Chapter 4
Owen
I came in my fist at dawn and it still felt like stealing.
Twenty-three wolves slept in the scrub off a cattle trail two ranges west of Landers Ridge.
I had the last watch because I didn’t sleep through dawn anyway.
I stood behind a screen of pine with my pants open and my cock in my hand and I worked it like I was trying to get it over with before anyone else woke up.
I thought about the cabin. I always did.
Reilly on the floor. The way she had locked her legs when I tried to keep the knot out.
The sound she made when it shoved in. I spat on my palm and stroked faster, thumb over the head on every upstroke, the other hand braced on bark.
I was already wet at the tip. The base was swollen the way it got when the bond decided to pretend I still had a mate to lock into.
I squeezed there and hissed. There was no one to put it in.
There had not been anyone to put it in for three years.
I pumped my fist and pictured her mouth after, the way she had swallowed me on the floor like an argument.
I pictured her tits in the lamp, nipples wet from my tongue.
I pictured the yard after and that almost killed it, so I went back to the floor, to her cunt tight around the knot, to come leaking out around the seal onto my knee.
My hips jerked. I came over my knuckles in thick stripes and bit the inside of my cheek in the same place I had bitten the night I didn’t claim her.
It helped for about a minute.
Then the bond pulled east and I felt her.
Not words. Heat. A thin, mean orgasm that wasn’t enough, and the shape of my name in a mouth that wasn’t here.
My cock twitched in my messy hand like it had ideas.
I wiped my palm on the pine needles and buttoned my pants and stood there until my breathing passed for a man on watch.
Melanie found me like that.
She didn’t comment on the smell. She had been my second for two years. She knew what dawn looked like on me. She held out a cup of water and a strip of dried meat and said, “You’re going to wear a hole in that tree.”
“Watch is quiet.”
“Watch is quiet. You’re not.” She drank from her own cup. “Trader came through last night after you took first sleep. Hillsford’s squeezing the ridge again. Landers is eating seed grain.”
I kept my face still. The bond had already told me she was hungry in ways that were not only grain. I had not known about the seed.
“That’s not our job,” I said.
“No,” Melanie said. “Our job is twenty head of someone else’s cattle and a border a sitting alpha won’t claim. Which we finished. Which means you don’t have an excuse to ride east.”
I ate the meat. It tasted like salt and smoke. “I didn’t say I was riding east.”
“You packed your saddle bags before watch.”
I had. I had done it in the dark like that made it less true.
The camp started moving. Joss Wender kicked a fire alive and didn’t look at me.
Joss looked at me less when Landers Ridge came up.
He had been in Tillson Ford when it burned.
He knew what Hillsford did with names. He also knew I had walked out of a yard with a rejection rite still wet in the air and he had the sense not to put that on the fire in front of twenty-three wolves.
I went to check the line anyway. Work dulls it.
That was the whole point of a free company with no banner and no Luna.
Cattle. Borders. Jobs sitting packs would not touch because touching them meant admitting they had lost ground.
We took coin and meat and we didn’t stay long enough for anyone to start calling me alpha like it was a hall instead of a count of bodies.
A year in, a woman in a river pack had put her hand on my belt behind a barn and said she didn’t care if I had a banner.
She was blunt and she smelled willing and I was tired of my own fist. I let her get my cock out.
She stroked me, spit on it, got on her knees and took it in her mouth.
She was good. She used her tongue under the head and took me deep and looked up like she wanted me to finish on her face.
I got hard enough. I even got close. Then the bond yanked, sour, and my body shut like a door.
I went soft in her throat. She pulled off and laughed once, not mean, and offered her hand.
I used her hand. Nothing. I tried to fuck her against the barn wall and I was half-hard at best and she was wet and patient and I could not get there.
I stopped before I started hating her for not being a woman who had rejected me in a yard.
I pulled my pants up and said it wasn’t her.
She shrugged and left me with my belt undone and my cock wet with someone else’s spit and no relief in it.
I didn’t try a person again.
I used my hand and I used the work and I used the fact that if I kept moving east I was going to end up on Reilly Landers’ river with a hard-on and a warning she had already heard.
Melanie walked the line with me. “If you go, I’m not bringing all of them.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“You will. You’ll get within smell of her and your wolf will try to kneel and you’ll need someone to tell the company we are not building a camp on the woman who dumped you the same night she used you.”
“She didn’t use me.”
Melanie stopped. “Owen. She let you knot her and then she said the rite with your come still on her. I wasn’t there. You told me enough. That’s used.”
I wanted to argue the word. I also remembered Reilly’s belt going back on and the way she had thrown my shirt at me. I kept walking.
“Landers Ridge is a Hillsford problem,” Melanie said. “Let it be.”
“If Hillsford takes the ridge they take the river. If they take the river they come west. That’s our problem.”
“That’s a map you drew so you can smell her again.”
It was both. I didn’t waste a lie on it.
By full morning the company was packed. The cattle job was done. Coin in the bag. Meat wrapped. I stood with the map on a stump and looked at a line I had looked at for three years and not crossed.
The bond was louder today. It had been louder since before dawn.
I knew what that meant. She had woken up wanting and she had put her hand between her legs and she had said my name into a room I was not in.
I had come in the pines to the echo of it.
That was not a reason to ride to her hall.
It was a reason and I was dressing it up as grain.
Joss came to the stump. He didn’t sit. “You going.”
“Yes.”
“To work or to her.”
“There’s work if I want it. Hillsford’s leaving gaps. Someone will pay to watch the west cut.”
Joss nodded at the map. “She rejected you.”
“I was there.”
“I’m saying it so you hear it from someone who likes you. You go back there and she will do it again if the hall needs her to. And you will let her put her hands on you first because you have not had a full night’s sleep since that cabin.”
I rolled the map up. “Get ten who want a paid watch. The rest can take the coin from this job and sit south until I send word.”
“Melanie won’t like ten.”
“Melanie can like staying here.”
She didn’t stay. I didn’t expect her to. When I saddled, she saddled. When I picked ten, she cut it to eight and herself and told two of the younger ones they were not coming because she didn’t need them watching me walk onto a rejected mate’s ground with my brain in my pants.
We rode east after noon.
The land got poorer as it leaned toward Landers.
Less game. Fence wire reused. A Hillsford patrol on a far ridge that did not come down, which was them counting us.
I kept my wolves off the skyline and my own body in the saddle like it was a job.
It was a job. My cock did not believe me.
Every mile the bond drew tighter I got heavier in my pants.
Not a full stand at first. A low, constant swell.
The start of a knot with nothing to push into.
I adjusted and it didn’t help. Melanie saw me do it and looked at the trees.
We made a dry camp before dark, still a range off the river. I set watch. I ate. I went into the trees with a cloth and opened my pants again because I was not going to sleep with my cock aching against the buttons.
I leaned my shoulder on a trunk and dragged it out.
I was harder than dawn. Thicker. The head was dark and wet and the base had a real swell on it now, enough that my fist felt like not enough.
I spat again and stroked from knot-swell to tip and thought about putting Reilly on her knees in the pine needles and feeding her my cock until she gagged and then turning her and shoving in and knotting her in the dirt where her scouts could have found us.
I thought about her saying the rite with me still locked in her.
That should have softened me. It made me stroke faster, angry, hips punching my fist. I came on the cloth and on my knuckles and on the bark and it tore through me and left my legs shaking and my mouth open and my wolf no quieter.
I was still half-hard when I cleaned up.
That was the problem. Coming didn’t clear it anymore. It took the top off and left the rest pointed east.
Back at the fire Melanie had coffee that was mostly burnt water. She handed me a cup. “You’re going to the marker tomorrow.”
“I’m going close enough to see if the west cut is open.”
“You’re going to the marker. Don’t insult me.”
I drank. “If she’s eating seed, Hillsford is done pretending. Alexander will want the wedding or the hall. Gareth will want both. A free company on the cut gives her something that isn’t Hillsford uniforms in her barn.”
“And you get to stand in front of her and smell her.”
“Yes.”
Melanie stared at me for a long time. “If she touches you, I need to know whether we are still a company or we are your escort to a cabin.”
“We’re a company.”
“Say it again after you smell her.”
I didn’t answer that.
Night went long. I took second watch and didn’t need to.
The bond leaked. Heat. The shape of a locked door.
The feeling of her fingers where my cock wanted to be.
I stood in the dark with my jaw locked and my hands off myself because I had already done that twice and a third time would put me on a horse in the middle of the night like a man with no company and no sense.
I thought about the yard.
I made her say it three times. I had told myself that was pride.
It was also the only way I could leave. If she had given me half a sentence I would have stayed in that cabin until she came back and took her clothes off again.
Full rite. Witnesses. Moon. I walked with her smell on my skin and my cock hard and I did not turn around.
I had been turning around ever since, just slowly, one job at a time, west to east, until seed grain gave me a sentence I could say out loud.
Near dawn Joss relieved me. “You’re going to look like hell when she sees you.”
“She rejected me. She can look at hell.”
He almost smiled. He didn’t. “Don’t let Hillsford see you first. They still like our name for kindling.”
“I know.”
We moved at first light. Eight wolves and Melanie and me. We kept off the road. By midmorning I could smell the river. By noon I could smell the hall under the ridge, woodsmoke and pack and the sour line of a broken bond that had never dried out.
I pulled up in the trees short of the marker.
My body went stupid the second the smell got specific.
Reilly. Not a memory. Her. Sweat and soap and the heat under it, the wet I had tasted on the cabin floor.
My cock filled so fast it hurt against the seam of my pants.
The knot-swell came with it, shameless, like we were back on those boards.
I sat the horse and breathed through my teeth and did not put a hand down because eight wolves and Melanie were right behind me.
Melanie drew even with my shoulder. She looked at my face, then at the way I was sitting.
“There it is,” she said, quiet.
“I know.”
“We can still turn around.”
“She’s going to come to the marker,” I said. “If those prints we left yesterday got found, she’s already coming. I wait here and I don’t walk up to her hall.”
“And if she brings Huntington and rifles.”
“Then I talk about a contract and I keep my hands on the reins.”
Melanie’s mouth was flat. “Your hands are not the part I’m worried about.”
I swung down because staying in the saddle was grinding me against leather and I was going to come in my pants like a boy if I kept doing it. On my feet it was worse. Gravity. Heat. I adjusted myself once, rough, no privacy in it, and Melanie looked away with her jaw tight.
I tied the horse. I told the others to hold the trees. I walked far enough forward that I could see the marker stone and the cut of the river and the path up toward a hall I had walked away from with her rite in my ears.
I did not step into the open.
I stood in the last of the cover with an erection I could not talk down and the bond screaming across a stretch of dirt I could have crossed in twenty seconds.
I knew what my body was going to do when she came into sight.
I knew it the way I had known in the cabin when she touched the rope.
I was going to smell her and want her on the ground.
I was going to remember the knot and the yard in the same breath.
I was going to offer her a contract because if I offered her anything else she would say the rite again and I would have to hear it with a hard cock and no floor to put her on.
Melanie stopped beside me, not in front. “Owen.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“I’m going to say it anyway. She chose the hall. She will choose it again. Do not let her put you back in that cabin unless you have decided you like being thrown out of it.”
I watched the path.
I didn’t promise her.
The wind came down off the ridge and brought Reilly with it, closer than the hall, like she had already ridden out once and turned back. Alive. In heat that had no moon. Mine according to a bond she had broken with her mouth and not with her body.
I put my thumb against the inside of my cheek, found the old scar from my own teeth, and pressed it until I had a point of pain that was not my cock.
Then I waited for her to come to the marker, packed and paid and already wrecked, and I did not step out of the trees.