Don't Touch Him! He's Not An Alpha, He's My Patient novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: The Ceremony

I read the blaze twice.

Then I looked at him.

He had pine sap on his hands and snow in his hair.

He looked more nervous than he had in the Moonwell with every pack watching.

"You carved all of those tonight?" I said.

"Eleven of them. I'd have done more, but my hand cramped."

"You heard every stupid thing I ever said to you."

"They weren't stupid. They kept me alive." He swallowed. "I'm asking, Freja. Out loud. You can say no."

"I'm not going to say no."

"You can, though. That's the point. You taught me that."

I walked across the snow and put my cold hands inside his coat.

"Yes," I said. "Wolf way and the other way. Yes."

A low laugh escaped him, his breath steaming between us.

Then he picked me up off my feet and spun me around in the snow until we both fell over in it.

We were married in the clearing two Saturdays later, under the blazed pine.

Hollow Pine does it the old way.

The whole pack stands in a ring with lanterns, and the oldest of your family binds your wrists together and asks if anyone objects.

Arlene bound our wrists with a strip torn off her best flannel shirt.

"Anybody object?" she said, glaring around the ring. "Speak now, and I'll break your nose."

Nobody objected.

The sixteen-year-old girl giggled.

"Good," Arlene said. "Now. Wylie. Say something nice, you've had five years to think about it."

Wylie looked down at our tied wrists.

"Four years ago she cut my hair for the first time and talked about her sister for an hour," he said.

People laughed.

"I couldn't answer her. I tried every night to move one finger so she'd know I was there."

He lifted our tied hands between us.

"So here's my finger. And the rest of me. I'm never going quiet on you again, Freja."

The ring went still.

Arlene wiped her nose on the rest of her shirt.

"Your turn, Luna," she said thickly.

I looked up at him.

I'd planned something.

It went straight out of my head.

"You told me once you'd have followed me home from the stairs," I said. "You did. You're home."

He kissed me before Arlene could tell him to.

The pack howled.

Forty-one wolves and one black one, loud enough to shake snow off the pines.

There was a supper after in the grange hall that went until midnight.

The old councilman danced with Arlene.

Ansel sent a crate of Stonemere apples and a card in his square capitals that said only GOOD.

The old pack mother sent Gran's wooden bowl, which I'd left on the Moonwell's rim, wrapped in a dish towel.

Somewhere around eleven, Wylie leaned down to my ear.

"I built you something," he said.

"When?"

"While you thought I was tracking that lost calf."

He took me home through the snow.

My little house at the end of the row had a woodstove and one bedroom.

The bedroom had a new bed in it.

It was big and plain and solid, made of peeled lodgepole pine, with a headboard he'd carved with a row of small pine cones.

"No slanted ceiling," he said. "No hearth. Nobody's grandmother. I tested it."

"You tested it."

"I jumped on it. It's fine."

I laughed and pulled him down onto it by the tie of my own wedding knot, still loose around my wrist.

I pulled him down by the red flannel around my wrist.

He landed on top of me and caught himself on his elbows.

We were still laughing, and then we weren't.

His mouth came down on mine and my hands were already at his collar.

He kissed me like he'd been waiting through the whole supper to get me alone.

I got two buttons open before he pulled back and looked at me.

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