In Heat for My Stepbrother novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Lights Out
On her last night in the pack, Liesel walks into her stepbrother's dark room during his rut to tell him the truth, and someone else walks in with a knife.
The last day of the lineworker program, my stepbrother walked into my classroom like he owned the building.
Twenty-two people in hard-hat stickers and work boots turned around to look at him.
I kept my eyes on my test results and pretended I hadn't seen him.
"Liesel."
Judd Varden leaned on the door frame with his car keys hooked on one finger.
Six foot three of flannel and trouble.
Two women in the second row actually sat up straighter.
"Why aren't you answering my calls?"
"My phone's on silent," I said.
It wasn't.
I'd been waiting for him to leave town with his girlfriend first, so I wouldn't have to ride home behind her perfume.
"Dad wants us up the mountain early," he said. "Full moon party."
I packed my bag and followed him out.
Somebody behind me said, "That's her stepbrother? God, she's lucky."
Lucky.
I'd been the Alpha's wolfless stepdaughter for five years.
My mother married Ozias Varden when I was nineteen, and I moved into a packhouse full of wolves who could smell everyone but me.
Wolves come by twenty-one in Black Mountain.
Mine never came.
No wolf, no heat, no scent at all.
The pack thought that was funny.
In the parking lot, his truck was empty.
"Where's she?" I asked.
"I broke up with her."
I stopped walking. "Why?"
"She said she loved me." He laughed and opened my door. "Same old problem."
That was the reason I'd never said a word.
I'd wanted him since I was twenty.
Four years of passing him the salt and keeping my face still.
He drove with one wrist on the wheel.
Our knuckles touched on the console once, on the switchbacks, and I watched the pines.
At the packhouse, my mother was waiting in my room with a garment bag.
Regina Varden. The Luna. Pearls and a smile she only used on other people.
She unzipped the bag.
White silk, with tiny flowers stitched at the hem.
She hadn't bought me anything since I was a kid.
"It's beautiful," I said. "What do you want?"
The smile went away.
"You need to pack your things, sweetheart. It's time for you to leave the pack."
She said it gently.
"The elders talk. A wolfless girl in the Alpha's house makes him look weak. I've held this marriage together for five years, Liesel. I can't hold you too."
I waited for it to hurt.
It did, somewhere far down.
"I'm already packed," I said.
She blinked.
"I passed my certification today. I start on the co-op's line crew Monday. Twenty-six dollars an hour. I signed a lease on the room over the hardware store three weeks ago."
My duffel was in the closet. My cable cutters were on top, my initials scratched into the handle.
"You were going to just leave?" she said. "Without telling me?"
"You were going to tell me to," I said. "I saved you the speech."
She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she laid the white dress on my bed.
"Wear it tonight anyway. Let them see you go with your head up."
I wore it.
Not for her.
For one last look at him.
The party was loud. Two hundred wolves in the great hall and out on the lawn, the full moon fat over the ridge.
Up on the little stage, my stepfather was raising a glass beside his nephew Wendell, who waved at me like I was everybody's favorite cousin.
Nobody else waved.
I found Judd in the back corridor near his room, one hand flat on the wall.
His shirt was soaked through.
When he looked up, his gray eyes had gone gold.
"Judd?"
"It's my rut." His voice came out of somewhere deep in his chest. "It's early."
Heat rolled off him. I could feel it from three feet away.
He ripped at his collar and two buttons hit the floor.
I'd never seen him like this.
I'd never been allowed to.
"Liesel." He swallowed hard. "Send Ket to my room."
Ket.
Of course.
"I'll find her," I said.
I hurried down the corridor.
Then every light in the packhouse died.
The music cut. Somebody on the lawn howled, and somebody laughed.
I counted in my head.
I'd rewired the generator's transfer switch myself last spring. Power came back in under thirty seconds.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.
Nothing.
Forty.
Nothing.
I stood in the dark and thought about the room over the hardware store, and my alarm set for five, and never seeing his face again.
I turned around.
His door was open a crack.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, a black shape in the moonlight from the window, breathing hard.
The iron ring by his headboard had a cuff on a chain, hanging open.
"Ket," he said roughly. "Lock it."
I knelt beside him and closed the cuff around his wrist.
My fingers were shaking so hard it took two tries.
He went very still.
"That's not Ket," he said.
"No."
"I know your hands, Liesel. I've known them for years."
Nobody had ever known anything about me in the dark.
"I'm leaving at dawn," I said. "Mom asked me to go, and I said yes. I'm not coming back. So I'm going to say this once, and then you can forget it."
"Liesel."
"I'm in love with you. I have been since I was twenty. That's all."
The chain clinked.
His free hand found my jaw, hot as a stove.
"Come here," he said.
I didn't think about it.
I kissed him.
He made a sound against my mouth that I felt in my knees.
His hand slid into my hair and held on, and he kissed me back, deep and slow and then not slow at all.
I climbed into his lap in the white dress.
The chain went taut. He swore and pulled me in tighter with the arm that was free, his palm spread across my back, burning through the silk.
His mouth went to my throat.
"You don't smell like anything," he whispered. "And I can still find you."
I pulled his torn shirt open and put my hands on his chest, and his whole body shook.
Then he stopped.
He pressed his forehead to mine and breathed.
"Not like this," he said. "Not in a rut. When I have you, I'm going to remember every second."
"I'm leaving."
"Then don't."
Behind me, the door hinge creaked.
I froze in his lap.
Judd's head came up.
The bed was in shadow, and nobody had ever smelled me in a room.
Whoever had come in was looking for one man, alone and chained.
A shape moved across the moonlight on the floor.
Something slid out of a leather sheath with a long, soft hiss.
And a man's voice whispered, very gently, "Sorry, Judd."
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