Chapter 11: Mara's Audit
The hooves came up the track an hour later, one horse only, riding hard. Jordan was buttoning his jeans with fingers that smelled of five girls when Mara swung down into the yard, brown braid whipping, satchel slung across her chest. She had her sister's eyes, narrower, and none of Celeste's warmth in them at the moment.
"The vial," she said, stepping into the aisle. "I sent a full dose out with Jordan last week. Empty bottles come home. That's the arrangement."
"Arrangement's been met," Sable called from the stall. She was lounging in the doorway, shirt knotted under her breasts, straw in her braids. "Come count the wreckage."
Mara rounded the stall door and stopped. Five girls lay in the ruined straw like an overflowing litter, flushed, half dressed, one of them still breathing in the deep rhythmic gulps of a droplets aftermath. The air was thick with milk and sex and sweat. Becka lifted her head and grinned at the newcomer without a shred of embarrassment.
"Are you the sister? The one who makes it?"
"I'm the one who makes it." Mara's gaze swept the stall and landed on Jordan, cold and precise. "You split one dose five ways."
"They asked."
"They always ask." She set her satchel on the upturned tack trunk and opened it with a snap. "Sit up, all of you. This isn't optional."
The girls sat up. Mara went down the line with a professional's hands, pressing two fingers to each wrist for pulse, then flat against each soft young belly, above the pubic bone where the blood ran new and rich. Her touch was brisk and impersonal until the third girl, the freckled one, gasped under her palm.
"There," Mara murmured. "You feel that?"
"What is it? What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong." Mara kept her hand where it was, head tilted, counting under her breath. She moved to the next girl and pressed again, and her mouth tightened. She reached the last one, the quiet girl, and held her palm there for a long moment, lips moving with the count.
"Three flutters," she said at last. "Three of the five." She straightened and looked at Jordan with an expression he'd never had aimed at him before, part accusation, part arithmetic. "You don't understand what you're doing out here. Eleven heartbeats is a claim, Jordan. Eleven claims you can't undo. Katherine's. Celeste's. Sable's. Mine now, I suppose, on behalf of three girls who rode here with borrowed halters and rode home as mothers."
"They knew what the droplets were," Becka said. "Elena told us everything."
"Elena tells everyone everything." Mara closed her satchel with a click that sounded like a verdict. "Congratulations. You three come to the house for testing in four weeks. Don't drink. Don't lift hay bales. And don't let him finish in you again this month, all of you. Two babies in one belly is not a recipe, it's a disaster."
"Even me?" the freckled one said, pressing her own hand where Mara's had been.
"Especially you. Your flutter was the strongest."
Jordan did his jeans up the rest of the way. His knees felt strange. "You said eleven claims. You counted yourself in."
"I count everything," Mara said. "It's the job."
"You missed one," Sable said.
Mara looked at her. "I didn't examine you. Katherine's decree settled your status at dinner."
"Examine me anyway." Sable untied her shirt and let it fall open, broad and bare in the striped light, and lay back on the hay bale with her belly offered up like a plate. She held out her hand. "Go on. Feel the creek's work. You've been dying to all morning, I can see it in your face. Clinical curiosity, your sister called it."
"This is inappropriate," Mara said, and crossed the stall anyway.
She put her hand flat on Sable's belly. The stable went quiet. Even the girls stopped fidgeting. Mara's fingers spread wide, deliberate, the pose of a woman doing a measurement, and then her breath caught, one small unguarded sound that nobody in that aisle would ever let her forget.
"There it is," Sable said softly. "Feel it? That's his."
"It's early," Mara whispered. "Barely six weeks. That shouldn't be perceptible yet."
"Tell it that."
Mara kept her hand there longer than the examination required. Her composure, that thin professional shell, cracked right down the middle, and Jordan watched something hungry and terrified move behind her eyes. She snatched her hand back and stood, hugging her satchel like a shield.
"I need a moment," she said.
"You need a dose," Sable said, swinging up off the bale. "That's what you need. You've smelled the whole stall, don't tell me you haven't. Your sister keeps the vials in the left pocket, I've watched her make them since we were kids."
"I don't take my own formulation. That would be unconscionable." Mara's voice was steady. Her pupils were not.
The girls giggled. Becka patted the straw beside her. "Room for one more, miss."
Mara looked at Jordan. It was the first time she'd looked at him properly, and her gaze went down his open collar, the straw marks on his chest, the shape of him under the unbuttoned denim, and stayed there a half second too long for a clinician. She opened her mouth to say something sensible and scientific.
Hoofbeats thundered into the yard instead. Many of them.
Mara's shoulders dropped. "They followed me. I told Katherine I was coming for the vial and she took it as an invitation, of course she did."
The yard filled. Katherine rode in first on a bay mare, emerald silk blazing in the dust, and behind her came Vanessa, Maren, Celeste, Priya, Rosa, Elena, Naya, the whole loud caravan of them, horses steaming in the shade. And one more woman Jordan had never seen, riding last on a tall grey, sitting the saddle with easy authority. She was tall and broad, copper-skinned, black hair braided heavy down her back, and her chest was a marvel that made even the stable's veterans stare: enormous, heavy breasts straining a plaid snap-front shirt, the seams doing honest work, a deep canyon of cleavage visible to the waist.
"Everybody," Katherine announced, dismounting like a queen reviewing troops, "this is Alexa. She does the veterinary work two counties over. She's heard about our stables and she'll be staying."
"Staying through what?" Mara asked.
"Through everything." Katherine's gaze took in the wrecked stall, the five rosy girls, Sable's open shirt, Mara's white knuckles on her satchel, and Jordan standing half dressed among them. Her smile was slow and satisfied. "Mara. Did you find your vial?"
"Empty."
"Good." She walked into the stall and put one finger under Jordan's chin, tipping his face up to hers. "Sable sent word ahead that I'd want the full number by sundown. I brought everyone to help you reach it, and I brought Alexa because she asked to meet the father." She glanced back at the tall woman. "Alexa, this is Jordan."
Alexa ducked under the low stall doorframe, which barely slowed her, and filled the space in front of him. Up close her breasts were astronomical, the top of her shirt strained over dark warm skin, and the weight of them swayed with every step. She smelled of leather and sage. She took his jaw in one broad hand, tilted it, and kissed him, a long unhurried press of her mouth that made the aisle go silent.
"He'll do," she said against his lips. "I brought droplets of my own. I don't wait for other people's supplies."
"You brought droplets?" Mara said sharply.
"I brought my own recipe." Alexa shrugged the shirt off one shoulder, then the other, and the whole stable watched the biggest breasts any of them had ever seen come free into the golden light, heavy as blessing, dark wide nipples already stiffening in the cool air. "Made them myself from your sister's published notes, Mara, don't look so scandalized. I've been sitting in that saddle two hours needing them badly."
Katherine laughed from her belly, the sound of a woman whose plans had all come home. "Well then," she said, pulling the stall door shut behind her. "Sundown, everyone. Jordan, love, start counting."
The stall door latch clicked and the smell of nine women crowded into straw and gold light. Alexa dug a brown glass vial from her saddlebag and drew a dose without ceremony, touching it to her tongue while the whole family watched. Her pupils blew wide within a breath.
"Oh," she said, rolling her shoulders. "That's good work. Better than mine." She looked down at Jordan, and her huge breasts swung with the motion, heavy and dark-nippled, swaying like kept things. "Come here, young man. My knees have been in a saddle all morning and I don't intend to stand for this."
She sat back on the hay bale, broad thighs spread, and pulled him between them by the belt. Her mouth found his again, hungry now, the droplets lighting her blood, and her hands made short work of his jeans. His cock was already thickening from the crush of her against him, from the heat pouring off her skin, and she wrapped a fist around him and laughed into his mouth.
"There he is," she said. "Katherine, you weren't exaggerating."
"I never exaggerate," Katherine said from the stall door, arms crossed, watching like a woman at a private theater.
Alexa guided him down onto the straw and swung herself over him, and the weight of her breasts came down onto his chest first, enormous and warm, her stiff nipples dragging across his ribs. She kissed down his neck, took his cock in hand again, and settled her cunt onto the head of him, sopping and bare. Then she sank, slow, inch by inch, groaning from her belly as her body swallowed him whole.
"God above," she breathed, seated fully, grinding her clit against the root of him. "Two hours on a horse and then this. I needed it worse than the droplets."
She rode him in long rolling strokes, her hips working like someone used to being in charge of large animals and getting her way, and her breasts swayed and slapped against his stomach with every drop. Jordan reached up and filled both hands with her, and the weight of them was astonishing, heavy and dense as bread dough, milk letting down under his grip in thin hot streams that ran between his fingers.
"You can drink," she said, looking down at him with dark amused eyes. "Everyone in that house already has, I can tell by how quiet they've gone."
He pulled one dark nipple to his mouth and drank, and her rhythm bucked. Milk flooded his tongue, sweet and warm, and Alexa swore in her grandmother's language, low and guttural, her cunt clamping down around him as the let-down peaked.
"Katherine," Celeste said from the edge of the straw, already unlacing her own shirt, "she's going to make him finish before sundown is even a discussion."
"Then we help," Katherine said. "Maren. Vanessa. Help her."
Maren was on her knees in a heartbeat, pressing against Alexa's broad back, her small hands reaching around to cup Alexa's swinging breasts from behind and squeeze the milk down in double streams over Jordan's chest. Vanessa knelt behind Jordan, spreading him, her fingers working between his legs while Alexa rode. The droplets had the whole stall glowing; the girls on the hay bales were kissing each other between giggles, and Sable had pulled Mara down onto the straw beside her despite her protests.
"You examine me, I examine you," Sable murmured into her ear, hand flat on Mara's flat belly, and Mara shuddered and stopped arguing.
Alexa came first, a rolling earthquake of it, her whole broad body seizing around him, milk spraying from both nipples under Maren's hands while she cried out to the roof beams. Her cunt rippled down his cock in long grasping waves, and Jordan gripped her hips and drove up into her from below.
"Inside," Katherine said from the door. It wasn't a suggestion. "All the way in, love. She's not leaving either."
Jordan let go. His cock pulsed deep in Alexa's clutching heat, pump after pump of hot spend flooding her, and she moaned low and ground down to take every drop, her hand pressed flat under her own belly the way Sable had done in the morning.
She stayed seated on him a while, vast and warm, catching her breath. Then she rolled off with a grunt and lay in the straw beside him, breasts spilling to both sides, his finish and her milk soaking into the pale bedding.
"Twelve," Katherine announced. "Katherine, Celeste, Sable, and the five, plus Alexa. Twelve."
"You're forgetting one," Elena said, stepping forward and pulling her sundress over her head. Golden-brown, curvy, bold as ever, she dropped to her knees in the straw and took Jordan's slick softening cock in her hand. "The decree said every non-pregnant woman gets a finish, and I felt a flutter at your house, Katherine, but nobody confirmed it. Nobody's put a hand on me but me."
Rosa laughed. "She's been waiting to say that since we left the driveway."
"Elena's right," Katherine said, amused. "Mara. Confirm or dismiss."
Mara crawled over on weak knees, Sable's hand still between her shoulder blades, and pressed two fingers low on Elena's belly. The stable held its breath. Mara counted. Her lips moved.
"Flutter," she said. "Elena's pregnant."
The cheer shook dust from the beams. Elena threw her arms up, naked and beaming, and Jordan laughed from somewhere deep and stunned.
"Then that's thirteen names," Alexa said from the straw, "and one cock that's earned a rest I'm not granting him." She rolled toward him and pulled Elena down by the wrist so they bracketed him, two warm bodies and four heavy breasts pressing him into the hay. "Katherine said sundown. There's a lot of daylight left and I see three girls over there who've had droplets and no second turn."
Becka stood up, freckled and grinning, already pulling the quiet girl to her feet. "He can't finish in us again. Mara's orders."
"He can do other things," Alexa said, and Becka's grin went wider.
Jordan lay in the wrecked straw, his mother's decree ringing in his ears, a pregnant woman on each side of him, and Vanessa's hand already traveling up the inside of his thigh. Somewhere by the tack trunk, Naya was unbuckling Priya's saddlebags for no reason anyone had stated out loud.
"Thirteen," Katherine said, settling herself on the hay bale like a throne, and reached for Celeste's nipple. "Get comfortable, Jordan. I want my full number, and I want it sung."
Vanessa's fingers closed around him first, stroking him back to hardness while Alexa and Elena held his arms and suckled lazily at each other's nipples. Then Becka pushed her down onto the straw and knelt over her face, and Vanessa spread Jordan's thighs and climbed on, taking him without a word.
She rode him slow and grinding, her cunt soaked and clutching, milk dripping from her swinging tits onto his stomach. "No finishing," she gasped. "Katherine wants me at sundown proper."
He held out while she came, twice, her clit swollen under Elena's reaching fingers. When she rolled off, Rosa was already there, straddling his face.
"Then use your mouth," Katherine said from her throne. "All of you. Every way but one, until I call it."
Rosa's wet heat pressed down on his tongue, and Celeste took his slick cock in her hand.
Rosa rode his mouth in slow rolls, her thighs clamped tight around his ears, her cream thick on his tongue while Celeste's fist worked his cock in long pulls slick with Alexa's spend. He gripped Rosa's hips and licked up through her folds until her breath broke apart.
"There," she gasped. "Right there, don't stop."
She came against his jaw, shuddering, milky drops pattering his chest from her swinging nipples.
Celeste slid up his body and sank onto him, taking him to the root in one greedy motion. "Katherine had him first last night," she murmured, riding deep, "so I get the next finish."
"Not so," Katherine said from the bale, and stood. "Sundown is mine. Everyone else warms him up." She walked over, unbuckling her trousers.
Katherine shucked her trousers and stepped out of them with the unhurried authority of a woman whose house this was, whose stall this was, whose son this was. Her silver-streaked hair had come loose from its bun in the ride over, dark curls framing her mahogany face, and the gold band on her ring finger caught the striped light as she knelt astride Jordan's chest.
"Celeste. Off. You'll have him after."
Celeste slid off his cock with a wet sound and a look of pure theatrical grievance, and Katherine took her place, sinking down onto him in one long motion that made Jordan's hips buck off the straw. She was hot and gripped and familiar, and she knew exactly how he fit inside her because she had designed it that way.
"There," she breathed, seated to the root, her heavy thighs clamped around his ribs. "Thirteen finishes in two days and he's still hard as an oak post. That's my boy."
She rode him slowly at first, rolling her hips in deep circles, her cunt stroking every inch of him with the patience of a woman who had all afternoon. Rosa still knelt over his face, and Katherine reached forward so the two of them faced each other, and Jordan felt the bed of tongues and hands around him shift and settle like water finding its level.
"Sable," Katherine said over her shoulder. "You said you were coming to dinner. I'm holding you to a better offer."
Sable grinned and crawled over, still half dressed, and knelt behind Katherine so their bodies pressed together, Katherine's back against her broad chest. Sable's dark hands came around and cupped Katherine's breasts through the emerald silk, kneading until milk darkened the fabric in two spreading blooms.
"He gave me four this morning," Sable murmured into Katherine's ear, loud enough for the stall. "I felt the creek's work moving under my own hand while he was still inside me. You should have led with the droplets years ago."
"I led with everything in the right order." Katherine's voice came rougher now, her rhythm quickening. She rolled her hips harder, fucking herself down onto her son's cock with long greedy strokes, and Jordan gripped her hips and thrust up to meet her, the slap of their bodies loud in the straw-hazed light. His mouth worked under Rosa, his tongue buried in her, and Rosa's breath was coming in high broken gasps as a second orgasm rolled toward her.
"Vanessa," Katherine gasped. "Behind him. Don't let him slack."
Vanessa was already there, kneeling between his spread feet, her hand reaching under to cup his balls, rolling them, her other hand splayed on his lower back to hold his hips steady while her mother rode him. The double grip made his vision spark. He groaned into Rosa's cunt and Rosa came again, thighs clamping his ears, her spend flooding his mouth.
Katherine felt him trembling on the edge and stopped. Full hilt, her weight settled on him, her hand flat on his chest holding him down.
"No," she said. "Look at me."
He lifted his chin past Rosa's hip. His mother's face hovered above him, flushed deep, her eyes bright and ferocious and proud.
"You gave five girls their first this morning. You gave a veterinary the ride of her county. Now you give your mother sundown, and you give it all." She began to ride again, hard, her ass slapping his thighs, milk streaming from her stiff dark nipples down over her belly and pooling in the shallow of her navel. "Beneath me, inside me, all of it."
Sable reached around and rubbed Katherine's clit with two broad fingers, and Katherine broke in under a minute, a long shuddering cry ripping out of her, her cunt clamping around her son's cock in waves that pulled at him like a tide. Jordan arched off the straw and let go, pulsing up into her, pumping hot and thick while she milked him with slow rolls, her head tipped back, her throat bared.
"Fourteen," Celeste announced from the hay bale, and there was a scatter of applause from the five boarders, Brecka leading it with both hands and a braying laugh.
"Count is mine to call," Katherine said, breathless, without opening her eyes. She stayed seated on him a long moment, her weight a warm anchor, then lifted off with a slick sound and a final pat to his stomach, possessive as a brand. She stood on unsteady legs and let Sable steady her, and she looked down at the wreck of her son, sweat-soaked, straw-stuck, his cock still hard and shining with her.
"He's not soft," Maren observed, delighted. She had shed her tank top somewhere in the last hour, her small pale body gleaming, the gold heart pendant swinging between her breasts. "He never goes soft anymore. Mara, is that the droplets or is that him?"
"That's fourteen finishes in thirty hours," Mara said. Her voice had lost its edge somewhere in the last hour, stripped down to something raw and wondering. She was sitting where Sable had left her, her satchel abandoned, her collar open, Sable's hand still resting flat on her stomach like it had been stamped there. "It's physiology. It's also insane and I'd like it noted that I said so."
"Noted," Katherine said dryly. "Now stop sitting on your hands, Mara. You're the only one in this stall who hasn't been finished with."
"I don't take my own formulation."
"You don't need to," Maren said, crawling over to her with a grin. "Look around. The whole stall's dosed. You're marinating in it just breathing."
Mara looked. She looked at Alexa sprawled against the tack trunk, vast and satisfied, her enormous breasts leaking slow streams onto the straw. She looked at Becka, who was lying across Elena's lap getting her hair stroked like a pampered foal. She looked at Jordan, propped on his elbows, straw in his hair, hard still, watching her with a steady patience that made her throat close.
"I examine people," she said. "That's the arrangement."
"Then examine him," Katherine said, settling onto the bale with a queen's grace, reaching for Celeste's nipple to drink. "Up close. Thoroughly."
Sable leaned in, her lips at Mara's ear. "You've wanted to since the moment you walked in and counted his pulse for him. I watched you do it. Fingers on his wrist, pupils blown. You counted his heart like it was a specimen."
"That's not true."
"It's completely true," Naya said cheerfully from across the stall. She was sitting in Priya's lap, both of them pleasantly wrecked, and she pointed at Mara with a strap of leather she'd pulled off the tack wall for no stated reason. "You counted eleven heartbeats in the girls and then you stood there staring at his hands. I saw."
Mara's composure, already cracked down the middle, came apart entirely. She laughed, one short helpless bark, and pressed both hands over her face, and the stall roared around her.
Then she got up. She crossed the straw on her knees to where Jordan lay, and she took his wrist, two fingers on the pulse, exactly the way she'd done to the five girls an hour ago. Professional to the last. Her thumb found the rhythm and her lips moved with the count, and her eyes traveled up the blue map of his forearm, the straw marks, the line of his throat, the shine of Katherine still wet on him.
"Heart rate elevated," she said quietly. "But then, everyone's is."
"Everyone's," Jordan agreed. He didn't move. He let her hold his wrist, let her examine him, and watched her decide.
She let go of his wrist. She pulled her shirt over her head instead, small and wiry under it, her breasts compact and pale with brown nipples already drawn tight, and then she was undoing her jeans with quick clinical hands as though she were opening a kit.
"Nobody finishes in me," she said, looking at Katherine. "I'm not on anything. I make the droplets, I know the odds better than anyone in this county."
"Katherine's decree covers it," Katherine said, lazy with satisfaction. "The decree says everyone takes a finish."
"Then the decree can amend itself, because I said no and I meant it." Mara's chin came up. For a moment the stall held its breath, five boarders and eleven women waiting on the matriarch's ruling, and Katherine looked at her pharmacist sister with something new in her face, respect sharpening the amusement.
"Mouth and hands, then," Katherine said. "The rest of her is her own. House accepts the amendment."
"House accepts," Mara echoed, and turned back to Jordan, and straddled his hips without taking him in. She leaned down and kissed him, the first time her mouth had touched his, and it was nothing like clinical. It was starving. Her tongue pushed into him and her hands framed his jaw, and when she broke it she was breathing hard.
"Eleven heartbeats," she whispered against his lips. "Do you understand what you are now? Eleven claims plus four plus whatever Alexa's carrying. You're not a man in a house anymore. You're a whole generation's father."
"That's what you came here to tell me?"
"That's what I came here to tell you." She sat up and reached back and took him in her hand, his cock soaked and sensitive, and she stroked him slowly, watching her own fist work. "And then I was going to ride home. And instead."
"Instead," Sable said from somewhere behind her, her hand sliding up Mara's spine.
"Instead." Mara shifted, slicked him with Katherine's and Alexa's spend still on him, and pressed him between her thighs, not entering, dragging her wet slit along his length, her breath stuttering at every pass. Her clit dragged over the head of him and she gasped, biting it down.
"Take your time," Celeste said softly, watching her from the bale with sisterly tenderness. "There's no clock. Katherine ended all the clocks."
Mara rode him like that, sliding, her hips finding a rhythm, her small breasts swaying, until the friction and the stall's heat undid the last of her and she lifted and pressed him to her entrance and sank down just enough to sheath the head of him inside her, clenching around it, never deeper. Jordan's hands found her narrow hips and held her there, still, letting her use him exactly as she'd ruled.
"That's it," she breathed. "That's enough. That's all I'm taking."
She worked the head of him in and out with quick shallow snaps of her hips, her hand splayed on her own belly, and the pressure built fast, her moans going high and cracked. Sable knelt behind her, kissing her shoulder blades, one hand cupping her small breast and rolling the nipple, and Mara came apart between them in under three minutes, shaking, her cunt clamping rhythmically around the head of his cock, her cry muffled into Sable's mouth.
She lifted off him before he could tip. She wrapped both hands around his cock and stroked him hard and fast, slick and tight, her face set in fierce concentration, and when his hips jerked she pointed him up her belly and milked him through it, his spend pumping in thick ropes over her stomach and her fingers, hot on her skin.
She sat back on her heels and looked down at herself, painted white across her flat stomach, and she started to laugh, quiet and scandalized at her own self.
"Fourteen outside, then," Maren said, counting on her fingers. "Or is her mouth on the list?"
"It counts," Katherine ruled. "Full number by sundown, and I make the rulings. Maren, you're short. Rosa's had her mouth only. Vanessa, you and Priya and Naya owe me a proper finish each before the sun's down or the count's not full."
"Then rotate," Alexa rumbled from the tack trunk, hauling herself up, her breasts swaying with a weight that made the straw under her shudder. She crossed to the middle of the stall and lay back, spreading her broad copper thighs, and beckoned Rosa with two fingers. "You. Mouth only, I heard. Come sit on my face, girl, and somebody put that cock somewhere useful."
The stall became a shifting warm machinery of bodies. Rosa climbed onto Alexa's face with a giggle, her knees planted in the straw either side of the taller woman's head, and Alexa's hands spanned her hips and pulled her down and Rosa's head tipped back with a long low moan. Elena straddled Jordan's face in Rosa's place, her golden-brown thighs around his ears, her pregnant cunt swollen and drenched, and he licked into her while Maren sank down onto his cock with a squeal of pure greed.
"Mine's a finish," Maren announced, riding him hard, her small body slamming down, the heart pendant bouncing. "Nine becomes ten, Katherine, I'm keeping count like I always do."
"Then earn it, baby," Katherine said, and drank from Celeste while her daughter rode her son to his tenth finish in the sight of the whole family, Maren coming around him in a shuddering rush and pressing down to take every pulse of it with her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth open on a silent cry.
Elena came on his tongue twice, grinding down, her spend and his breath the only things in the world for a while. When she rolled off, Priya took her place, quiet and flushed, and Naya bent over the hay bale beside him and let Vanessa finish her with her hand while Jordan watched and the light in the slats went from gold to amber.
The shadows were leaning long across the yard when Katherine stood and cracked her back like any tired woman at the end of a long day's work. She surveyed her stall. Five boarders asleep in a puppy pile against the far wall. Alexa and Rosa tangled and dozing. Mara sitting up, still streaked, wiping her stomach clean with a square of sacking and not succeeding at looking composed. Her daughters and friends in various states of ruin, all of them glazed in milk and sweat and him.
"Fifteen," she said. "The number's full. Sundown kept."
Sable raised her head from Mara's shoulder. "Dinner, then. You promised me a place at that table, and I'm starving enough to eat the table."
"You'll have a place," Katherine said. She walked to the stall door and lifted the latch, and the evening air came in cool over all of them. Then she paused, her hand still on the door, and looked back at Mara with the calculation back in her eyes.
"Mara. Your formulation. Alexa says hers came off your published notes. That means the notes are loose in three counties now."
Mara went still. "They were clinical notes. Dosage only. Nobody could reproduce the active from what I wrote."
"Alexa did."
"I have a gift for chemistry," Alexa said mildly, not opening her eyes. "And a memory like a barn owl's."
Katherine let that sit in the cooling air, her gaze moving from the pharmacist to the veterinarian, from the vial-shaped satchel to the saddlebag, and a slow smile spread across her face that had nothing gentle in it.
"Then the two of you are going to sit together at my table tonight and talk supply," she said. "Because as of this morning I count five pregnancies in my house and three unconfirmed in this stall, and every woman in three counties is going to want what you two can make. Family recipe, family price. Nobody sells to anyone who hasn't sat at my table first."
Mara looked at Alexa. Alexa opened one dark eye and looked back at her.
"Sixty percent and my name first on any paper," Mara said.
"Sixty percent and I keep my counties," Alexa said.
Katherine pulled the stall door wide and let the evening in. "Done. Everyone up. Dinner's in an hour, and Jordan's carrying the smallest of you on his horse, because I know for a fact none of you can walk a straight line right now."
The stall groaned and stirred around him. Jordan lay in the wrecked straw a moment longer, fifteen finishes ringing in his body, five flutters and a generation's worth of claims pressed into the women sleeping around him, and Maren flopped down beside him and kissed his cheek.
"You're doing the dishes tonight," she said. "House rule. The father of eleven does the dishes."