Chapter 7: The Torn Page

The sun came up over Cutter Ridge while I stood in Gunnar's kitchen in his flannel shirt, making coffee.

It was a big plain room with a black iron stove and a long scrubbed table.

The window looked down over a mile of spruce.

I had slept two hours, and I felt wonderful, and I resented it.

Gunnar came in behind me in bare feet and jeans.

He leaned against the doorframe and watched me fight his coffee pot.

"You put the grounds in the wrong place," he said.

"This is a pot from the nineteen-fifties."

"It's from the nineteen-twenties."

"That explains the attitude."

He took the pot from me, did something with a lever, and the machine began to hiss.

He didn't step away.

His chest was against my back, and his arm came around my waist.

I felt the whole warm length of him.

"I owe you the story," he said into my hair.

"You owe me a lot of things."

"Start with that one."

I turned in the circle of his arm and looked up.

His face was tired, and the lines at his eyes looked older than thirty-six.

"Tell me," I said.

"My father was the Alpha in Iceland," he said.

"My mother was twenty-two when the seer wrote her name beside his."

"Written in the book."

"Written, read aloud, and accepted by everyone but her."

He looked at the stove.

"She kept a second book, a small one, hidden in the flour bin."

"What was in it?"

"Every day of the forty years, in her own hand.

She left it to me, and I have never opened it."

"What was he like?"

"A good Alpha, and a bad husband."

His mouth twisted.

"He never raised his hand to her.

He never asked her what she wanted, either.

He believed that what the book said was what was best."

I put my palm on his chest.

"She died the winter I turned thirty," he said.

"She asked me, at the end, not to let anyone hand me a wife."

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