I dragged Ned off her, wiping off the slobber, and standing her into Momma’s embrace. Love swelled in my heart when she brushed Fallon's curls from her eyes and asked if she was okay.
I couldn't even be mad when Fallon responded withher ‘fuck you’ gesture. Even Momma just took it as ‘okay’ with a suspicious look of guilt on her features. Momma turned back to the chaos and clapped her hands. I edged Fallon out of the way. The rest of the family acted on Momma's orders as she organized our personal pack to find blankets, pick out salvageable items and gather wood for repair.
Now, I was free to make this a little better. I sneezed again.
“I can fix this!” Fallon’s voice rose too high as she scrambled on the floor trying to catch slippery pickles and stuff them back into a broken jar.
One squirted out of her hands and I caught it in midair. “Honey, this is extreme redecorating. If you hated the curtains, you could have just let me know.”
That only twitched a smile so I dropped to the floor and wrangled another slick pickle into her jar, if for no other reason than it was important to her.
“Here, pickle, pickle,” I called, trying to make Fallon laugh.
“There’s one under the loveseat. Or what’s left of it.” Her wobbly voice didn’t clear.
I pointed across the carcass of the room. “That one’s trying to make an escape!”
Fallon dove for the pickle on the burned windowsill, but her hands shook and she froze, tears trembling on her lashes. No amount of good cheer was turning this into something Fallon deserved tohandle.
She sat on her heels, her back bowed. “I can’t even make a jar of pickles.”
Oh no. That wouldn’t do. Scooping Fallon into my arms, I left the jar of failure on the floor. My room sheltered her from the noise of my scrambling family. No one got hurt other than Fallon, and Momma had complained about that space forever. She certainly wouldn’t be mad that Fallon now had no other place to sleep. In fact…
Setting her on my side chair, I chafed her arms, covering her with my green, tufted throw. I scanned every inch of skin I could see, my anxiety growing.
“Where are you injured?” Away from the stench of vinegar, I now smelled her blood and it was driving me mad.
She held out her hand with less conviction than I had ever seen from her and that scared me more. My insides twisted into a mess as she presented the cut on the back of her hand. It trailed up to her wrist. My wolf instincts shuddered. I was always more human than wolf in the wider Harrowlands. The Old Magic, my homecoming, worked through me, demanding I fix this. Doubt gripped me and I sent up a quick prayer. Unable to help myself, I licked her wound clean.
Her indecision knocked against my mind, but I tightened my grip. We started this. I would finish it. She wouldn’t pull away. I noted the way her thighs came together with every rasp of my tongue.
“Dec.”
The tremble in her voice vibrated something deep inside me. Focus was my friend. When she saw the closed wound, she just sighed. My face twitched to hide my grin. If ever I needed confirmation that we were mates, the fact that I could heal her was it. Wiping away her tears from her soft skin, my mind worked through my suspicions. Her splendor threatened to suck me in and make me forget everything else. She was safe. She was here. I would keep it that way. I rearranged the blanket to give my hands something to do.
“Was Momma helping you with the fermenting?”
Fallon blinked, her grip tightening on the fabric. “How did you know?”
Momma was a lot of things, but subtle was not one of them. “She might have been more upset than we thought that we didn’t sleep together.”
Momma would make sure the Old Magic stayed by any means necessary. After all, she assumed I came back with a fully bonded mate. One that could break the link to the Old Magic all over again.
She shook her head. “That’s extreme, Declan.”
It was, if you lived in the wider Harrowlands. Here you would do anything and everything for a mate. “In her eyes, it’s unnatural for mates to be that far apart.” I explained quietly, not wanting to burden her with the expectation.
Despite that, her distress was clear. “If shedoesn’t trust me, then she won’t teach me. Ihave to try the pickles again.”
That's what she took from this conversation? I kept my huff to myself, searching for a sunny response. Would the woman ever rest? Again, Momma tried to manage Fallon into her worst impulses and I was done with it. I was finished with Fallon expecting nothing more for herself. Coming home was supposed to free her from that.
“Sometimes when you’re working too hard at something, it helps to take a break.”
Her nose scrunched up. “A what?”
I loved her, but Honey was as dense as a potato when she got that one-track mind stuck on a thing she cared about. I sighed softly with despair that it would ever be me.
“Where you stop doing things and do something else, that isn’t stressful.”
