Breed Me, Daddy Alpha novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Yard
Suitors line up at Dot's fence and Everly sends them off one by one, until she walks through the woods to Kellan's door.
By sundown there were eleven men in my mother's front yard.
Mom stood at the kitchen window with a dish towel over her shoulder and counted them out loud.
"Eleven. Eleven grown men standing on my tulips."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"Don't you be sorry. That's the Courting, it's the law, and the last time we did it was for your cousin Jill." She squinted. "Is that the Hadfield boy? He was still in diapers a minute ago."
"He's twenty-three, Mom."
"Then he's the one in diapers who got tall."
The law said I had to go out to the porch and look at each of them.
So I did, in a clean tank top and my wolf's hunger, while Mom sat in her kitchen with her glasses on her nose, listening through the screen.
The first man was an old logger who had to be fifty-five.
He took off his hat.
"Miss Dunne."
"Thank you for coming, sir. No."
"I understand." He put his hat back on. "Tell your mother the pie at the diner is the best in the county."
"I'll tell her."
He walked off and I heard Mom say, "That's right."
The second man was nice, and the third was very nice, and the fourth cried a little because his girlfriend had left him in March.
The fifth said he'd always had a feeling about me, and I said "Not me," and he said "Understood" with a face like a punched pillow.
Nobody got past the fence.
Nobody wanted to, once I looked at them.
My wolf didn't even lift its head.
Every male in that yard smelled like something that had nothing to do with me.
The only scent I wanted was three miles away, and it smelled like cedar and iron.
By the ninth man I was fighting a laugh.
By the eleventh I was fighting something else.
Heat rolls over you in waves, and the one that hit at nine o'clock took my breath.
I gripped the porch rail and my vision went white at the edges.
I wanted to be touched so badly my teeth hurt.
I wanted the wrong person, and the wrong person had made himself my entire problem.
"Everly Dunne."
Ridley.
He had been waiting at the back of the line the whole time, hands in his pockets, leaning on my mother's mailbox.
He strolled up the walk, past the tulips, and stopped at the foot of the steps.
"Beta Crowe," I said. "No."
"I haven't asked yet."
"The answer's the same."
"That's not how it works." His pale eyes took their time going down me. "You're supposed to hear a man out."
"Fine. Talk."
"I'm the pack's second. I'll be its first sooner than anyone thinks. And you're going to need someone like me, a woman with no wolf training at all and a heat this strong."
"What I need is you off my mother's flowers."
He smiled with half his mouth.
"You smell like you're begging, Everly. Everyone in this yard can smell it. It'd be a mercy to take care of that."
The yard went quiet.
Somewhere to my left the old logger made a low growl.
I put both hands on the rail and leaned toward Ridley.
"Say that again."
"I said it's a mercy."
"It's the law that I can send you away," I said. "I'm going to send you away. And you're going to go, because every man here is watching."
"Am I?"
"No." I smiled back at him, wide, with the gap between my front teeth. "Not because of the law. You'll go because you've got the bladder control of a six-year-old and if you take one more step, I'll make everyone in this yard remember the fourth-grade field trip."
The old logger made a different noise.
It sounded a lot like a cough covering a laugh.
Ridley's face went flat.
"I'll be at the fence every night," he said, soft, "until you pick me."
"Then bring a chair."
He didn't leave.
He stood there with his jaw working, and the other men were going quiet and uneasy, and I could feel his wolf rolling under his skin.
The screen door banged open.
My mother came out with her dish towel still on her shoulder and my grandfather's shotgun in both hands.
"Ridley Crowe," she said. "You're standing on my tulips."
"Dot, it's the Courting."
"It's a Courting, not a squatting. My daughter said no. Move your feet or I'll move them for you."
She racked the shotgun.
It wasn't loaded, but he didn't know that, and neither did I.
Ridley looked at the barrel.
He looked at me.
"Tomorrow," he said, and turned and walked off down the road.
The rest of them drifted away in ones and twos, saying "Evening, Dot" and "Sorry about your flowers."
When the yard was empty, Mom lowered the gun.
She looked at me for a long moment over her glasses.
"It's Kellan," she said.
I opened my mouth.
"I'm your mother. I smelled it on your coat the second you came in. Cedar and iron. I've known that man since he was a skinny boy in high school."
"Mom."
"He's good, and he's an idiot, and he's going to tell you no."
"He already told me no."
"Then he's going to tell you no again in a worse voice." She hung the shotgun on the porch hook. "I'm not going to stop you. I'm only going to say one thing."
"What?"
"He is a grown man, so if it goes wrong, it's his fault and not yours. Go get your shoes."
I did not need to be told twice.
I ran.
The woods behind our house were dark and wet and every inch of them sang to my wolf.
I came out of the trees at the back of the MacAskill house at ten o'clock.
Marlee's truck was gone.
A single light was on upstairs.
I climbed the porch roof and tapped on the glass.
The window slid up.
Kellan stood there in grey sweatpants and nothing else, his chest bare and rising fast, a bottle of whiskey open on the nightstand behind him.
He looked at me.
"I'm not letting you in," he said.
I put my hands on the sill.
I swung one leg over.
"That's fine," I said. "I'm climbing."
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