Unwanted Shewolf novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: Ordinary Evening

By evening the smoke from the kitchen chimney was black.

"It's just soup," Rafe said.

"It's on fire," said Mabel.

She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her canvas bag on her shoulder and a wooden spoon in her fist.

Rafe stood by the stove holding a pot with both hands, and the bottom of it was burning.

"I can kill a mountain lion with my hands," he said with great dignity. "I can't see why soup is the problem."

"Because the mountain lion didn't need salt," Mabel said.

I was sitting on the kitchen table with my elbows on my knees, and I could not stop laughing.

I had laughed more in four days than in eighteen years in that big house.

Rafe looked at me over the pot.

"You could help," he said.

"I'm watching."

"She's the Daughter," Mabel said. "She doesn't stir. She supervises."

"Then supervise."

"Take it off the heat, Warden."

He lifted the pot off the fire and set it in the sink, and a cloud of steam rolled up in his face.

Mabel took the pot and the spoon and put the sink tap on.

"Sit," she told him. "Both of you. I'll fix it."

I sat across from Rafe at the table, and he looked at his hands.

"I burned the Daughter's dinner," he said.

"I've never had anybody cook for me," I said. "Burned or not. It counts."

He raised his eyes to mine.

For a moment Mabel and the stove and the smoke were all gone, and there was only the bond humming between us, warm and low.

"Don't say that to me when she's in the room," Rafe said hoarsely.

"I'm standing right here," Mabel said without turning.

We ate her soup at the table, all three of us, with bread torn from the loaf.

Mabel told a story about the winter she delivered a litter of triplets on a snowed-in road, and Rafe told one about a bear that had stolen the Hollow's entire stock of lemon cake.

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