Mated to the Grumpy Alpha

Chapter 2

CIARA | CORBETT’S LANDING

BY SATURDAY MORNING THE WHOLE TOWN HAD A NEW NAME FOR ME. IT WAS AISLE FOUR.

Nancy held her phone across the front desk so I could see. Corrie’s video had nine thousand views and a sad song playing under it.

“She added a song,” I said. “Who does that to a person?”

“Corrie does. She thinks she’s an artist.” Nancy scrolled with her thumb. “Somebody in Bracebridge says she would have slapped him. A woman in Florida wants your skin care routine.”

“I don’t have a skin care routine. I have a bar of soap and a towel.”

“Then you’re doing great, Aisle Four.”

“Call me that again and I’m telling Amrit you eat his yogurt.”

“He knows. He labels it now.” She turned the phone around to look at it again. “You have to admit the man was nice to look at. In a mean way.”

“He dumped me in front of the birdseed, Nancy.”

“I’m not telling you to marry him. I’d just have let him catch me.”

I took the phone out of her hand and put it face down on the desk. Mrs. Dunphy came in at nine with her cat in a laundry basket and her saddest face on.

“You poor thing,” she said. “My Harold proposed to me in a feed store, you know. At least he waited until I’d paid.”

“That’s lovely, Mrs. Dunphy. Let’s have a look at Pickles.”

“He was a Ridge man too, your one in the video. You can tell by the shoulders.”

“What’s a Ridge man?”

“Oh, you know. Those families up the hill. They keep to themselves.” She patted my hand. “Your grandmother never trusted them.”

Pickles had swallowed a hair elastic. I spent twenty minutes on her and nobody said the word aisle. They were the best twenty minutes of my day.

Two teenage girls came in after that and asked about the rabbits. They filmed my face the whole time I answered.

“Are you the Aisle Four lady?” the taller one asked.

“Today I’m the rabbit lady,” I said. “That one bites, by the way.”

Smile, I told myself. You have bills. Wish me luck, because the day was not done with me.

***

Theo Marchetti came in at eleven with two coffees and the same shy smile he’d had in ninth grade. He wasn’t supposed to start until Monday.

“I wanted to see the place before it was mine,” he said. “Is that strange?”

“It’s yours either way.” I took the cup he held out. “Oat milk and two shots. You remembered.”

“I remember most things about this town.” He looked at the cracked tile by the scale and then at me. “Cee, I saw the video. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. A stranger dumped me before we’d even had dinner. He saved us both the bill.”

Theo didn’t laugh. He rarely did, and back in school I had thought that made him deep.

“He had no right to do that to you in public,” he said. “If he comes in here, I’ll ask him to leave.”

“You’d say please.”

“Politely, and with the door held open.” He set his cup on the desk. “He’d still be going.”

I asked him the thing Amrit had dodged. “When did he call you about the clinic?”

“Amrit? Back in March.” Theo frowned. “I didn’t even know it was for sale. He said he wanted it to go to someone who would keep you on.”

“I was doing his books that whole month. He never said a word to me.”

Theo slid an envelope across the desk. “There’s a raise in it, fifteen percent. I put it in writing so you’d know I mean it.”

Fifteen percent was more than he had given me in eight years. It still wasn’t a door.

“Thank you,” I said. “Can I think about it?”

“Take all the time you need, Cee.” He stopped at the door. “And Ma wants you for lasagna tomorrow. She says heartbreak makes you thin.”

“I knew the man for four minutes.”

“She doesn’t care. She already bought the ricotta.”

He touched my arm on his way out, warm and kind. My heart stayed exactly where it was.

***

Gran’s house sits at the end of Alder Lane. It has a crooked porch and three stray cats who think they own it.

“Dinner is late because I’m a public figure now,” I told the cats. “Don’t look at me like that, Mustard.”

I fed them first and ate toast with peanut butter over the sink. Groceries were eleven dollars short this week.

Nancy called while I was licking the knife.

“Mute your phone,” she said. “Aisle Four is trending in three counties.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s terrible. But somebody made a cartoon of you and you’ve got great hair in it.”

“Goodnight, Nancy.”

“Lock your doors. I mean it.”

I swept the porch after that and checked the line of salt across the top step. Gran laid it every spring and fall with the heel of her hand.

She made me promise to keep it, and she never told me why. I kept it up the same way I kept her skillet oiled and her blue pitcher on the windowsill.

At eleven the cats shot under the porch all at once.

“Mustard?” I called through the screen. “What’s gotten into you three?”

Then I heard breathing outside, slow and heavy and too big for a dog. I turned on the porch light.

A grey wolf stood at the bottom of my steps. It was the size of a small pony, and it held its head lower than its shoulders.

“Okay,” I whispered to nobody. “That is not a coyote.”

It came up the first step and hit the line of salt. It yelped and jumped back into the yard.

I grabbed Gran’s skillet off the stove. My hands shook so hard the handle rattled against my ring.

“Go away!” I yelled through the screen. “I have a skillet and I am not afraid to use it!”

The wolf didn’t care about my skillet. It paced along the bottom step with its eyes on my door.

Then a man walked out of the dark at the end of the drive. It was Declan Levesque.

He was barefoot in jeans, and his T-shirt was on inside out. He hadn’t shaved, and his eyes were red around the rims. He walked straight past the wolf and stopped in front of my porch with his back to me.

“Go home,” he told it. His voice was low and rough. “Now.”

The wolf showed him its teeth and stayed exactly where it was.

“What are you doing here?” I asked through the screen. “How do you even know where I live?”

“Get inside and lock your door.”

“I am inside. This is my house.”

He turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder. Up close he looked worse. He was grey under the eyes and swaying a little on his feet.

“Then lock it,” he said. “Please.”

The wolf stopped pacing. It swung its big head toward the side gate, where I kept the garbage cans.

I looked too. Under the gate light the salt across the path had been scuffed open. Someone had dragged a boot through it and left a gap the width of my hand.

Declan saw it at the same moment I did. He walked over and stood in the gap with nothing in his hands.

“Declan, move!” I shouted. “It’s twice your size!”

The wolf put its head down and ran at him.