My Not-Yet Mate and the Thirty-Day Trial novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Thirty
The Keeper names Laney and Joss fated mates and ties a red cord on each wrist, which hushes the bond for thirty nights; on her porch Joss says nothing is pulling him and he wants her anyway.
The Keeper said my name in a room full of eighty wolves, and I still had cow on my sleeves.
"Laney Dunnaway," she read from her little black book. "Joss Holcombe."
I had come straight from a prolapsed heifer at a ranch up the valley.
I had washed my hands and my face in the Grange hall bathroom sink and that was all.
The room went quiet.
Across the folding chairs, Joss Holcombe stood up.
He is six foot three, with shoulders that fill a doorway, and he stood up slowly.
His dark hair was loose to his collar.
His hands hung open at his sides, and I looked at them because I could not look at his face.
I had known Joss my whole life.
He ran the sawmill crew, he was the Alpha's Beta, and he had once rebuilt my grandfather's fence in three days without being asked.
I had never talked to him about anything but weather and cattle.
I had thought about him for two years anyway.
That was my private business, and now it was a name read aloud at the equinox.
"Come up, both of you," the Keeper said.
She is the oldest woman in our pack, and she has done this every spring and fall since before my mother was born.
I walked to the front in my rubber boots, and every head turned to follow me.
I heard Dena in the third row whisper, "Oh my God, oh my God," at a volume meant to be heard.
Joss reached the front when I did.
He smelled like cedar and a clean wool coat and a little like woodsmoke.
I noticed that and then I was annoyed that I noticed.
"Fated mates are not claimed at first sight in this pack," the Keeper said to the room, in the voice she uses for rules.
"You get the Thirty."
She took out two lengths of red wool cord.
"Thirty nights, one roof, and the bond held quiet for all of them."
"Nothing pulls. Nothing is owed."
"Either of you may say 'I walk' on any morning, and the cord is burned."
"Nobody thinks less of you."
A few people in the back coughed, which is how a pack says it will think less of you anyway.
"On the thirtieth night," she said, "you say whether you stay."
She turned to me.
"Give me your wrist, Dr. Dunnaway."
I held out my left arm.
She wound the cord twice around it and knotted it, and her old fingers were dry and quick.
She did the same to Joss.
Then she took my hand and pressed my wrist against his, cord against cord.
His skin was hot.
His thumb settled over the pulse in my wrist.
I waited for the thing my mother described to me when I was fifteen.
She called it a fall off a high step with no ground under it.
I waited for the pull, the fever, the roar in my ears.
Nothing came.
The room made a sound, a soft shift.
The Keeper said, "There. It's hushed."
My heartbeat was the only thing I could feel, and it was racing, and it was mine.
I looked up at last.
Joss was looking straight at me with hazel eyes that did not move away.
"Huh," he said, very low.
"What?"
"I thought it would go quiet and I'd stop wanting to do this." His thumb pressed, once, gently, on my pulse. "I didn't stop."
My face went hot from my collar to my hairline.
Behind him, in the second row, Keeley Orrell sat with her arms folded and her ponytail perfectly straight.
She did not look at me.
She looked at his hand on my wrist.
"Whose roof?" Emmett Varney, our Alpha, called from the side, kindly, as if asking about a potluck.
The hearth rule is old, and the pair picks a house.
Joss's mouth went to one side.
"Yours has the bigger kitchen," he said to me, not loudly.
"Mine," I said.
It was out before I thought about it.
The room laughed, and I realized I had made the first decision of the Thirty in under a minute.
I liked how that felt more than I should have.
I drove home with the cord scratching my wrist and Dena's text lighting up my phone.
DENA: HE IS COMING TO YOUR HOUSE DENA: WEAR SOMETHING DENA: OR DON'T
I turned my phone face down on the seat.
His truck followed my taillights down the county road, with one headlight a shade dimmer than the other.
I pulled up by the farmhouse and sat there for a moment.
Joss parked behind me, got out and took a duffel bag from the bed of the truck.
He walked up to the porch and stopped at the bottom step.
The second step has been loose for a year.
He put his boot on it, and it groaned.
He looked down at it.
"I'll fix that," he said.
"You don't have to."
"I know."
He came up the steps and stood in front of me on the porch with the yellow light on his hair.
He was close enough that I had to tip my chin up.
"Laney," he said. "Nothing's pulling me. The Keeper made sure of that."
"I'm not saying this because of a rope on my arm."
"Okay," I said.
My voice came out thin.
"I've wanted to put my mouth on you since the day you pulled a calf out of a neighbor's pasture."
"You did it bare-armed, and you swore at it for twenty minutes."
I stared at him.
"Tell me to go sleep in the truck and I will," he said. "I'll mean it."
I thought about the spare room, the couch, all the careful rules I had made about being twenty-eight and alone.
I thought about thirty nights and a cord that said nothing was owed.
I opened my front door and held it with my hip.
"Come in," I said.
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