He Brought His Lover Home, So I Left Him to His Regret novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Woman on His Arm
Kendrick brings his lover home, offers Rowena the role of sister, and she walks out the same night. At the gate her mailed filing comes back with the tape cut and pressed down again.
Kendrick Winslow walked into his parents' living room with a woman on his arm and told us he would mate her at the next full moon.
I was standing in the doorway with the tea tray.
I was his registered mate. I had been for three years, and he had not spent one night under the same roof as me.
"This is Odette Delamere," he said. "We met at the northern post. She's going to be my Luna."
His father lowered his paper.
His mother put down her knitting and said, "Well, she's lovely. Come in out of the cold, sweetheart."
Nobody told Odette she couldn't have my chair.
She sat in it.
"Kendrick," I said. "You already have a Luna. She's holding the tray."
He didn't look at the tray. He looked at a spot just past my ear.
"Your name stays in the registry, Rowena. Nothing about your status changes."
"You keep your room upstairs. You keep running the house for my parents. And I'll go on treating you as I always have, like a sister."
Odette's hand slid into his.
"Odette isn't a mistress to be tucked away," he said. "She's the one I chose."
I set the tray down on the side table, because I could feel my fingers going numb.
The tea cups rattled once and stopped.
Kendrick took my silence for a yes. He had always been good at that.
I was eight when his family found me in an evacuation tent after a rogue wolf attack. They raised me in this house.
They were kind to me. They also decided before I turned nine that I would be Kendrick's mate, and they told neither of us.
When it came out, Kendrick was twenty-five and he was sure I had planned it. The day after our wedding, he put in for the northern border.
His mother, Lenore, got up and crossed the room to me. She smelled of lavender and wool.
"Sweetheart, he's been on the road for two days. Don't answer him tonight." She squeezed my arm. "Nothing in this house will change for you. I promise."
I almost believed her.
She had said the same thing the morning after my wedding, and again every spring since.
"I'm not answering him," I said. "I'm answering the law."
Kendrick laughed.
"Don't tell me this is the termination again. Third time, Rowena?"
"I filed it three weeks ago. I mailed it to the Royal Council myself."
"It will be refused. They always refuse it, because I don't sign."
"You don't have to sign," I said.
He stopped laughing.
"Under Greenhaven law, a mate bond with no shared home and no completed claim can be ended by the abandoned partner. After three years." I looked at the calendar on the wall. "That's thirty days from tonight."
Odette leaned forward in my chair. "You counted?"
"Every night."
His father turned a page of his paper without reading it.
"You have no pack to run back to," Kendrick said. His voice was flat and sure. "You have nobody. If you leave this house, where do you go?"
I had been waiting sixteen years for somebody to ask me that.
"North," I said. "I found my birth parents in the spring. They're alive, and they've been looking for me since I was eight."
"Oh, sweetheart," Lenore said softly. "When was this? Why didn't you tell me? I'd have gone with you."
"I wanted to see them first."
"Of course you did."
She patted my arm again. Her smile did not move.
Kendrick took a step toward me, and for the first time that night he really looked at me.
"You went behind my back," he said.
I thought about the night I sat at the dining table in my wedding dress until the candles burned down.
I thought about the morning he picked up his duffel and walked out on me.
"You left three years ago," I said. "I'm only catching up."
So I stepped out.
I went upstairs and filled one bag in ten minutes. I took my coat and my papers.
On the way down I passed the hall table. Lenore had already laid out the post for the day, sorted into three neat piles.
Mine was the bills pile, as it had been every morning for sixteen years.
I had never had a letter from anyone, and I had never wondered why.
Nobody stopped me at the front door.
The night guard at the gate stepped out of his booth as I came down the drive.
"Luna," he said. He held out a long envelope. "This came back to the box this afternoon. The Council office says it never arrived."
It was my filing. My handwriting, my return address.
The tape across the flap was mine too. But it had been cut clean and pressed down again, a little crooked.
Somebody in that house had opened it before it ever left the gate.
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