Page 90 of Black Moon

Colt groaned and wiped his hands down his face. “Yeah, that sounds like him. Seriously? They’re all here?”

Rowan shot him a sympathetic expression, nodding. “Sorry. But I should get back before Juniper socks your brother for refusing to touch anything and making faces like breakfast stinks.” He turned to go, but paused and looked back at us, a tentative half-smile on his face. “But I made breakfast! A celebration breakfast, because you know. Election. And, um, congratulations, Linden. I know you’ll do great.”

I blinked after him as he rushed off, and Colt groaned again. “I don’t believe they came here. And of course my father is acting like Virginia is a foreign freaking country.”

“Isn’t he a senator from Maryland? He knows we’re neighbors, right?” I turned to the closet. I wanted to clean up the floor of the bedroom, but if his family was waiting on us, we didn’t really have time for that. I needed to get dressed and get down there.

Rowan was right, after all, and being treated like an ignorant hill-person was likely to make Juniper explode, and I didn’t want to leave her to put up with it, or Rowan to deal with the fallout.

“Yeah, but he thinks anything less populated than Bethesda is rural, and all people he classifies as rural are by default uneducated.” Colt was still sitting there on my bed as I opened the closet, his shoulders slumped and head hanging low. “This is what I get for telling them no, I guess.”

I reached deep into the back of my closet and pulled out the chocolate-brown cashmere sweater Rowan had made me when he’d learned to knit, and brought it over to Colt. There wasn’t a softer thing in my whole wardrobe, and it smelled so deeply of pack that it had always been an enormous comfort to me. Maybe Colt’s family wouldn’t approve, but apparently they’d shown up and insulted my family. They could kiss my ass.

“Here,” I said, unfolding it and holding it out to him. “And this isn’t on you. If they never learned to take no for an answer, it’s time for them to do that.”

He took the sweater and pulled it tight against his chest, breathing in the pack scent of it and sighing with happiness, and it made the alpha in me practically purr in contentment. “It’s not just that I said no,” he said after a moment.

I wasn’t naive. I knew what he meant. But there was no way I was going to accept that. Colt was a grown adult, and he got to make his own decisions. “Then your father is going to have to explain to this uneducated rural person exactly why he has a problem with his adult son making his own choices. Maybe if he explains real slow, I’ll understand.”

I’d always found that forcing people to explain their inappropriate attitudes in great detail made my point for me. It’s a little hard to explain that a joke is funny because of bigotry, and still be laughing.

A tiny part of me wanted to throw on my rattiest sweatpants and a torn T-shirt I only wore for housecleaning, but no. I would do what I always did. So I pulled out a pair of charcoal slacks, a button-down, and an argyle sweater vest in gray and blue. The senator would have to find a reason to look down on me that wasn’t my home, my clothing, or my education.

Somehow, I didn’t doubt he’d manage it.

By the time I’d dressed, Colt was finally pulling the sweater over his head, looking pale and drawn, like a man headed for his own execution.

“Hey,” I whispered to him. “No need for that face. We can deal with this. So your family are, um—” I wasn’t sure I wanted to seriously insult them. They might be making my brother and sister’s morning worse, and maybe Colt was mad at them, but that didn’t mean he wanted or needed to hear me complaining about them.

“Jerks,” he confirmed with a scowl as he snatched a pair of jeans out of his bag and started stuffing his legs into them. “They’re a bunch of elitist jerks who refuse to take no for an answer from me, and are going to judge you and Grovetown and everything good in the world, and find it wanting.”

He yanked his zipper up with such force that I winced, imagining him getting tender skin stuck in the teeth of the thing. Then I went over and took his face between my hands, angling his chin up and softly kissing his lips. “I understand. And you know what? That’s fine.”

“Fine?” he demanded, angry on behalf of the whole town. The whole pack.

On behalf of me.

“Fine,” I agreed, leaning back down to give him another kiss. “You know why?”

His eyes had narrowed to slits, and he shook his head. “I don’t see how it can be fine that they invade your house, and probably eat Rowan’s food, all while insulting it and looking down on everyone here.”

“It’s fine because it’s on them, Colt.” I leaned in and pressed our foreheads together. “They miss out on Rowan’s pie, and Zeke’s stories, and Claudia’s...Claudianess. By looking down on us, they’re the ones who lose. Are we missing out, not being graced with their approval?”

He snorted and shook his head.

“Then let’s get out there and keep my sister from killing anyone.”

46

Colt

This was my nightmare. Obviously, at some point, Dad was going to send Chase or Cait or maybe even Mom to Grovetown to try and talk some sense into me. That was unavoidable, but I could’ve handled one of them—pulled them aside and appealed to their care for me. It wasn’t like there were no fucks given to my happiness in the entire Doherty family.

But when you sat me down at one side of the table, Dad down at the other, and asked them to choose between us, I was always going to lose.

Of course, there wasn’t a seat at the head of the table for me to take. Dad was at one end, Juniper at the other. Every bite of breakfast she took, she ate with vigorous enthusiasm, glaring down the table and begging my father to say something nasty.

When we came in, she didn’t budge from her seat. “Morning, you two.”

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