Page 17 of Moonlight's Mate
She bit her lip, and the little pain reminded her she could take greater pain and so could her people. They had before and they would again to preserve the place they’d won with blood and kept now with a fierce allegiance that a one-time soldier would surely understand.
Beck rubbed the back of his neck. “Merrilee—”
Grandmère would be disappointed she’d even for a moment weakened. “I’ll keep you updated. I assume you’ll do the same.”
“Of course. Let me give you a lift home.”
She spun on her heel. “I’ll hitch a ride with Orson.”
“Babe…”
She didn’t pause this time, but she kept her footsteps even so it didn’t look like she was running.
But even though she was going slow, he didn’t chase after her.
By the time she retrieved the iron scraps with Orson—who loaded Beck’s pickup with a notable lack of bear deliberateness while Claudia chatted at him—and they swung by her cottage to unload half the iron, the sun was heading for the backsides of the mountains.
She paused to wipe her forehead. Despite her wereling strength, wrestling the length of decorative fencing without getting impaled was a trick. Even Orson was huffing as he leaned against the pickup’s bumper.
He resettled the straps of his overalls. “Got everything?”
She nodded. “Half of it, anyway.”
“He’d give it all, if you just asked.”
She frowned at him, bemused. “I wouldn’t leave the town undefended.”
“Ain’t the town that’s wide-open. It’s his heart.”
It hadn’t been Beck’s heart open, but his pants. “Claudia got to you, didn’t she?”
The old griz flattened his lips in a prim line. “Bears are solitary.”
Merrilee tapped her chin. “So where do little bears come from?”
“Never mind that. I mean to say bear-kind don’t bother themselves with who is first and who is second.”
She stiffened. “I don’t bother either. I am Alpha.”
“If that keeps you warm at night.”
It didn’t. It kept her up some nights, as she checked her spreadsheets and work orders, making sure her pack stayed strong. Strong and separate. She didn’t have much from the mother who’d left her with a loving but stern grandmother, even less from the ancestress who had fought a hundred years ago, but this they had passed to her along with her Alpha blood: a place of her own. She would not give that up to another pack or to the fae.
Or to her own traitorous heart.
Chapter 6
Explaining the imp to Keisha and her husband, Peter, was easier than Merrilee had expected. She invited them to her cottage for dark beers and darker troubles, but they knew more about the fae than she did.
“Peter’s mother loved fairy tales,” Keisha said. “Where do you think he got his name?”
Merrilee wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t Peter kill the wolf?”
Peter shook his head. “He just caught it and marched it in a victory parade. It was Russia, where they do that sort of thing.”
To her mind that wasn’t a preferable outcome. “Beck is keeping things quiet in town, but we don’t have that luxury. I want at least two iron weapons in every hand by tomorrow afternoon.”
She’d already told them about Claudia’s scraps. Keisha started sketching at the office desk while Peter solidified her ideas in a drafting program, the two of them in their matching World of Warcraft T-shirts arguing whether iron-tipped spears or crossbow arrows would be more practical.
