The Forbidden Mate: Claimed by My Ex's Alpha Uncle novel · Chapter 20 of 32

Chapter 20: The Loft

Stellan didn't say a word on the drive down the back of the ridge.

He drove slower than he'd driven up.

Both hands on the wheel.

I'd taken a picture of the lease before the foreman snatched it back.

At the ranch, he took my phone and sent the picture and the lab numbers to the three wolves who'd brought the lumber.

Tell people. Bottled water. Boil does nothing. Tell everybody you trust.

By nine that night, Jarrett had answered on the pack's group text.

The water is FINE. Hospital tested it. Exiles are trying to scare you so you'll run to their barn.

It had forty hearts under it in ten minutes.

Stellan read it standing in the yard.

Then he put my phone back in my hand and walked off toward the fence line in the dark.

I let him go.

He came back at eleven.

I was up in the loft of the barn, where we'd been sleeping since the farmhouse filled up.

We'd made it a room.

Two hay bales for a table, a camp lantern, a mattress the trucker had found, every blanket Lucille could spare.

The big loft door at the end was cracked open a foot for air, and I could see the stars through it.

The barn under us was empty for once.

The schoolteacher had taken her girl to her sister's in the city that afternoon, where the water came out of a tap that wasn't ours.

I heard him climb the ladder.

He sat down on the edge of the mattress with his back to me and took off his boots.

He set them side by side, very neatly.

"Say it," I said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever you walked the fence line not saying."

He was quiet for a while.

"I was in that chair for fourteen years," he said. "Every year I said no to that road."

"I know."

"And three days after I lay down on your table, it's done. And I'm in a barn."

"Do you regret it?"

He turned his head.

"Regret what?"

"The seat. Giving it up." My voice came out harder than I meant. "For me."

He didn't answer fast enough.

That was the problem.

He didn't answer fast enough, and the silence went into me like the fishhook in my clinic.

"Okay," I said.

I got up.

"Geneva."

"No, it's fine. You'd be in that chair if you'd kept your mouth shut at the trial. You'd have stopped them."

"That's not..."

"Go back. Tell the eldest it was a fever. The bond, the loft, all of it. Tell them I seduced you on the operating table. They'll believe it."

"Stop."

"I spent seven years with a man who thought I cost him something," I said. "I'm not doing it again with you."

He stood up so fast the lantern swung.

"Don't tell me what I'm sorry for," he said.

His voice wasn't loud.

It was worse than loud.

"Yes. I regret the seat. I regret it every morning. I wake up and I don't know who's watching the creek, and now I know nobody was."

"There."

"I'm not done."

He took one step toward me.

"I don't regret you. Not for one second. Not the trial, not the cabin, not this barn."

"You hesitated."

"Because I was trying to say it right!" He threw up his hands. "You asked me a real question. I was trying to give you a real answer. You don't let a man finish."

"You take too long."

"You walk off too fast."

We stood there glaring at each other across a loft full of hay.

Then my mouth twitched.

I couldn't help it.

His did too.

"You're a very difficult woman," he said.

"You're a very slow man."

"I'm a careful man."

"You hesitated so long I could have run a code."

He laughed.

He sat back down on the mattress and put his face in his hands and laughed until his shoulders shook, and I felt it rattle under my ribs.

I sat down next to him.

After a while he took his hands away from his face.

"I miss the work," he said quietly. "I don't miss who I had to be to keep it."

"Who was that?"

"A man who never looked at the barn."

I leaned my head on his shoulder.

He put his arm around me.

His heartbeat in my chest slowed down to match mine.

"We'll stop them," I said.

"I know."

"Not tonight."

"No," he said. "Not tonight."

He turned and kissed my temple.

Then the corner of my eye.

Then my mouth, slow, the way he'd kissed me in the cabin, like he was apologizing and asking at the same time.

"Is this all right?" he said against my lips.

"Yes," I said. "Come here. Yes."

He kissed me slow, like he had all night to do it.

His hand came up and cupped my jaw, not to hold me there, just to hold me.

I melted into it before I told myself not to.

"Geneva," he murmured against my mouth.

"What?"

"Nothing. Just wanted to say it."

I laughed, soft and surprised, and he swallowed the sound.

His tongue slid against mine, and his other hand found the hem of my flannel shirt, his flannel shirt, and slid underneath.

His palm was warm and rough against my stomach, and my breath caught.

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