Fated to My Mate's Uncle novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: Shower

Patsy reached over and turned the scanner off.

Nobody said anything.

Then the gray-bearded wolf got up, walked to the stove and poured himself coffee.

"Visit," he said. "She's welcome to visit."

He drank.

"I'd like to visit him. With a shovel."

That was the end of the quiet.

The whole cook shack started talking at once, and the kid in the yellow shirt started listing everything he'd do to Gregor, and Patsy hit him with a dish towel for the parts that were too specific.

Fraser didn't say anything.

He just looked at me down the length of the table.

I knew that look.

October. Seven weeks. And everything we had was a ring, a swatch, and a nose that had been wrong once in front of the whole pack.

September came in hot and smoky.

Fraser's stitches came out on the tenth day.

Wolves heal fast, but not clean.

He had a long pink scar now from his left ribs to his hip, and a shorter one on his forearm.

The kid in the yellow shirt said it made him look like a pirate.

Fraser said pirates didn't have to fill out Forest Service injury forms.

By the middle of the month, I was four months along, and I couldn't button my jeans.

I'd been wearing Fraser's work shirts for a week.

Then one morning I came into the cook shack and the whole crew stopped talking and looked at my stomach.

"Okay," the medic said. "Now you're showing."

"I've been showing."

"Now you're showing to people who aren't wolves."

That Saturday, Patsy told me to go to the equipment barn for a box of canning jars.

I should have known.

Patsy never asked anyone to fetch her canning jars.

I opened the barn door, and twenty wolves yelled, "Surprise!"

They'd hung yellow flagging tape from every rafter.

There were balloons tied to the saw racks.

There was a sheet cake on a folding table with blue frosting, and a little frosting wolf on it that looked like a potato with ears.

"The kid did the wolf," the medic said.

"It's a wolf," the kid said.

"It's a potato."

"It's a wolf in a sleeping bag."

They put me in a camp chair in the middle of the barn.

Then they brought out the presents.

The gray-bearded wolf had carved a rattle out of cottonwood. It was smooth as glass, with a little wooden ball loose inside it that clicked.

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