Filed to story: The Alpha’s Pen Pal Book
Before I come clean and tell him the truth about how she looks and who she is to me.
Before I confess to him that she’s my mate.
He’ll never let me live it down if I tell him. He’ll forever gloat that the blind date he picked for me ended up being my mate. Even though I’m rejecting her—once I figure out what the hell is going on with our bond—he’ll still brag about it to anyone who listens until either he dies or he finds something else to be smug about.
Whichever comes first.
“So, you didn’t want to tear it up with Taryn?” he teases.
“She’s not that type, okay?” I snap, slamming the black marble counter with my fist, holding back the growl my wolf wants to give him.
How dare he insinuate that about her? How dare he treat her like an object?
“Dude, chill. I’m joking,” he says, lifting his hands in surrender.
“I’m going to bed,” I say, ignoring him and shoving off from the counter, heading out of the kitchen, down the hall, and up the stairs before I wring his neck for suggesting I would use my mate like that.
The way I’ve used every other female I’ve ever been with.
That thought stops me in my tracks, and I rest my forehead against the door of the beta apartment, my hand frozen on the knob.
It’s not like those females didn’t know what they were getting when they rolled into bed with me. I’ve always been blunt about what a night with me entails—fantastic sex with no strings attached, no emotional commitment.
I’ve always been respectful, too. I make sure the females have as much enjoyment as I do when we’re together. Sure, there isn’t any kissing, but no kissing doesn’t equal no pleasure. There is plenty of pleasure.
But now—what happens now? I can’t go out and continue on in the way I have been. Sure, Taryn didn’t feel the bond, but that doesn’t mean I can sleep with other females while the bond is intact. I don’t know for sure that she won’t feel my betrayal since I don’t know why she didn’t feel the bond to begin with.
And what happens if she sleeps with someone else? Will I feel that? What if she dates someone from Date-To-Mate, or, Goddess forbid, lets Dominic back into her life?
The snarling, growling, and snapping of jaws by my wolf in my head at that thought clinches it for me. I have to find out what is going on with our bond as soon as possible. So I can reject her on the next full moon.
The day before Wesley and Haven’s wedding.
“Fuck!” I mutter under my breath, banging my head against the door noiselessly. “This is all such a fucking mess.”
It appears Haven’s birth mom has a sense of humor. A twisted one. But, then again, she’s Selene, and a goddess, so maybe her idea of what is funny isn’t the same as what we think is funny.
“Reid, you need to stop spiraling and just go to bed and sleep on it. You’ll think clearer in the morning when it’s not so fresh,” I say to myself.
With that goal in mind, I open the door to the apartment and head inside, only to be stopped in my tracks again.
The scene in the living room shouldn’t surprise me. It’s not the first time I’ve found my dad like this in the eighteen years since my mom died, and it won’t be the last. But somehow, I am always shocked when I come home to find him like this—passed out cold on our old, brown couch, with bottles of beer and liquor littering the floor and the coffee table.
I close the door behind me, careful to not make a sound, then walk into the living room, pinching the bridge of my nose and blowing out a long breath. I don’t want to deal with this. Not after the night I’ve had. Not with my racing thoughts, my riled up wolf, and the stress both are putting on my mind and my heart. I’m exhausted, and all I want to do is go to sleep so my mind can rest and my wolf will stop bothering me.
But the benefits of staying up longer to clean up this mess are better than the benefits of getting a small bit of extra sleep, no matter how needed it is.
I move around the living room, making as little noise as possible as I pick up the discarded beer cans, shot glasses, and empty bottles of liquor. I take them into the kitchen, sorting them into the dishwasher and the recycling, my nose wrinkling from the scent of the mixing alcohols as they flow into the drain before I toss the bottles.
I don’t bother to calculate how much he’s had. I know it’s enough to kill a human if it’s knocked him out cold. Our enhanced healing doesn’t prevent us from getting drunk—it just means it takes more alcohol to get us there.
I head back into the living room with a cleaning rag and a bottle of multi-purpose cleaner and begin wiping the coffee table and plank flooring to rid it of the stench of his drinks. I pause as I glimpse his hand dangling down the side of the couch, clutching the framed picture of my mom he keeps by his bed. The one of her kneeling in the garden, with dirt on her forehead, her worn overalls, and under her nails, her blonde hair windblown and messy, and a joyful smile on her face as she laughed at whatever my dad said to her when he snapped the picture.
The last picture he took of her before she died.
I slip it from his fingers and wipe it, too, cleaning off the fingerprints and smudged tears, setting it on the coffee table so I can take it down the hall with me when I head to bed. My throat tightens, and it takes everything in me to rip my eyes away from her face, to not let myself get lost in the memories my dad already drowned himself in while I was out.
“Reid?”
My dad’s voice is cracked, dry, and confused. I glance at him and find him blinking, his eyes open but glassy. He sits up and roughs up my hair, and I hold in my grimace, hold back my urge to flinch away.
“What are you doing out of bed, buddy? It’s the middle of the night. You should be sleeping.”
I swallow and close my eyes. He’s not here—he’s in the past. He thinks I am the kid version of me instead of the grown, adult werewolf I am now.
“I can’t sleep,” I say, pulling the words from memory, repeating the sentences I said so many times in those early years of my life and so many times after on nights like tonight. “I miss Mom.”
It’s not a lie, not an act. I’ve spent countless nights lying on my back, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling—the ones she put there for me because I feared the dark—trying to count the rotations of the ceiling fan so I could fall asleep, but never finding that relief.
“She’s on patrol like she always is on Friday nights. Go back to sleep, and she’ll be home by the time you wake up in the morning,” he says.
“Okay,” I reply in a whisper, getting to my feet and grabbing the picture frame and the cleaning supplies.
He’s lying back on the couch with an arm thrown over his eyes, already snoring before I make it to the hall. I tuck the supplies away and slip into his bedroom, placing the picture frame in the exact spot it’s always in on his nightstand. As though he never removed it.
As soon as the frame is out of my hands, I leave his room and head to mine across the hall, leaning against the door as I close it behind me, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes as I stand there and breathe.
I don’t know how long I’ve been there, emptying my mind of everything, when my phone buzzes against my leg.
I fumble in my pocket for it, my wolf perking up again since he knows there is only one person who would try to reach me by text instead of by mindlink.
My mate.
New Book: Veiled Desires of the Alpha King Novel
Dayson was the alpha of the largest pack in North America. Powerful figures from other packs sought to offer gorgeous girls as potential mates for Dayson. He steadfastly rejected these advances, he was not a pawn to be manipulated. But eventually there came a mysterious girl he could hardly say No. Who was she?