My Alpha Stepbrother Called Me a Gold Digger, So I Bought His Father's Note novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cake Knife
At her mother's wedding supper Kari hears her new alpha stepbrother say his father married a bus driver for her daughter's body and her pension, lays down her key in front of the pack, and gets one last line at her ear: somebody cashed the pension.
I was carrying the cake knife past the head table when I heard him say it.
"My father didn't marry a bus driver for her cooking," Soren Holloran said.
He said it low and easy, with a plate of ham in one hand, to the six pack elders at his elbow.
"He married her for her daughter's body and her mother's pension.
"And both of them will be off the Ness place before the first snow."
Nobody laughed.
Nobody told him to stop, either.
I stood there in the Dunmore Lutheran church basement with the knife in my hand and a stranger's frosting on my thumb.
It was forty minutes since my mother had said I do.
She was out on the linoleum right now, dancing with her new husband to a fiddle and a bad speaker.
She had her eyes shut and her head against his cardigan.
She hadn't heard a word.
I had known Soren Holloran for two weeks.
He was the pack's alpha heir, thirty years old and six foot four, and I was an omega with a bus driver for a mother.
I had met him four times.
Every time, he had looked at me the way you look at a scale that might be reading heavy.
He hadn't once said what he was thinking.
He'd just said it now, to the whole pack, with ham on his plate.
The elders had gone quiet and studied their coffee.
One of them, Kjell Sundby, wore a gold co-op pin and a pink, pleased face, and he was smiling into his cup.
Soren still hadn't looked up.
He took a bite of ham.
I'm twenty-four years old.
I run the scale house at Ridley Siding, ten miles out on the county road, and I have kept the weigh-ticket books there for five years.
I know what a thing weighs when it's loaded and what it weighs when it's empty.
I know what a man weighs when he lies about the difference.
My father died under a combine when I was nineteen.
After that, I kept the books so my mother could keep the bus route and the house.
No Holloran had ever paid one dime of that.
On Tuesday I had taken a day off and driven to a lawyer's office in Havre, because my mother asked me to, and signed two pages.
I'd asked her what they were.
She'd said, "Paperwork for the wedding, baby. Keep it between us till after," and kissed my cheek, and I'd signed where the lawyer's finger pointed.
I hadn't told a soul.
Halvard's twenty-year-old truck sat in the church lot with the rust coming through its door.
The pack house up at the Ness place hadn't had a new roof in years.
I had noticed both things and thought: he's a farmer, he's proud, and he loves my mother.
I set the cake knife down on the elders' table, between the coffee urn and Soren's plate.
I took my key ring out of my pocket.
There was one key on it that wasn't mine.
Halvard Holloran, my new stepfather, had put it in my hand at the rehearsal on Friday night with tears in his eyes.
It was the key to the weigh shed on the Ness place, his own private farm scale, so I'd always have a place of my own on the land.
I worked it off the ring.
It took a moment.
My hands didn't shake, and I was proud of that later.
I laid it on the tablecloth in front of Soren Holloran, next to his fork.
The whole basement had slowed.
The fiddle hadn't, but the people had.
"I'm Kari Brennick," I said, loud enough for the back tables.
"I'm not living under your roof or your father's.
"I'm not taking one dollar of Holloran money, not now and not when you're all gone.
"I'll be at my own scale house Monday at six, like I am every Monday, and you can find me there."
I turned to the elders.
"Thank you for the ham."
Kjell Sundby's smile slipped about an inch.
I felt every eye in the room on my back, and I didn't care.
I started toward the stairs.
I got three steps.
Then he was behind me, close enough that I felt the heat come off his chest.
He bent his head, and his mouth was at my ear.
He didn't touch me.
He didn't have to.
His breath moved the loose hair at my neck, and his scent came down over me, cold wheat dust and snow and something dark under it that made my knees go soft.
I'd spent two weeks pretending I couldn't smell what he was.
He had spent two weeks pretending he couldn't smell me.
"You've got a nerve," he said, so only I could hear.
"I'll give you that, sweetheart."
I turned my head and looked at him.
He was close enough that I could see the pale scar through his left eyebrow and the gray of his eyes.
They weren't amused.
They were angry, and something under the anger was hungry, and I didn't want to know what it was.
"Move," I said.
He didn't.
"You say you won't take a dollar from us.
"You say it nice and loud, in front of people."
His mouth was a few inches from mine.
"Then you'll be wanting your mother's pension back."
My stomach turned over.
"Somebody cashed it," he said.
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