TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 347

CHAPTER 274: HIS HOME

EMBER’S POV

I do not know what to do with that.

I’ve spent my whole life being the woman people look through. Being looked at like this/like I am s omething, makes my skin feel two sizes too small.

I am busy, not knowing what to do with my own face when one of them just-leaves./

She breaks right out of the line, a little older woman, small and fast, and she is already crying before she gets to us, which, I want to be clear, no one had warned me was on the agenda.

“You brought someone home.” She says it to Knox, and then she says it again, quieter, like she doesn’t believe her own mouth. “Oh, dear. Ten years. Ten years and you finally brought someone home.”

Beside me, something in him goes soft. First soft thing I’ve felt off him in hours.

“It’s late,” he says. “You should be asleep, Marjorie.”

“Don’t you tell me about my sleep.” She scrubs her face with the back of her hand, and then she

turns all of it on me, and I brace, because I know that turn.

I have felt that turn in every fancy room I’ve ever been shoved into. The up-and-down, the math, the

silent judgment that says you don’t belong in our world.

It doesn’t come.

What comes is a smile so wet and so happy it makes my chest hurt, and two small warm hands grabbing one of mine like she’s found something she lost.

“Look at you,” she says. “Oh, look at you. He didn’t say you’d be tired, the great idiot. Have you eaten? You haven’t eaten, I can see it.”

“I’m okay,” I say, which is a lie, and she knows it is a lie, and she lets me have it anyway.

“You’re about to fall over is what you are.” She wheels on him without dropping my hand. “Forty minutes up the mountain and it didn’t cross your mind to feed her?”

And the scariest man I have ever stood next to looks, for one second, exactly like a kid who got

caught,

“There was a situation.”

“There’s always a situation with you.” She squeezes my fingers and drops her voice like we are

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CHAPTER 274 HIS HOME

already conspirators. “He’s been like this since he was a boy. All teeth and trouble and never once a straight answer. You’ll learn. I’m Marjorie. I run his house, which mostly means I run him, and don’t let him tell you different.”

“Ember,” I say, and my voice comes out smaller than I want. “It’s- I’m Ember.”

“I know who you are, love.” Her eyes go soft and wet all over again. “We all know who you are.”

I want it on record that the warm, crying woman is what nearly breaks me. I have armor up for the cold.

I’ve been getting ready since the plane for the polite freeze, the you-don’t-belong-here said in a voice nice enough that you can’t call it what it is.

I have nothing for an old woman crying because she is happy to see me. My throat just-closes. have to look at the floor.

Which is the only reason I don’t see the next one coming until she is already there and the air has changed.

“Your Majesty.”

Smooth voice. Where Marjorie’s had been all torn edges, this one is pressed flat and sent just far

enough to land.

Tall, straight as a rail, hair pinned so tight not one strand of it has escaped, and her clothes are a notch nicer than everybody else’s, and she goes to him like she has a key to him.

Her hand lands on his coat. Smooths it down. An old move, comfortable, the kind you only do to someone you’ve decided is yours to fuss over.

“Knoxie,” she says, and the way she says it is somehow, too light, a little singsong, like she is wron calling a boy in from the yard. “You didn’t call ahead. I’d have had the whole house up. You always do this, you sneak in like a thief in your own home and then expect Marjorie to perform miracles.”

“Hale.” His voice doesn’t move. “You’re up late too, I see.

“I’m always up when you come home.” She smiles at him. Then she turns the smile on me, and it arrives a half-second late, and it is a beautiful piece of work, that smile.

Warm at the mouth and dead everywhere else. Her gaze makes the trip down my coat and back up, and when it gets to my face it has already filed me, sorted me, set me on some shelf in the back of her head.

“And who’s this little thing?”

“My fiancée.” Knox’s hand finds my back again. “Ember. She’s going to be my wife.”