In Bed With My Ex's Brother-in-Law novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: One Bed

At the Bridger place Rance lays out the forged marker and the 28 days before the mark moon, gives Shiloh his bed, and then they learn her mares are headed to the sale barn.

"Get her out how?" I said.

Rance drove with one wrist hung over the wheel.

The moon was a day past full, sitting fat over the Owl Creek range.

"Two years ago my father rolled his truck on the Hudson grade," he said. "He lived two days. Noreen Jessup came to the funeral with a piece of paper."

"What kind of paper?"

"A marker. One point eight million dollars, for cattle and money owed. Signed Bridger."

I laughed before I could stop it.

"Your father couldn't owe the Jessups a dollar without Noreen telling the whole valley at Sunday supper."

"That's what I said."

"So what did she want?"

"Our water."

He didn't have to explain it.

Everybody on Crooked Creek knew the Bridgers held the oldest water right on the creek. 1887. It was the only reason nineteen wolves still had a ranch.

"She offered to tear the marker up," he said. "Kacey marries Coy. At the mark moon he bites her, and our water goes to the Jessup house as her dowry."

"And Kacey said yes."

"Kacey said yes before I got my mouth open."

His jaw worked under the scar.

"Twenty-eight days," I said.

"Twenty-seven, after midnight."

I knew the old custom. Every Jessup pup learned it.

A bride could walk back her vows at the mark moon, before the bite, in front of both packs.

But only if the groom's house had bound her with a lie.

"Nobody's done that in sixty years," I said.

"Nobody's had the proof."

"And you think I can get it."

"You lived in that house five years. You know where she keeps things. You know which boards creak."

I looked out at the black fence posts going by.

"I want my mares," I said. "All fourteen. That's my price."

"Done."

He said it too fast.

I turned and looked at him.

He kept his eyes on the road.

The Bridger place sat low against a cottonwood bend of the creek.

One log house with a sagging porch. A bunkhouse with three lit windows. A set of pole corrals that needed new rails.

Four old geldings stood in the near pen.

When Rance's truck door opened, all four of them wheeled to the far fence and stood there blowing.

"They're used to me," he said. "That's them being used to me."

A small white-haired woman in a quilted robe stood on the porch with a shotgun broken over her arm.

She sniffed the air once.

"So this is the Jessup girl," she said.

"Not a Jessup," I said.

She looked me up and down. "No. You don't smell like one anymore."

"Gran, this is Shiloh."

"I know who she is. Every horse in the valley knows who she is." She turned to go in. "There's stew on the stove. Don't let him feed you out of a can."

The house had two bedrooms.

Gran's was at the back.

The other was his.

He stood in the doorway of it and rubbed the back of his neck.

"Sheets are clean," he said. "Mostly."

"Where are you sleeping?"

"Couch."

I looked down the hall at the couch.

It was a plaid thing about five and a half feet long.

Rance was six foot three if he was an inch.

"You'll hang off it like a rug," I said.

"I've slept in a horse trailer in Pendleton. I'll live."

He tossed me a gray T-shirt out of a drawer.

It came down to the middle of my thighs.

I lay in his bed for an hour and didn't sleep.

The pillow smelled like him. Pine smoke and leather and something wilder underneath, the smell of a wolf who ran alone at night.

My wolf rolled over inside my chest and pressed her nose to it.

I told her to quit.

She didn't.

Around one, I took the spare blanket off the end of the bed and went down the hall.

The lamp was still on.

He was sitting on the edge of the couch with his shirt off, rubbing liniment into his left shoulder.

I stopped in the doorway.

He had a long, raised scar down his ribs on the right side. Another one, puckered, at the top of his shoulder. A pale line of old stitches above his hip.

He went still with his hand on his shoulder.

"You can come in," he said. "I don't bite."

"Coy said that once."

His eyes flicked up. For a second they caught the lamp and went gold.

"I'm not Coy."

I walked over and set the blanket on the arm of the couch.

Up close, the liniment smelled like wintergreen.

"Which one was Cheyenne?"

"The jaw."

"And this one?"

I touched the long scar on his ribs before I'd decided to.

His whole body went tight under my fingers.

His skin was hot. Wolves run hot. He ran hotter.

"Pendleton," he said. His voice had gone low. "A horse called Widowmaker. He stepped on me after."

"You won the go-round anyway."

He looked up at me.

"You watched that?"

"Everybody watched that."

He caught my wrist.

He didn't pull it away from him. He just held it there, flat against his ribs, so I could feel his heart going hard under the scar.

"Careful, Rawlins," he said. "You're standing in my living room in my shirt."

"You gave me the shirt."

"I know what I did."

My wolf came up so fast my skin prickled.

His nostrils flared. He could smell it on me. I knew he could.

Neither of us moved.

Then his phone buzzed on the coffee table, loud as a snake rattle.

He let go of my wrist.

He picked up the phone, read it, and his face changed.

"Kacey," he said.

"It's one in the morning."

"She's in the bathroom at the Jessup house with the water running so they can't hear her."

He turned the screen to me.

It was a photo, blurred and dark. A stock trailer in the Jessup yard under the floodlight.

Through the slats I could see a mouse-gray hip with a black stripe running down it.

Under it Kacey had typed one line.

Noreen's hauling your mares to the Riverton sale barn. They sell Saturday.

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