Then watch."

I stepped back and took the rest of it off for him.

My boots, my jeans and my underwear all lay where they fell.

He stood there with his shirt half open and his mouth open too.

"I have never seen a thing like you in this house," he said.

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