They Blamed Me for Mama's Death, So I Healed Their Worst Enemy novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Cold Hands

In the Roan lodge Dovie shakes with the cost of healing, Duncan sets his rules, and when she breaks the first one he puts his mouth on her with his coat still on.

The Roan keep their Alpha in a lodge of stone and black logs on Yellow Mountain.

I rode up to it in the back of a truck, in his coat, shaking.

I could not stop.

Healing takes the heat out of me.

The harder the break, the colder I get, and a bone through a child's shin is about as hard as I have done.

A short old woman met us on the porch.

She had a white braid wound round her head, a man's gray cardigan and a wooden spoon in her pocket.

"Dessie," the Alpha said. "Feed her."

"I was going to anyhow," she said. "You don't have to tell me how to run my kitchen, Duncan."

She took me by the elbow and walked me through a great room with a hearth you could stand up in.

She sat me down at a long plank table and put a bowl of soup in front of me.

I could not hold the spoon.

She watched my hand shake.

Then she took the spoon, filled it, and fed me.

"Dessie Trivett," she said. "I'm his great-aunt. I cook, I sing bass, and I don't take sass from anybody who ain't had three bowls."

I ate three bowls.

She put a fourth in front of me and sat down across the table.

"The Roan send a flatbed of feed and firewood to Elk Fork every December," she said. "Been doing it since before Duncan could drive."

She tilted her head at me.

"Is that how you all stay fed down there?"

I thought about it.

I had carried every sack that ever came into Loyal Gragg's barn.

"I never saw a flatbed," I said.

"Well." She wiped her hands on the cardigan. "Old Alpha's book, I reckon. Nobody's asked."

The Alpha stood in the door of the great room with his arms folded.

He had taken a barn coat off a hook, and he had it buttoned to the neck.

"Miss Moretz," he said. "Three things."

I waited.

"You are a guest in this house until the thaw."

"You are not a servant, and you do not eat in the kitchen. You eat at this table."

I had been about to carry my bowl to the kitchen step.

It is where I have eaten my whole life.

I set the bowl back down.

"Second," he said. "Nobody touches me. That includes you. Particularly you."

"And?"

"You do not heal me, whatever you see."

"Third was the table," Dessie said.

"Third was the table," he agreed, and he went out.

Dessie put me in a room at the end of the upstairs hall.

It had a quilt, a stove going and a window onto the dark.

It was the warmest room I have ever been in, and it did not help.

I stood in front of the stove with my arms wrapped around myself and my teeth knocking together.

There was a knock.

"Dessie says you haven't come down," the Alpha said through the door. "She says you can't get warm."

"I can't."

He opened it.

He stood in the doorway in the barn coat, six foot three, with his hands at his sides and the hall light behind him.

He was not angry, and he was not sorry for me.

He was working out what it would cost him to come in.

"What do you need?" he said.

"Heat," I said. "Skin. A body that's warm. It's the only thing that has ever worked."

I added: "You don't have to like it."

"Rule two," he said.

His voice was not quite level.

"Then stay in the hall," I said, through my teeth. "Rule two is yours, Mr. Trivett. I don't remember agreeing to it."

He did not move.

I crossed the floor in my socks.

I took his right hand in both of mine.

He went rigid from his shoulder to his heel.

His hand was big and hot and dry, and it was shaking.

It had been twenty-six years, he told me later, since anyone had held it.

The knowing hit me again, wet slate and cut cedar.

The cold that had been in my bones all evening drained out through my palms.

"Dovie," he said.

It was the first time he had used my name.

"Come here," I said.

I put my hand flat on his chest, over the coat.

His heart was going hard enough to feel through the wool.

I stood up on my toes and kissed him.

He did not kiss me back for a long second.

I felt him decide.

Then his hand came up and cupped the back of my head.

He kissed me slow and deep, a man who had gone without, his tongue sliding against mine.

I made a sound I did not know I could make.

"Take this off," I said against his mouth, and pulled at my own shirt.

"I'm taking mine off. You keep yours on, if you have to. I don't care."

"Dovie," he said.

"Do you want to?"

"God, yes," he said.

I stripped.

I did it fast, standing in front of the stove, and I was not shy about it.

He was staring at me with his whole face open.

My breasts were full and heavy in the firelight, and my belly was soft.

I have thick thighs and a gap in my teeth, and Royce told me for five years what he thought of every inch.

Duncan Trivett looked at every inch of me, and wanted all of it, and let me see that he did.

"You're beautiful," he said, rough.

"I'm sorry. I don't have the words I ought to have. You're the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

I walked backward to the bed and sat on the edge and opened my knees.

"Then show me," I said.

He came down on his knees on the rug, in his barn coat buttoned to the throat, and put his hands on my thighs.

He stopped there.

His hands were shaking.

"Tell me what you want," he said.

"Your mouth." I leaned back on my elbows. "On my pussy. Now."

He put his face between my legs.

The first stroke of his tongue went up through me slow and flat and hot.

I cried out and dropped back on the quilt.

He did it again.

He found my clit with the tip of his tongue and circled it, easy and patient.

He learned me by listening.

I got my hand in his hair.

He went still, his whole body, and made a low noise against me that I felt in my spine.

I pulled him closer by the hair.

"Don't stop," I said. "God, don't you stop."

He did not.

He licked me with his whole mouth, long strokes and then small fast ones on my clit.

Then he slid two thick fingers inside me and curled them up, and I came apart.

I came with my back arched and my heels digging into his shoulders, shouting into the quilt.

My hand was fisted tight in his hair.

He held me through it.

He kept his mouth on me until I was pulling at him to stop.

When I could breathe, I looked down.

He knelt there with his forehead against my thigh, shaking, his mouth wet, his eyes shut.

I touched his cheek, and a shudder went through him from his head to his knees.

"Rule two," I said, hoarse.

"I know," he said into my skin. "I know."

He stood up very carefully.

He was hard against the front of his trousers, and he saw me see it.

He did not touch it, and he did not ask me for anything.

"Get warm," he said. "Sleep."

"Duncan."

"If I stay in this room, Dovie, I won't leave it."

He shut the door softly behind him.

I lay naked under his great-aunt's quilt, and for the first time in my life I was warm all the way to my feet.

I was still lying there when the window went gray.

Headlights swept across the ceiling.

More headlights followed, coming up the mountain road toward the gate.

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