Chapter 26
Bree had been to Clan land exactly twice in her life before tonight. Both times, she’d stayed in the truck. Tonight, she walked in as family.
The gathering place was a wide, flat clearing behind Rodrigo’s house, ringed with strings of lights someone had run between the mesquite trees.
Long tables had been carried out and covered with food.
There was a fire pit at the center, already burning low and steady, and the smell of roasting meat drifted over everything.
The desert evening was going gold and then purple at the edges, and somewhere beyond the lights, the land rolled away dark and peaceful toward the mountains.
She had expected maybe thirty people. There had to be almost a hundred gathered.
“Breathe, babe,” Pax said, low, standing beside her. His hand was warm at the small of her back.
“I am breathing.”
“You’re recalculating. I know the look. And if I don’t miss my guess, you’re getting close to overwhelm.”
“There are a lot more people here than I expected,” she admitted. He chuckled, and some of the flutter in her stomach settled. If she could make him laugh, she could do this.
Estelle reached them first. Pax’s mother came through the crowd like it wasn’t there, and took Bree’s face in both hands.
“I prayed for this,” Estelle said simply. “For years, I prayed one of my boys would be smart enough to see what was right in front of him.” She kissed Bree’s cheeks, one at a time. “You’ve been mine since you were fifteen, sneaking sandwiches to my sons. Now it’s official.”
“You knew about the sandwiches?” Bree asked, incredulous.
“I’m a mother. I knew about everything.” Estelle tucked Bree’s hand into the crook of her arm. “Come. Herman’s been standing by the food pretending he isn’t waiting for you.”
Herman Rojas was indeed standing by the food, and he was indeed pretending.
He was a big, quiet man who had passed his size to his sons and his stillness to Pax.
When Bree reached him, he didn’t say anything at first. He just looked at her, and then at his son, and then he pulled Bree into a hug that lifted her half off her feet.
“Welcome home, daughter,” he said against her hair.
Bree held on and blinked hard at his shoulder. She was not going to cry in the first ten minutes. She had made herself that promise in the truck on the way here.
She made it almost twenty minutes before Rodrigo tested her resolve again.
The Alpha didn’t call for attention. He didn’t have to. He simply stepped up near the fire, and the gathering settled around him.
“Tonight we celebrate a mating,” Rodrigo said.
His voice carried without effort. “Paxton Rojas, Beta of this Clan, has found his mate in Briana Leeland. Most of you already know her. You’ve been in her store.
Some of you have been in her store so often I suspect you’re personally funding her retirement. ”
Laughter moved through the crowd. Bree caught sight of at least four Clan members who suddenly found their drinks very interesting.
“What you may not know is what this woman has carried for us.” Rodrigo’s tone shifted, and the laughter faded into something more attentive.
“She learned what we are when she was still a girl. She held that knowledge close to her heart for all these years. No oath bound her. No fear compelled her. She kept our secret because it was the right thing to do, and she asked for nothing in return.” He looked at Bree directly.
“This Clan pays its debts. Tonight, we pay this one the only way it can be paid. Briana Leeland, you are family. You were family long before my Beta was wise enough to make his move.”
“It took him fifteen years,” Elena called from somewhere in the crowd. “We were starting a betting pool.”
“You started the betting pool eight years ago,” someone answered, and the laughter rolled again, warm and easy.
Bree pressed her lips together and looked up at Pax, who seemed floored to discover that his entire Clan had been discussing his love life for the better part of a decade.
“Eight years?” he muttered.
“You’ll want to let that go,” Bree advised.
Rodrigo let the laughter run its course, then turned, and his gaze found her father, seated in a good chair someone had carried out specially and placed where he could see everything.
“And one thing more,” the Alpha said. “William Leeland.”
Her father stood. He did not appear even slightly surprised to be named, which was very much her father.
“For thirty years, you have taught, employed, and looked out for the people of this Clan without ever once asking who we were or what we were hiding. A man does not do that by accident. You saw more than you said, and you said nothing. In my experience, that is the rarest kind of wisdom there is.” Rodrigo inclined his head, a gesture Bree had never seen him make to anyone.
“You have been a trusted friend of this Clan for longer than most of our young people have been alive. Your daughter’s mating only makes official what has been true all along.
You are welcome on this land, in this Clan, for all your days. ”
Her father was quiet for a moment. Then he quipped, “I’ll expect that in writing,” and the whole gathering broke up laughing. Rodrigo laughed with them, and Bree gave up and wiped her eyes.
The formal part of the evening ended there, and the party began in earnest.
Bree moved through it in a happy blur. She was hugged by women she’d only known across the store’s counter.
She was thanked, quietly and separately, by three different mothers whose sons had found work through the workshops.
Diego found her near the food tables, moving with the loose, easy stride of a young man whose ribs had never been broken, and solemnly informed her that he was available for any lifting, hauling, or shelf-building the store might ever require, free of charge, forever.
“That’s a very long warranty,” she told him, amused.
“Clan rates,” Diego said, grinning, and went off to fill a plate that could have fed four ordinary men.
His mother caught Bree’s eye from across the clearing and touched her hand to her heart. Bree returned the gesture. Neither of them needed words.
It was Elena who claimed her next, appearing at her elbow with two glasses and handing one over without asking.
“So,” Elena said. “You’re the one who marked up the town map.”
“Word travels.”
“Word gallops, in this Clan.” Elena studied her with sharp, amused eyes.
“That loading bay placement saved us a fight in the open street. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I don’t say that lightly.
” She sipped her drink. “When you’re settled, you and I are going to have a conversation about the town.
A real one. I’ve been the only one thinking about this territory strategically for thirty years, and I am tired of doing it alone. ”
“I run a hardware store,” Bree said.
“Mm. And I’m a retired schoolteacher.” Elena’s smile said everything her words didn’t. “Welcome to the family, Briana. Finally.” Elena touched her glass to Bree’s then moved off into the crowd, pausing to say something to Tomás that made the young man stand up straighter.
Tomás had been standing straighter all evening, come to think of it.
Bree had watched it happen in pieces over the past hour.
Rodrigo had spoken to him early on, one hand on his shoulder, and whatever the Alpha had said, the boy who had appointed himself her shadow had walked away from that conversation looking older and prouder, somehow.
Other adult Clan members had been stopping him ever since.
Not to tease him, the way they teased all the young ones, but to speak to him.
She didn’t understand the mechanics of it, the invisible ladder of standing and dominance the Clan all seemed to feel in their bones, but she understood what she was seeing.
Tomás had moved up. He caught her watching and gave her a small nod across the fire, and she nodded back, absurdly proud of him.
It was full dark and the fire had been built up high when she finally went looking for her father and found him exactly where she should have known to look.
He was at the edge of the party, past the last string of lights, sitting in his good chair with a plate balanced on his knee.
Pedro Ortiz sat beside him in a second chair, and the two old men were watching the celebration together like a pair of judges at a fair.
Bree stopped a little distance away. She didn’t mean to eavesdrop. She just couldn’t quite make herself interrupt.
“The tall boy by the drinks table,” her father was saying. “Watch him. He’s going to try to jump the fire pit before the night’s over.”
“He is,” Pedro agreed. “His father did the same thing at his mating celebration. Cleared it, then set his boots smoking on the far side.”
“You saw that?”
“I have seen everything in this desert at least twice, William.”
Her father grunted, which from him was high entertainment. “Then you’d be the man to ask. That rock formation out past the north fence line. The one that looks stacked. Natural, or did somebody put it there?”
“Now that,” Pedro said, “is a very old story, and it requires something stronger than what is in this cup.”
“I have a bottle at the store that might qualify.”
“Then I will come to your store, William Leeland.”
“Tuesdays are quiet,” her father said, and the two of them went back to watching the fire in comfortable silence, an eighty-year-old man and a man older than the state itself, sitting shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the light like they’d been doing it for years.
Bree backed away without a sound and went to find her mate, because if she stood there one more minute, she was going to cry again, and she’d already used up her quota of tears for tonight.