Page 90 of The Pack's Knotty Runaway
“Just like at the pub, everybody knows you guys,” I say, once we’ve left the frog and its disputed custody behind.
“Small town.” Ash takes my free hand. “Population low, opinions high. By tomorrow morning a hundred people will have told a hundred other people that the Miller pack brought their omega down, and that she was either lovely or stuck-up. There’s no third option.”
“Which am I going for?”
“You’re a natural at lovely,” he says, easy, I roll my eyes and he grins, because he caught the half-second where I had to fight my smile down.
The produce tent smells of a hundred vegetables all scrubbed up for their Sunday best. There’s a folding table at the front, and behind it a woman named Delia, who looks at our apple over the top of her glasses for a long, professional while.
“Hm,” she says, finally. She turns a card over and writes on it in a careful hand: MOST UNUSUAL PRODUCE. “You’ll want this category. The plain-biggest class is all pumpkins, and you’ll lose to a pumpkin every time, those people are not well.” She lifts the apple out of my arms with both hands and sets it in a wooden crate behind her, then tucks a square of muslin over the top of it. “It stays back here with me until judging. Out of sight.”
“Out of sight?”
“Last year somebody’s prize melon took a knitting needle through the rind an hour before the ribbons.” She pats the cloth flat. “You don’t want to tempt the devil.”
Reed’s face lights up. “Delia thinks the competition will feel threatened,” he says, laughing as the three brothers exchange a round of knuckle bumps.
“All right.” I say as we head out the tent. “Now what?”
“Now,” Ash says, holding the tent flap up for me, “we wander.” He says it light. Too light. Out in the sun he steers us, not obviously, just a hand at the small of my back angling me down the row toward the food stalls, and Reed, who is constitutionally incapable of silence, has gone quiet.
“What’s going on—” I start, but then I smell it.
Under the cider and the cut grass and the fryer oil, something else. Warm. Specific. Butter gone brown in a pan. Sugar pushed one second past safe, right to the edge of burnt. Cardamom. And cutting up clean through all of it, the high bright note of orange zest.
“I know that smell,” I say.
Nobody answers me. I turn and look at Ash, and he just tips his head down the row.Go on.
So I do. I follow my nose, three big alphas falling in behind me, and the smell gets thicker and more impossible with every stall I pass, until I come around the end of the row and pull up short.
A table stacked with apple hand pies. A tower of something glazed and gold. A hand-lettered sign that reads TASTE OF LAKEVIEW, which is eight hours away and has no earthly business being in this field. And behind the table, copper hair tied back, both hands full of pastry... is Maren.
She sees my face and both her arms shoot straight up over her head.
“SURPRISE,” she bellows, and a cloud of powdered sugar comes off her apron.
I make a sound I will deny later. My feet are already moving. I go around the end of the table, knock a stack of napkins to the grass, and get both arms around her. Man, Maren always gives the best hugs. She laughs into my hair and holds on.
“There she is,” she says, into the top of my head. “There’s my girl.”
“How,” I get out, pulling back to look at her. “You’re eight hours away. You have a bakery. It’s Saturday, you never close on a Satur—”
“Okay, so.” She holds me out at arm’s length and swipes under my eye with her thumb, her own beautiful azure eyes a little wet. “Your alpha called me a couple days ago and introduced himself.” She tips her head at Bram, who has the grace to look caught. “Asked would I come down and surprise you. And I said, Bram, I would love nothing more, but I cannot justify shutting the shop and driving across the state on a whim.”
“So what changed your mind?”
“So then he asks,” she says, already grinning, “had I ever considered entering a regional baking competition.” The grin goes feral. “Babe. Regional is doing a lot of work in that sentence. But it’s abusiness expense.I’m doingmarket research.I’m buildingbrand awareness.The part where I get to ambush my best friend in a cow pasture is tax-deductible.” She drops her voice. “Also they shipped me a crate of your orchard’s apples to bake with, and Luna, they’re obscene. I put them in the hand pies and a man proposed to me about forty minutes ago.”
I turn around. All three of them are wearing the same face. Caught, and pleased about it.
“You did this,” I say.
“It was Reed’s idea,” Bram says, at the same moment Reed says, “It was a group effort,” and Ash says, “I had no idea until this morning.”
I don’t have words for what’s in my chest, so I reach for a joke, except it doesn’t come. What comes out instead is, “Thank you.” Small, to all three of them.
Bram’s throat moves. “Of course,” he says.
