My Alpha Gave Me to His Impotent Uncle novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Seven Dry Years
At the Harvest Moon feast Colt crowns Roxanne, gives Bryn to his 'impotent' uncle as a joke and sells the orphans; Bryn takes Gunnar, the five kids and a public bet, and that night catches Gunnar dosing himself with wolfsbane.
"My uncle hasn't been able to get it up in seven years," Colt said into the microphone. "So tonight I'm giving him a present."
The whole great hall laughed.
I was standing at the bottom of the staircase in the champagne slip dress I'd bought for our mating ceremony.
The ceremony he had postponed for seven years.
The Harvest Moon hung full in the glass wall behind him.
Ten minutes earlier he had kissed Roxanne Vail on that same landing and called her his Luna.
The guests from Silver Ridge had clapped the loudest.
Now Colt pointed his whiskey glass down at me.
"Bryn Prewitt. I release your promise. In front of the pack, under the moon."
Two hundred wolves turned to look at me.
There was nothing to break. We were never fated. It was a paper his father signed when I was nineteen.
It still felt like being stripped in public.
"But I'm not cruel," Colt said. "I won't leave a Pup House girl with nobody."
He turned toward the back of the hall.
"Uncle Gunnar. Seven dry years. She's yours. Maybe she can raise the dead."
The laughter came back twice as loud.
Gunnar Brennick stood by the back doors in a black work jacket, the only man there who hadn't dressed up.
His pale hair needed cutting.
His face didn't move at all.
Somebody near the bar said, "Poor gelding," and somebody else choked on their beer.
Roxanne laughed into her champagne and leaned on Colt's shoulder.
I gripped the banister.
I'd spent seven years being laughed at politely. I could stand one more night of it out loud.
Then Colt raised his hand for quiet.
"One more piece of business. The Pup House closes tonight."
My hand slid off the banister.
"Our friends at Silver Ridge have offered to foster our orphans. They'll be trained, fed and housed. Their truck comes at dawn."
The Silver Ridge table clapped again.
I knew exactly what Silver Ridge trained its fosterlings for.
Everybody in this hall knew.
The kids were by the dessert table, where I'd told them to stay.
Glory had the baby by the back of his collar. The twins had frosting on their faces. The little one was holding Glory's hoodie with both fists.
Glory was thirteen, and she was looking at me.
She wasn't crying.
She was waiting to see what I'd do.
I walked.
Not up the stairs. Through the middle of the hall, in my ridiculous dress, past every table.
People leaned back to let me through.
Fern Mabry was behind the buffet in her catering apron, holding a serving spoon like a weapon.
"Go get 'em," she mouthed.
I stopped in front of Gunnar.
He was taller than I remembered. Gray eyes. A burn scar across his left forearm where the sleeve was pushed up.
"Does he mean it?" I asked him. "Am I yours?"
His voice was low and rough. "You don't have to do anything he says."
"That's not what I asked."
He looked at me for a long second.
"If you want to be," he said.
I turned around to face the hall.
"I accept," I said.
The laughter thinned out. A fork clinked on a plate somewhere.
"Since I'm going to a Brennick house," I said, "I'm taking my family with me."
Colt's smile slipped. "Those pups belong to the pack."
"Brennick blood can foster any orphan in this pack. That's your own law."
I didn't look at Colt. I looked at the man beside me.
"Gunnar is Brennick blood."
The whole hall waited.
Gunnar looked at the dessert table. At Glory holding the baby.
"Five," he said. "I've got the room."
Somebody at the back actually said, "Huh."
Colt's jaw went hard. Then Roxanne put her hand on his arm and smiled down at me.
"Let her go, baby. She'll be crawling back before the Hunter's Moon."
Colt liked that. I watched him like it.
"A month," he said. "You'll be on my doorstep in a month, begging to scrub toilets."
"Then bet on it," I said.
The hall went dead quiet.
"If I come back before the Hunter's Moon, I'll scrub Roxanne's floors for a year. On my knees. Everyone here can watch."
Roxanne's eyes lit up.
"And if I don't, the Pup House stays open. And no pup of this pack is ever fostered out. Not to Silver Ridge, not to anybody."
I lifted my chin.
"Swear it on your father's name."
Nobody in Blackfork swore on the old Alpha's name. Not for anything.
Beside me, Gunnar went very still.
Colt laughed, but it came a beat late.
"On my father's name," he said. "Enjoy the cold bed, Bryn."
I walked to the dessert table, picked up the baby, and took Glory's hand.
The twins grabbed my dress. The little one grabbed the twins.
Gunnar held the doors open for all six of us.
His truck had a cracked windshield and smelled like hay.
The baby bit his thumb while he buckled him in.
Gunnar didn't even flinch.
"He bites," I said.
"I noticed."
His ranch was twenty minutes up a dirt road on Deer Ridge.
A log house with a sagging porch and a woodstove that smoked when he lit it.
I put the kids down in sleeping bags in front of the stove, all five in a row.
Glory fell asleep last, with one arm over the baby.
Past midnight I went to the kitchen for water.
Gunnar was sitting at the table in the dark.
There was a small brown bottle in front of him, and a glass of water.
He squeezed a dropper over the glass. One, two, three, four.
The smell hit me from the doorway. Bitter and purple, like crushed violets and pennies.
Every pup in the Pup House learns that smell before they learn to read.
"That's wolfsbane," I said.
He didn't look up. "Go to bed, Bryn."
"That kills wolves."
He drank the whole glass and set it down.
"Not if you're careful."
"How long have you been doing that?"
He finally looked at me.
"Every night," he said. "For seven years."
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