The Alpha's Fine Print novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Fine Print
Tilda signs the Hollowtree deed as the pack's new Steward, and Lorcan finds out her no stops him cold.
Hobart Lund left me one thing in his will, and it was a pen.
It was a heavy black fountain pen with a chipped cap.
The letter that came with it said, "Read the deed before you sign. Then sign it."
I was thirty-one years old, a property lawyer, and I read everything twice.
So I drove four hours from Missoula to Larch Creek with the 1911 Hollowtree deed on my passenger seat.
The Reeder ranch sat at the end of a gravel road, under a wall of dark larch trees.
The house was long and low, with a porch that ran the whole front.
A dozen people stood on that porch, and not one of them smiled at me.
They were big, quiet people in flannel and boots, and they all looked at my red lipstick like it was a warning.
"You're Quarles," said the man at the center.
He was tall and lean, with chestnut hair tied at his neck and a face that had never been told no.
His eyes were the color of whiskey held up to a lamp.
"I'm the successor Steward of the Hollowtree Trust," I said. "Mr. Lund named me."
"Hobart's dead," he said.
"I know. I went to the funeral."
"I didn't see you."
"I stood at the back. I'm good at the back."
Something moved across his face, quick and hard to read.
"I'm Lorcan Reeder," he said. "I run this land. The lease runs out on December thirty-first, and I'd like to handle that without a stranger."
"The lease is a ten-year renewal signed by the Steward," I said. "It isn't yours to handle. It's mine."
A woman at his shoulder laughed out loud.
She was small and freckled, with platinum hair cut short as a boy's.
Lorcan did not look at her.
He looked at the folder under my arm.
"Come inside," he said. "Let's make this quick."
The dining table was scarred pine, big enough for thirty.
I laid out the deed and put on my glasses.
The deed was four pages of cramped old legal English, and I had read it in the car at a gas station in Philipsburg.
Most of it was dull.
Boundaries, water rights, a clause about grazing, a clause about a hollow larch tree.
Then, on page three, there was one sentence in a paragraph like all the others.
It had made me put the paper down and stare at a gas pump for ten minutes.
"The Steward, being one not of the blood," I read aloud, "shall hold the Alpha's refusal for one year from the signing."
"What the Steward forbids, the Alpha shall not do, nor speak against, nor move toward."
Nobody on the porch had followed us in.
But the doorway was full of faces anyway.
"That's nonsense," Lorcan said, very quietly. "Old nonsense. Sign it and we'll all go home."
"You've read it?"
"My father made me read it when I was twelve."
"Then you know what it says."
"I know what it says on paper."
I uncapped Hobart's pen.
I should have been afraid.
I was a human woman in a house full of people who had gone still in a way people don't go still.
I could smell pine and woodsmoke and something warm and animal under it.
Instead I was angry, because a man I loved had left me a trap and called it a gift.
"Mr. Reeder, I don't believe in this clause," I said.
"I'm signing because it's the only way your land stays yours."
"Then we'll see what's real."
I signed.
The nib scratched the old paper, T. Quarles, October fourteenth.
The sound of it seemed to go on a very long time.
Lorcan's shoulders came down.
His hand shot across the table and closed on the deed.
He was fast, much faster than a man should be.
His fingers had it by the corner, and he was pulling it toward himself, toward the fire in the stone hearth.
"No," I said.
I didn't shout it.
I just said it.
He stopped.
I mean he stopped completely, every muscle, with the paper half a foot off the wood.
His arm shook.
A vein stood out along his forearm, and his jaw clenched, and his eyes went from whiskey to gold.
He wasn't holding still because he chose to.
He was fighting it, and he could not move one inch.
"Lorcan," said the freckled woman, and her voice cracked.
"I'm all right, Bess," he said through his teeth.
I put my hand over his wrist.
His skin was burning hot, and under my fingers his pulse hammered.
I should have taken my hand away.
I didn't.
"Let go of the deed," I said.
His fingers opened at once, and the paper dropped onto the table.
The whole room breathed out.
He was staring at my hand on his arm.
His chest rose and fell, and the gold in his eyes did not fade.
"Everyone out," I said.
I had no idea where the voice came from.
His people looked at their Alpha, and he gave one short nod, and they went.
The door shut.
We were alone, and he was still looking at where I touched him.
"A year," he said, low and rough.
"You hold my no for a whole year. Anything you say no to, I can't do."
"Only what I forbid," I said. "Nothing else."
"Do you know what that feels like?"
"No."
"Like a hand around everything I am."
He turned his wrist under my fingers until my palm lay flat against his.
"And it's the best thing I've ever felt."
My mouth went dry.
His thumb moved against the inside of my wrist, one slow stroke, and I felt it in my knees.
"Tell me no again," he said.
I should have.
I know I should have.
He was a stranger, and a wolf, and a client, and I had a whole career that told me where this line was.
"Tilda," he said, and my name sounded different in his mouth.
"Tell me no, or I'm going to kiss you."
I looked at his mouth.
I didn't say a word.
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