Chapter 39
Luna
“A month,” I say into the phone. “Bob. I want to be sure the heat spike hasn’t done something to my hearing. You said a month?”
“Yep, thirty days on top of whatever you’ve still got banked.” Bob keeps his voice low and level, the way he’s kept it for thirty years in a building full of people trying to read. “It’s heat leave. It’s statutory, which means I couldn’t keep it from you if I tried... which I wouldn’t, of course.”
I’m cross-legged in the middle of the couch with a quilt pooled around my waist and three of my alphas’ shirts, taking in a frequent lungful.
The heat spike is gone. It took the rolling boil out with it and left me scooped-clean and warm. I’d called my boss to beg. More time off, unpaid if it came to that, hat in hand. Instead Bob is giving me a full month.
“So this pack you found,” he says. “They all proper?”
Across the open room, Ash is at the kitchen island with two steaming mugs and zero intention of pretending he can’t hear every word.
Bram sits on the low stone lip of the hearth, forearms on his knees.
Reed is sprawled along the far end of the couch with one sock-foot hooked over the armrest, watching me sideways.
Three alphas. All listening. Not one of them sorry about it either.
“All proper,” I say, and my voice does something humiliating on the second word.
“Good. I mean that.” And I hear that he does. “You take the leave. The library will keep turning without you. You spend this month thinking about you for once, yeah?”
I laugh, and it comes out a little wet, and I press the back of my wrist against my mouth.
“Now.” Something shifts in him. “I’m going to tell you one thing, and then I’m going to hang up, and I do not want you reading into it.”
“That’s an ominous runway, Bob.”
“There’s a relocation program nationwide for omegas who match outside their own district.
Job transfers, housing help, the whole works.
If a person found her pack a long way from home, and decided she wanted to be where the pack is, there is a paved road for doing exactly that.
Most people go their whole lives never knowing it exists.
” A beat. “And I’d be a poor excuse for a boss, and a worse one for a friend, if I let you be one of them. ”
Bram’s head comes up. Down the couch, Reed’s foot goes still on the armrest.
“I love Lakeview,” I say. Too fast.
“I know you do.”
“I have my job. I have my apartment. I have Harper, and Beth, and Maren—”
“Luna,” he says, gentle. “That is the exact reason I told you not to read into it. I am not running you off. I’m only telling you that the door has a ramp, in case you ever decide you want it.
That’s all.” I can hear him smiling. “You take care now. And Luna? I’m real happy for you. I mean that part most of all.”
“Bob—”
“Bye now.”
The line clicks dead.
I sit there with a warm phone and a wet face and, for a second, no idea what to do with either. Then I set the phone face-down on the cushion.
Nobody moves right away. Then Reed’s foot drops off the armrest. Bram lets out a long breath through his nose.
“A full month.” Ash is already pushing up off the island, and the half-smile he’s been wearing finally climbs the rest of the way up his face. He crosses the room, sets the mugs down on the coffee table, and folds himself onto the couch to gather me into his side. “That’s huge, beautiful.”
Bram still hasn’t said anything. He’s gone quiet and square-shouldered, jaw set. But his shoulders come down an inch, and when I catch his eye he gives me a small nod. Reed leans over the back of the couch and presses his mouth to the crown of my head.
And my omega, who has been a smug, boneless puddle since approximately yesterday afternoon, lifts her head and says good. More. Greedy thing.
“Okay. But.” I pull a knee up and wrap both arms around it.
“I think we should actually talk about the part that comes after this month is up. Because I want to be here. Not eight hours up a highway from here. But I’m not ready for Bob’s ramp either.
Lakeview is my home, so I don’t know what we do about that.
At the same time, I really, really don’t want you waking up four months of long-distance from now and deciding I’m too much math and quietly letting me go. ”
There it is, says the Derek voice, delighted. You’ll wreck it. You always wreck it.
I shut my eyes.
“Sorry,” I say. “That got away from me.”
Nobody rushes to fill the quiet. Then Bram gets up off the hearth and comes to the couch, lowering himself onto the cushion beside me, slow and careful, so the whole thing barely dips under him.
“Don’t you dare apologize for telling us what you feel,” he says, his thumb brushing my knee.
“Here’s where we are. None of us has the whole answer yet, and I won’t sit here and pretend we do.
But I can promise you the part that actually matters.
We are never giving up on you. Whatever it takes to keep us together, that’s what we’ll do, all of it.
Where there’s a will there’s a way, and between the four of us there is no shortage of will. We’ll figure this out together.”
Ash shifts closer, catching my eye.
“And here is the part I do know for certain,” he says.
“The day those bottles ship, that’s two million dollars.
Money like that doesn’t only save the orchard, it buys us hands.
People we pay to run the press and walk the rows and load the trucks, so this place stops needing all three of us standing on it every hour of every day just to keep it breathing. ”
Reed sits up straight, eyes bright. “Which means we’ll no longer be chained here year-round.
Honestly, I’ve wanted to see more of the country for years anyway, and so have the guys.
Once we’ve got a year-round manager trained, we can go to Lakeview or really anywhere else.
Only head back up to the orchard for the heavy craft windows like harvest and pressing.
So don’t worry. Eight hours is a long drive, beautiful, but it’s not a wall. ”
“We’ll find the shape of it,” Ash says, drawing me against his chest until his mouth is against my hair. “I promise.”
But here’s the thing none of that touches, so I make myself say it out loud.
“But you still have to hit the deadline. And my heat is coming. What if I turn out to be the reason you miss it? And even if you don’t, even if every bit of this works the way you’re saying, what if not being here is too hard for you and—”
“Give me your hand,” Bram says, gentle.
I give it to him. He flattens my palm against the center of his chest, over the spot where his heart is working, and holds it there under his.
“Our parents loved this land,” Bram says softly.
“We always will, too. But they told us a long time ago that pack is where the heart is. And we’ll be back here as often as we need to be anyway.
” His thumb sweeps across the back of my hand.
“Now, about that deadline, I promise we’ll make it, so don’t you spend one second worrying about the bottles. ”
I have to look at the ceiling for a second, because my eyes are full.
I walked into this cottage carrying the bone-deep certainty that I don’t get to keep the good things.
That love is something that happens to me by accident and then spoils.
But wrapped in their warmth, I can finally see a bright future, full of love.
“Thanks,” I say. “I know we don’t have to solve all of it this morning. I think I just needed to hear that we were—”
“On the same page,” Reed finishes. “We are.”
I laugh, and a tear gets loose and slides sideways toward my hairline. Reed reaches over and thumbs it off my jaw before it gets there.
Then Ash’s eyes cut to Bram, Bram gives the smallest nod, and Reed sits back wearing a grin.
“Okay, no.” I look from one of them to the next. “You three just did a thing with your faces. What is happening.”
“So.” Ash leans forward, retrieves one of the mugs, and folds it into my hands. “We may have planned something for you today a few days back. And honestly, the timing could not be better, because it’s going to show you exactly how confident we are about that deadline.”
“Planned what.”
Bram is openly smiling now. Reed bounces the couch cushion under me with the flat of his hand.
“The harvest festival,” Bram says. “Down in Honeycreek Hollow.”