Filed to story: The Alpha’s Pen Pal Book
We get out of the car at the same time, so I rush around the hood and grab the cafe door’s handle before she can, opening it for her. She turns to look at me, her curly, messy bun almost brushing my nose as she does. The light coconut scent of whatever she uses on her hair mixes with her natural scent, feeding into that summertime nostalgia it awakens in me every time I catch a whiff.
“Holding the door open?” she asks with a raised brow. “You continue to surprise me.”
“Should I not hold it open?”
“No, go ahead. Treat me like a queen. Just know I’ll expect this level of treatment from now on whenever we see each other,” she says as she walks by me.
My wolf perks up and if he could, he’d be nodding his head and saying “Yes, dear” to her request. He’s already whipped and we’ve only known her for three days.
And he seems to be forgetting we’re rejecting her in a few weeks on the full moon.
We walk to the counter, and the stares from the handful of Crescent Lake wolves seated within the cafe itch my skin. I’m sure they find it odd, seeing me here with a female. But I ignore them and pay no attention to any of the other customers seated at the tables of various sizes and shapes.
I have nothing to be ashamed of. I’m here to have coffee and lunch with a friend. A friend who is a female.
And my mate.
“I’ll take a snickerdoodle latte, the BLT with avocado, and two each of this week’s cookies,” I say to the female at the register, cutting off my thoughts. “What would you like?” I ask, turning to Taryn.
“A white mocha and a kale salad with grilled chicken, please.”
I turn back to the cashier and hand her my card, hiding my smug smile from Taryn. She didn’t even argue with me about me paying for her food. She just let me take care of her like I’m supposed to.
Wait, what? Why do I care about that? Oh, right, because of the mate bond. Because of my wolf.
Stop planting these thoughts in my head, fur ball!
I scold my wolf in my mind, jaw clenched as the cashier hands me back my card, and I shove it into my wallet.
But I force what I hope is a smile—or at least a neutral, natural look—onto my face as I turn towards my mate. I mean Taryn. Taryn. Her name is Taryn, and she’s not my mate. Or, well, not for long.
“Holding the door and paying for my food and coffee? You are more of a gentleman than I thought!” she teases, placing her hand on her chest.
I clear my throat and follow her towards a table near the front windows. “I may sleep around, but I’m not a dickhead.”
She sits down with her back to the windows. “That’s not what Sebastian said.”
I groan and pinch the bridge of my nose as I sit across from her. “Despite what he claims, between the two of us, Sebastian is the real dickhead.”
“How so?”
“When we were kids, I called him a dickhead at training. The next day, after school, I fell asleep on the couch in the alpha apartment. Now picture this: one minute, I am sleeping peacefully, dreaming of what my wolf will look like when I turn fourteen and shift for the first time, and the next, I am being jolted from my sleep by Seb banging a pan with a wooden spoon yelling ‘Who’s the dickhead now?!’ because he’d drawn a giant penis on my forehead with a permanent marker.”
Her hand is covering her mouth again, but her shoulders shake, and her eyes squint as she tries not to laugh. I narrow my eyes at her, and she breaks out in a fit of laughter.
“I’m sorry, but that is funny shit. And you kind of deserved it,” she says, pointing her finger at me.
“I’m sure he deserved to be called a dickhead. I don’t remember what he did that made me say that, but he was always doing things to get on our nerves. On purpose,” I add.
“How old were you?” she asks, still laughing.
“I was twelve, and he was ten.”
“Did you ever get him back?”
I wince and rub the back of my neck. “I put some bleach in his shampoo.”
She gasps and her eyes widen. “You did not!”
I nod. “I did. And Luna Emily was NOT happy. She made me bleach my hair too, even though I’m already blond, so Seb didn’t have to suffer alone.”
“I like her,” Taryn says.
Our food and coffee arrive, and the barista sets it all on the table between us. I eye the plate of fresh-baked cookies, debating eating one now while they are still warm because that is when they are best, but I decide against it. I’ve already given Taryn enough ammunition for a lifetime of teasing me about my cookie obsession.
Not that we’ll have a lifetime together.
“What about you and your friend?” I ask, picking up my sandwich. “Blake? You said she made you your Date-To-Mate profile, too. Do you two have any… dickhead stories?”
She’s already chewing a bite of her salad, so she holds a finger up to me until she swallows. “No, we don’t pull pranks on each other. But we have a friendly competition between ourselves that’s been ongoing since we were teens. A bet, of sorts, I suppose, although it’s just for bragging rights.”
“I thought you just moved to Silver Ridge a little over a year ago?”
“I did, but my parents were from there originally, remember? We used to come visit my aunt Georgia all the time, so even though I wasn’t born there, I was already familiar with the pack and most of the members when I moved here.”
I nod as I finish my own bite of food. “That makes sense.”
“So, when we were younger, after my first shift, we agreed to team up and train together whenever I visited, and we’d keep each other updated on our progress in between over texts and stuff.”
“Is her wolf small, too?” I ask.
“No, her wolf is normal-sized. But she has this natural white streak in her hair—kind of like Rogue from X-Men—and kids used to tease her about that and because she’s so short. Petite. In her human form, I mean. When I turned fourteen and had my first shift and my wolf was small, we made a pact to work harder so people would learn what happens when they underestimate us. Every workout, challenge, training, run—all of it goes on our scoreboard. There isn’t a prize or an end goal, but we use it to remind ourselves where we started.”
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?