My Mate and Family's Choice novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Cider

At Henshaw Hall Dalton's kiss gives her nothing but cloves and his mother's cider makes her wolf growl; at dawn Rodrick invokes the debt law before the elders, and Tegan leaves with him to hear her mother on neutral ground.

Henshaw Hall sat at the bottom of the valley in the pines.

It had a hundred windows, and every one was lit.

Dalton carried my bag and my bow up the front steps himself.

He would not let a servant touch either one.

"You'll have the east room," he said. "It's yours for as long as you want it. Nobody comes in unless you say."

His mother met us in the front hall.

She was a small, silver-haired woman who had never once raised her voice at me in four years.

She held a steaming mug in both hands, and the smell reached me before she did.

Cloves and cinnamon and warm cider.

"Poor lamb," she said. "You're frozen. Drink this."

Something moved low in my chest.

It was a growl, small and deep, from a part of me that had not made a sound since I was eighteen.

I put my hands behind my back.

"Thank you," I said. "I'm not thirsty."

"Just a sip. It's only cider."

"I had a lot of milk today."

Dalton laughed, a warm, easy sound, and took the mug out of his mother's hands.

"Let her be, Mother. She's had a day."

He set it on the hall table.

I watched it steam there, and the growl in my chest settled slowly.

In the east room, Dalton took my face in both hands.

"I thought I'd lost you," he said.

Then he kissed me.

It was the kiss I had been given a hundred times, tender and unhurried and sweet with cloves.

I waited for the heat that was supposed to come.

I waited for the pull that every girl in the Haskins pack described, the one that dragged you across a room.

There was only the smell.

I told myself it was the milk, still sitting in my blood.

I told myself I was cold and tired and had been carried up a mountain.

"Better?" Dalton said against my mouth.

"Better," I said, because he was waiting to hear it.

I didn't sleep.

At dawn I stood at the east window with my bow strung across my knees, watching the mist lift off the yard.

There was a truck at the front gate.

It was an old grey flatbed with MacAlister pack plates, and it hadn't been there when the light came.

Rodrick MacAlister stood beside it with his hands in his coat pockets, waiting to be let in.

I was downstairs before I had decided to be.

The Henshaw elders were already in the front hall, six of them, in their morning coats.

Dalton stood at the head of them with his arms folded and a smile that did not reach his eyes.

"You're on Henshaw land, MacAlister," one of the elders said. "By the old rules, you'll state your business and go."

"Council truce law," Rodrick said. His voice was low and unhurried, and he did not look at anyone but me. "The Haskins debt paper is signed. It stands until the girl refuses it aloud at a Moon Rite."

"She doesn't need to refuse anything," Dalton said. "She's my mate."

"Then she'll say so at the Rite in three nights, in front of the packs, and the paper burns." Rodrick finally looked at him. "Until then, she is owed a hearing."

"A hearing from whom?"

"Her mother."

I stopped on the stairs.

"Annette Haskins came to my gate at dawn," Rodrick said. "She says she'll speak to her daughter on my land and nowhere else. She won't do it in front of Henshaw ears."

The elders murmured.

Dalton's jaw moved once.

"That is convenient," he said. "For you."

"It's the law," said the oldest elder, tiredly. "Three nights under truce. One escort, no pack colors."

"I'll go with her," Dalton said.

"No," Rodrick said. "A guest comes alone. Her bow, her boots, her key to the door. Your pack stays here."

Everyone in the hall turned to look at me.

Somewhere behind me a fork scraped a plate, and then nothing.

I thought of my mother's voice cracking down the middle in the lodge.

I thought of my father looking at the table.

I thought of the smell of cloves in the hall, and the growl that I had not been able to explain.

"I'll go," I said.

Dalton crossed the floor in three strides and took my hands.

"Tegan. Don't. He's the one who locked you in."

"And my mother's the one who drugged me," I said. "I want to hear why. I want to hear it from her face."

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then his smile came back, soft, a little hurt.

"Then I'll be here when you're done," he said.

He pressed a steel thermos into my hands.

"For the drive. It's still hot."

It was heavy and warm, and it smelled of cloves.

I carried it out to Rodrick's truck.

When I was far enough from the house, I unscrewed the cap and poured every drop into the snow.

Rodrick watched me do it and said nothing.

I went with the Butcher of Elk Fork to get away from the man I loved.

That is how wrong I had it.

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