Her Brothers Scented Me at the Gate, Now All Three Claim Me novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Gate
On Linnea's birthday Lowen steps through the Niemi gate and all three of Linnea's brothers scent her and say "Mine" before forty watching wolves. She faints, wakes with the three in a ring on the floor, sets her rules, and learns the pack's law lets only one of them keep her.
Linnea's twenty-fifth birthday party started at six.
At ten to six I was standing at the iron gate of her family's land with a lemon cake in a white box.
Past the gate, a gravel drive ran through the pines to a long timber house.
On the lawn, forty people stood with paper cups under strings of lights.
Linnea had come down to unlock the gate herself, and she was talking fast.
"They won't be here, I promise," she said. "Dad sent my brothers to Escanaba for a trailer. They won't be back before ten."
"I'm not scared of your brothers," I said. "I've just never met them."
That was true, and it was strange.
Linnea and I had been best friends for seven years, since our first week of college.
I knew the oldest ran the lumber business, the middle one cooked, and the baby lived in a forestry lab.
I had never seen any of them.
Linnea and I always met at the Ridge Diner on the county road, an hour south of the house.
Tonight was the first time she had ever asked me up here.
"Dad asked me to ask you," she had said on the phone. "He says seven years is long enough."
Now she took a small brown bottle out of her coat pocket.
Since college, she had dabbed pine oil on my wrists before every time we met. She always said it was for the bugs.
Tonight she held the bottle for a second, then screwed the cap back on.
"Not today," she said.
"It's October, Lin. The bugs are dead."
She laughed, too loudly, and swung the gate open.
A man was already walking down the drive toward us.
He had a grey-streaked beard and kind brown eyes, and he held out both hands for the cake box.
"You must be Lowen," he said. "I'm Garrick. We've heard about you for seven years."
"Hi, Mr. Niemi. It's nice to finally see where she's from."
"Garrick. Mr. Niemi is my father, and he's dead." He smiled. "There's lemonade on the porch, and nobody here will make you talk to anyone you don't like."
I liked him at once.
I stepped through the gate.
The wind changed.
It came from behind the house, through the pines, and it was warm, and it smelled like woodsmoke and cut cedar and something I wanted to put my face in.
Something behind my ribs pulled forward, hard, toward the trees.
Three men came out of the trees at a dead run.
They crossed the lawn so fast the people there stepped aside, and they stopped on the gravel twenty feet from me, breathing hard.
The tallest had black hair and grey eyes and shoulders that filled half the drive. He stared at me and did not blink.
"Mine," he said.
He said it quietly, and he did not move.
The man beside him had sandy hair and a flour-white apron on under his open jacket. He put a hand over his mouth, and his shoulders shook.
"Mine," he said, and laughed, and it cracked in the middle.
The youngest was already moving.
He had brown curls and a university sweatshirt, and he got within six feet of me before the sandy-haired one caught his collar.
"Mine," he whispered. "Lowen, you're mine, please."
Everything on the lawn had gone quiet.
Forty people stood with their paper cups and watched three brothers say that to a woman holding nothing but her car keys.
"Oh, hell," Linnea said behind me.
I opened my mouth to tell them I had the wrong house.
The ground tilted, and the last thing I saw was the youngest one's hands, reaching.
I woke up in a narrow bed under a ceiling covered in glow-in-the-dark stars.
I knew the stars. Linnea had described them to me in our freshman dorm. This was her old room.
The cake box sat on the dresser.
There were three men on the floor.
They sat in a ring, ten feet from the bed, and not one of them was touching another.
"She's awake," said the one with curls.
"I can see that, Stellan," said the sandy-haired one. "Quietly."
"I'm being quiet. I'm being the quietest I've ever been."
"Who carried me up?" I asked. My voice came out rough.
"I did," said the big one. "Torsten." He looked at the floor, then back at me. "I didn't want anyone else to."
"Dad put the kettle on before you even hit the ground," the sandy-haired one said. "He knew you'd want tea. I'm Beck, by the way. I cook."
I sat up. They all leaned toward me at the same time.
"Stay where you are," I said.
They stopped. Stellan slid one knee about an inch closer.
"Stellan."
"I was measuring."
My keys were in my pocket, and my car was at the gate.
I stayed on the bed and told them to talk.
"First, my rules," I said. "Nobody touches me until I say. Nobody lies to me. And nobody fights over me."
"Done," Torsten said.
"Done," Beck said.
Stellan raised his hand. "Does sitting near you count as touching?"
"Yes."
"What about looking?"
"Looking is fine."
"Now explain," I said. "Why did you all say that?"
"A wolf gets one mate," he said. "One, for his whole life. When he scents her, a thread pulls tight in his chest."
"All three of us felt that thread at the gate," Beck said quietly. "All three. To you."
"That has never happened in this pack," Torsten said. "And the pack's law says only one of us gets to keep it."
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