He Signed My Resignation Without Reading It, Now His Wolf Hunts Me novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: No Tea

Without her morning tea, Odette wakes with a fever and silver eyes, and when Alasdair arrives to order her back to work, his Alpha voice slides off her.

I woke up on Saturday with my skin on fire.

The sheets were soaked through, and the sun hadn't cleared the pines yet.

My first thought was that I had the flu.

My second was that I had never once been sick in nine years of working for a pack of wolves.

I got up and stood at the bathroom mirror in my grandmother's carriage house.

My gums ached along the top row, hard and deep, and my canines felt too long for my mouth.

My hands shook on the sink.

Then I looked up and saw my own eyes.

They were silver.

Not grey. Not hazel with a trick of the light.

Silver, bright enough to throw a shine on the glass.

"No," I whispered.

Something moved under my ribs.

It was slow and heavy, and it turned over once.

I had been told my whole life that my wolf was slow.

I had never felt her at all.

I gripped the sink and breathed through my nose until the ache in my jaw dulled.

Yesterday's cup at my desk had been my last one, and the tin was still sitting in the office.

It was the first morning without tea in as long as I could remember.

A knock came at the door, two raps and a thump of a cane.

"It's open," I said.

My grandmother came in with a jug of water and her cardigan buttoned wrong.

Mabel Swinburne was seventy-six and had been Ironwood's healer for forty years, and she looked at my face for a long time without saying a word.

Then she set the jug on the table.

"Drink water," she said. "A lot of it."

"Gran, my eyes."

"I see your eyes."

"What is happening to me?"

"Drink water," she said again, and her voice cracked on the second word.

She would not look at me.

I drank a glass, then another.

She sat down with both hands on her cane and stared out the window at the south field.

"You'll want to stay inside today," she said. "Keep the curtains shut."

"Why?"

"Because somebody's coming up the lane."

I heard the engine before I saw the car.

It was a black SUV, and it stopped in my grandmother's gravel hard enough to throw stones.

Alasdair got out.

He was wearing a grey sweater instead of a suit, with a day of stubble on his jaw, and he looked like he hadn't slept either.

I had spent nine years memorizing what that face did when he was angry.

Today it was doing something I had not seen before.

He stopped halfway across the yard and breathed in.

His head turned toward the carriage house.

Then he shook it off and kept walking.

I stepped outside before he could knock, and shut the door behind me.

"Padraig told me you cleared your desk," he said.

No hello.

"I did."

"Why?"

"You signed a paper yesterday," I said. "Ask what was in it."

"I sign forty things a day." He ran a hand through his hair. "I don't have time for riddles, Odette. The Ridge ledgers are due Monday, and nobody else knows where the numbers live."

I laughed.

It came out short and ugly, and he stared at me.

"I'm not your Gamma anymore," I said.

"You are Monday." His voice dropped, and the low, heavy note came into it that every wolf in Ironwood obeyed without thinking.

"Monday, eight o'clock. That's an order."

It rolled over me, and I waited for it to bend my knees.

It didn't.

It slid off my skin and was gone.

Inside me, something raised its head and looked at him.

My wolf, for the first time in twenty-eight years, was awake enough to be amused.

"No," I said.

Alasdair went very still.

His eyes flared amber, and his nostrils widened.

"That's not possible," he said quietly. "No one has ever said no to that voice."

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