My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: Haying
Marit's POV
A line of trucks came up my father's road at five in the morning on the first Saturday of August.
I was standing in the yard with a coffeepot when the heeler began to bark.
They came in with swathers on trailers, a baler, two bale wagons and a cooler on the seat of every cab.
I watched them park along my fence.
I knew every driver.
Every one of them had turned his back on me in May.
The first one out was the old woman from the fence, in a man's work hat, with a grocery sack in her arms.
She walked across the yard and stopped in front of me.
"I told you to hold on, honey," she said.
"You did."
"I told myself for forty years I was right to say it."
She put the sack in my hands.
It was heavy and warm and smelled of cinnamon.
"Those are rolls," she said. "I'm no good at the rest of it."
I took them.
That was all she said, and it was enough to start me crying.
I turned and handed the coffeepot to the nearest man.
The older board man came next, with a baler hitched behind a green tractor.
Then came a rancher who had never nodded to me.
Two brothers who had eaten ham in my father's kitchen the day of the funeral came after him.
Rod came down the road last, driving his own truck, with his hay already on the ground on the bench.
They stopped talking when he got out.
A man in a feed cap, sixty or so, walked over to him and took off his hat.
"Reimer," he said. "My father crossed the road when he saw your granddad's truck. I've done the same to you for fifteen years."
Rod looked at him for a time.
"You've got a baler?" Rod said.
The man blinked.
"I do."
"Then run it down the north field. The rows are laid."
The man went red, nodded and walked away.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of My Mate Cut My Brand Off, So the Outcast Wolf Claimed Me are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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