Mated to the Grumpy Alpha

Chapter 10

CIARA | CORBETT’S LANDING

THE ALPHA’S MOTHER FOUND US ASLEEP ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF A DOOR, HOLDING HANDS.

I woke to boots in the hall and a woman’s voice right above Declan’s head.

“Well,” she said. “That’s new.”

Declan let go of my hand so fast he banged his knuckles on the door. I heard him scramble up and hit the wall.

“Mom. You weren’t due until next week.”

“Jonah phoned me at midnight. He said you’d carried a girl up the hill over your shoulder.” Her voice moved closer to my door. “You can come out, dear. I’ve seen pajamas before.”

I opened the door in my flannel pajamas and Gran’s sweater, with floor marks on my cheek. The woman in the hall had a long grey braid and a barn coat. She was looking at me with her chin up.

I knew that face. For ten years she had come to the fall fair and bought two jars of Gran’s strawberry rhubarb jam. She always paid cash and never gave a name.

“You,” I said. “The jam lady.”

“I’m Penny Levesque, Declan’s mother.” She held out her hand, and her grip was firm. “I still have one jar. I never could bring myself to open it.”

***

Penny made coffee in the big kitchen. She knew where every mug lived, because she had put them there. Declan stood by the fridge with his arms crossed and his ears still red.

“Sit down, Ciara.” Penny pulled out a chair. “You look like you need it.”

“I’m fine standing, thanks.”

“Sit anyway. I’m going to tell you something, and I’d rather you weren’t standing when I do.”

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

“Your grandmother came to me fifteen years ago,” she said. “You’d just come to live with her. She sat at my kitchen table in Huntsville, and she asked me for one thing.”

“What thing?”

“Keep her out of the woods. She’s the only family I have.” Penny turned her mug in her hands. “So I did. I watched you from a distance. I made sure the Ridge left you alone.”

“And the jam?”

“That was how I checked on you. Once a year, I could look at your face and see if you were happy.”

My coffee had gone bitter in my mouth. “Who else?”

Penny took a long sip before she answered. “Amrit Bhatt. He made Pilar the same promise.”

“That’s why he kept me at the front desk for eight years.” My voice was rising, and I let it. “That’s why he never let me buy in.”

“I can’t tell you his reasons. Those are his to give.”

“Of course they are. Everybody has reasons, and nobody shares a single one with me.”

“Mom,” Declan said from the fridge. “Tell her what you told me. About the jam.”

Penny sighed. “Every fall I went home and told my husband she looked well. He’d ask if she was still smiling at the customers. I always said yes.”

“I was smiling because I needed the money,” I said. “The jam paid my phone bill.”

Penny looked at her son. Then she looked back at me with her chin up again.

“Would your grandmother approve of this?” she asked. “You in this house, on that floor?”

That did it. I put my mug down hard enough to slop coffee on the table.

“My grandmother is dead,” I said. “So are her wishes. I’m twenty-seven years old. I am so tired of people choosing my life for me in rooms I’m not in.”

“Mom.” Declan’s voice dropped into something I hadn’t heard from him before. It filled the whole kitchen. “That’s enough.”

Penny went still. So did everything else in the house.

“Don’t you start either,” I told him. “You chose for me in aisle four. You don’t get to be on my side now.”

Penny studied me over her mug. Then her face changed, and she looked almost sorry.

“He slept until five,” she said. “Jonah says it’s the first time since the feed store. Did you know that?”

“I was there,” I said. “On my side of the door, holding his hand.”

I went upstairs and packed my bag in ninety seconds. Declan was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and he caught my wrist as I went past.

“Stay for breakfast,” he said. “Please. Let me make you eggs.”

“Let go of me, Declan.”

He did, at once. That surprised me more than anything else that morning. I walked out the front door.

***

It was six miles from the Long House to Alder Lane. I was wearing twenty-nine dollar shoes from the Walmart in Minden. Betsy’s engine started behind me before I reached the bottom of the drive.

“You forgot your toothbrush!” Jonah yelled from the porch.

“Keep it!” I yelled back. I didn’t turn around. The truck crawled along behind me at the speed of my feet with its hazard lights going.

After a mile I turned around and yelled at the windshield. “I’m not getting in!”

He leaned out his window. “Nobody’s offering you a ride.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Driving.”

“At two miles an hour?”

“Betsy likes it slow.” He didn’t smile. “Keep walking, Ciara. I’m not stopping you.”

“Then go home!”

“No.”

I walked another two miles with my feet hurting and my eyes stinging. He didn’t honk or argue. He didn’t try to pick me up and put me anywhere.

He just made sure nobody came near me from behind.

I called Nancy at mile four. “I’m going to be late.”

“Why do you sound like you’re walking? Where are you?”

“On the Ridge road. Declan’s following me in his truck.”

“Following you how? Is he being creepy?”

“No. It’s more of a slow parade.”

“Is he holding a sign?”

“He’s holding a grudge against my shoes. He keeps looking at them.”

Nancy laughed so hard she had to put the phone down.

At my gate he stopped the truck and got out. He held out his hand for my bag, and I gave it to him because my shoulder was killing me. He carried it up the walk and set it down below Gran’s line.

“My mother was wrong to ask you that,” he said.

“So were you, in the feed store.”

“I know.” He put the bag strap in my hand, and his fingers stayed on mine. “I’m on your porch on Sunday. Not one hour. Until morning.”

“I didn’t invite you.”

“I’m not asking. I’ll pay the rate.” His thumb pressed my knuckles once. Then he let go and walked back to Betsy.

I stood at the gate and watched the truck until it turned off Alder Lane. Then I turned around and climbed my own front steps.

An envelope was tucked into the frame of my screen door. My name was on the front in neat blue ink.

I knew that handwriting from a memo line. I opened it standing on my step.

“Miss Cortez,” I read out loud to nobody. “The offer ends at midnight on Sunday. After that, I cannot promise he will knock.”

It was signed with two neat initials. S.B.