Mated to the Grumpy Alpha

Chapter 9

CIARA | CORBETT’S LANDING

THE ALPHA CARRIED ME OUT OF MY OWN HOUSE OVER HIS SHOULDER. THEO HELD THE DOOR.

It started with Ansel under my streetlight, spinning Gran’s chain around one finger.

“Come and take it, Alpha.” His voice carried up the lane. “Oh, wait. You can’t turn anymore, can you? Silas gives you about a week.”

“I don’t need to turn for you.” Declan didn’t move from in front of me.

“Says the man who can barely stand.” Ansel tucked the chain into his coat and patted the pocket. “Tell your human I’ll keep it safe until Sunday.”

He walked off down the lane whistling. He didn’t hurry, and he didn’t look back.

“He has Gran’s necklace!” I grabbed Declan’s arm. “Go after him!”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“He wants me in the cedars and you alone.” Declan turned around, and his eyes were gold at the edges. “I won’t give him that.”

Jonah’s truck came up the lane and stopped behind Theo’s car. He climbed out with a tire iron and took in the whole scene.

“Evening,” he said to Theo. “I’m Jonah. I’m the friendly one.”

“Theo. I’m the one who called the police.”

“Good man. They’ll be here sometime next week.”

Declan looked up at me on my porch. “You’re not sleeping here tonight.”

“Term five. My house is mine.”

“Term three.” He didn’t blink. “If you sleep under my roof, the door locks from your side. That’s your handwriting. Tonight is what it’s for.”

I had no answer for that. Jonah made a small happy noise and studied the sky.

“One night,” I said. “And the key stays with me.”

“Done.”

“And nobody moves until the cats are fed.”

I packed a bag and fed the cats.

“It’s one night,” I told Mustard. “Nobody panic. If I’m not back by breakfast, Jonah will feed you.”

“Jonah will?” Jonah said.

“You heard her,” Declan said. “Six sharp. Mustard likes the gravy kind.”

“Ciara,” Declan said from the bottom step. “I’m counting.”

“Count all you like. Mustard is a picky eater.”

I set my bag down on the porch to find my shoes. That was my mistake.

He came up the steps in two strides. His shoulder went into my middle, and my feet left my own porch.

“Declan Levesque! Put me down!”

“You can yell at me in the truck.”

Theo was holding the screen door open, because Theo is polite even in a crisis. He watched me go past upside down over Declan’s back.

“Is this normal?” he asked Jonah.

“No,” Jonah said in a reverent voice. “Never in his life.”

***

Declan set me in Betsy’s passenger seat and buckled me in himself before I could escape. Then he went back for my bag and Gran’s blanket.

“That’s term five broken,” I told him when he got in. “Two hundred dollars.”

“Add it to the tab.”

“You don’t have a tab. You have a debt.”

“Then I’ll pay it off slowly.” He started the engine. “Over years, probably.”

Theo knocked on my window. When I rolled it down, he handed me the red cooler.

“Ma would want you to have it,” he said. “Phone me in the morning, Cee.”

“I’m sorry about dinner.”

“You owe me one.” His eyes went past me to Declan. “Bring her home tomorrow.”

Declan nodded once.

Jonah folded himself into the back seat with the tire iron across his knees. We were halfway up the Ridge road before I turned in my seat.

“Tell me why you did it,” I said. “Aisle four. You kissed me twice today, and you meant it both times. I want the real reason.”

His hands tightened on the wheel. In the back, Jonah stopped breathing.

“Not tonight,” Declan said.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re running from your own house in your scrubs. Ask me when you’re not scared.” He glanced at me once. “I’ll tell you everything. I swear it.”

“You don’t get to pick when I’m ready.”

“I know. I’m asking you to let me pick this one time.”

I hated that it sounded fair.

“He means it,” Jonah said from the back. “He’s never broken a swear in his life. Ask him about the canoe.”

“Jonah.”

“He swore he’d paddle it to Minden and back, and he did. In November. With a broken oar.”

“That’s not the same thing at all,” Declan said.

“It’s exactly the same thing. You’re stubborn about promises.” Jonah leaned forward between the seats. “That’s the good news, Ciara.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“He’s stubborn about everything else too.”

***

The Long House sat at the top of the Ridge with every window lit. It was built of old logs gone silver. Twenty pairs of boots stood in a row inside the front door.

“Who owns all these boots?” I asked.

“Everybody,” Jonah said. “We eat here on Sundays. You’ll be expected.”

“Expected to do what?”

“Bring dessert. Those are Pam’s rules, and nobody argues with Pam.”

Declan carried my bag up the stairs to a room at the end of the hall. It had a quilt on the bed and a key on the inside of the lock.

“This was my sister’s room,” he said.

He set the bag down and didn’t step back. We were both in the doorway, and there wasn’t enough doorway for two people. He put one hand on the frame above my head.

“Lock it,” he said. His forehead came down against mine. “I mean it, Ciara.”

“You’re the one standing in it.”

His breath was warm on my mouth. I tipped my face up an inch, and he made a sound low in his chest.

“Toothbrush!” Jonah called up the stairs. He was waving it in its package. “Brand new! I checked!”

Declan shut his eyes and stepped back.

“Goodnight,” he said roughly. Then he went.

***

I couldn’t sleep. At two in the morning I heard breathing on the other side of my door, fast and uneven.

I knelt down and looked through the gap at the bottom. Declan was lying on the hall floor across my doorway with his coat under his head. He was wide awake, and he was shaking.

“You have a perfectly good room,” I whispered through the door.

“It’s too far.” His teeth clicked together. “Turns out a door counts. Go back to bed.”

I could have opened the door.

I lay down on the floorboards on my side instead. I slid my hand flat under the door, through the gap.

His fingers found mine at once. They closed around my hand hot and shaking. Then the shaking stopped.

“Is this going on my tab?” he whispered.

“Twenty dollars an hour. Go to sleep, Declan.”

He laughed under his breath. It was the first laugh I had ever heard from him.

“Ciara,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Go to sleep, because I have work at eight.”

A minute later he was asleep. I lay there with my cheek on the floor and my hand in his, and I didn’t let go.

At five o’clock, headlights swept across my ceiling. A car came up the Ridge road and stopped in the drive below my window.

A door shut. Then a key turned in the front door downstairs.