The Lycan King Thinks My Sweater Makes Him Mine

I knit myself a sweater.
The yarn was sixty percent “local.”
Local is six foot six, and he just joined my knitting circle.

I’m the bookkeeper in a town too small for secrets, which is how I know something’s off. Somebody holds the good parking spot outside the coffee shop for me every morning. The butcher won’t take my money. A teenager I’ve never laid eyes on steps off the sidewalk into the slush to let me by.

Then there’s the man in the brown shearling coat. He turns up with a pair of wooden needles he holds like hammers, and a scarf coming off them that is either a scarf or a cry for help. He walks me home on the traffic side of the street. He calls me sweetheart the way other men say ma’am.

Here’s what nobody in town thought to mention. Up on the Vasska ridge, a wolf’s shed coat is never sold. It gets given, and whoever wears it down the road is telling the whole ridge: this one’s mine.

His aunt spun it. His aunt sold it to me. His aunt is not one bit sorry.

“That’s my fur on your shoulders, sweetheart. In my world, you claimed me.”

Rhys Vasska has been king for ninety years and has the silver in his beard to show for it. He says the sweater obliges me to nothing, and he’s seeing to that himself, one walk home at a time.

Custom says I wear it through to the spring shed, or I hand it back and it’s finished. It’s the first thing I ever made and kept.

It’s cold out. I’m keeping the sweater. Him, I haven’t decided.

A cozy, spicy small-town wolf shifter romance: a bookkeeper who knits for everyone but herself, a silver-bearded alpha king who takes up knitting to court her, a meddling aunt, a whole town in on it, and no drama that outstays its welcome. No cliffhanger. Guaranteed HEA. Standalone.

Tropes: Accidental Claim • Courtship by Knitting Circle • Silver Fox Alpha King • He Learns to Knit for Her • Meddling Aunt • Small Town Secrets • Heroine Holds the Power

Heat: Spicy (open door, heat on the page, warmth-led) │ Tone: Light, funny, emotional │ POV: Dual first person, present tense │ Standalone │ HEA, no cliffhanger