Page 1 of Harvest Moon

1

Alexis

As I walked up the long driveway to Ridge’s family farm, all I could think about was my mother’s tiny frown as I walked out the door. It was the shirt, of course. She wanted me to get rid of it, because “it was too small.”

Which, I supposed, wasn’t entirely untrue. I’d gotten it in high school, and I had grown since then, but that was half the reason I wore it. More than once, I’d been told I looked good in it.

Yes, sure, I was an omega, but as an omega who’s been miraculously unaffected by the Condition, I’m in pretty good shape. I think it’s the hiking. Or maybe the canoeing. The rock climbing?

The canoeing was for sure why my arms looked pretty darn good in the shirt. Maybe the climbing for my pecs.

What can I say? It pays to be an outdoorsy guy sometimes.

And I needed my best foot forward for this. Or my sexiest shirt. Whatever.

Because Ridge was finally home.

It felt like it had been forever. All through high school, our parents had encouraged us to wait to start anything serious.

My mother had always nagged about how I didn’t want to get myself trapped in a bond while I was still in high school. It was hard to blame her, and even now, I could see her point. She and my father had bonded in high school, and by all werewolf accounts—except for hers—they were some kind of perfect fairy-tale fated mates or whatever.

The truth was, she could barely stand to look at him. He was crude and blue collar and down to earth, and she hated all that about him. In Ridge, she’d seen everything she hated about her own life as a specter looming over my future.

Thing is, I didn’t want fancy parties or silk blouses or husbands who worked behind a desk and had never seen a clod of dirt in their lives.

I wanted a man who knew a tractor inside and out, and who could tell one kind of seed from another on sight. A man so obsessed with the land that he’d gone off to college in North Carolina for years to learn more about how to make things grow out of it.

No, of course not just any man who’d done all that.

Only Ridge Paterson.

Why else would I have accepted our parents’ suggestions to wait all through high school, not dating anyone at all, just following after Ridge like a groupie? Why else would I have waited as he’d gone off to North Carolina for college, been away for far longer than college had any right to take him from me?

I was twenty-two years old, and I’d never even been on a proper date because I’d spent my whole life waiting for Ridge.

But now? Now he was back.

The sight of his beat-up old red pickup meandering through town yesterday had been unmistakable, and it had taken every ounce of self-restraint in me to keep from running down the road after it.

And that’s the story. That was why I was there, walking up the long, dusty drive that led to Ridge’s family farm. Why I was wearing the tightest shirt I owned and jeans that showed off every single one of the hundred squats I did every day.

Mrs. Paterson was sitting on the front porch swing, a lemonade at her side and a fan in one hand. She smiled and waved when she caught sight of me, and then, as though no time at all had passed since school, she pointed toward the north field. It gave me such a moment of déjà vu that I almost wanted to pull out my phone and check the date.

Instead, I smiled and waved back, and turned toward the north field. Nothing was going to stop me this time. My mother could hate her life all she wanted, and I was sorry she did, but that wouldn’t stop me from snatching the life I wanted with both hands.

It wasn’t my fault she was unhappy with the choices she’d made when she was too young. More importantly, what she wanted and what I wanted were very different things. Not that I’d have married my dad or anything, but he was a good guy. And maybe I had picked a guy a lot like him, but I was not like my mother.

She wasn’t a nature lover. She didn’t have a podcast calledOmega and the Great Outdoors. She should never have married a blue-collar guy who worked with his hands for a living. Me? I wanted those rough, callused hands. Wanted them all over me, on every inch of my skin, and...

Okay, no, that was a bad train of thought to head down right before I saw Ridge for the first time in years. I didn’t want to go see him while stinking of arousal, and distract him from the conversation at hand. From the fact that I’d been waiting for him for almost a damned decade. The fact that I wasready.

Ridge, in classic Ridge style, was digging in the dirt.

As much as I love the outdoors, I know absolutely nothing about farming. I mean, yeah, I know that things grow out of the ground and we eat them. It’s awesome. But it’s not the vocation for me. It’s Ridge’s thing.

He glanced up as I approached, sniffing the air, and froze, staring at me, eyes wide.

Was that good or bad? Was the shirt too tight? Did I look ridiculous?

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