All Chapters of My Step Daddy’s Holimate: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

RONANI’VE been watching her all night even though I told myself I wasn’t. I told myself I was engaged in conversation with the council members who kept finding me with things to discuss, alliances to broker. But my eyes kept finding her. Every single time.She’s come back from that bathroom totally transformed. Shoulders back, chin up, fierce and decided in the set of her jaw. She walked onto that dance floor like she owned it and proceeded to prove that she did.The first man, some beta in a navy suit whose name I didn’t know, put his hands on her waist and I felt Fox snarl so loudly in my chest that the alpha standing beside me actually paused mid sentence.“Everything alright?” He asked with a frown.“Fine. Continue.” But I wasn’t listening to a word he said.I watched her laugh at something a navy suit said, her head thrown back, her auburn hair catching the light like flames. I watched her move with him, easy and unselfconscious. She was so beautiful beautiful. She looked happ

WREN’S POVI woke up to my own skull trying to kill me. The sunlight coming through the curtains was like a personal attack. I pressed my face into the pillow and groaned. My head was pounding and my mouth is tasting like regret and stale champagne. Every muscle protesting the memory of dancing in heels for three hours straight.Ashley was completely unsympathetic in my mind. Wide awake and judgmental.“Don’t start” I muttered into the pillow and she huffed.I lay there for another few minutes waiting to see if the ceiling would stop spinning if I just stayed very still and breathed carefully. It didn’t help but it didn’t make things worse either so I counted that as progress.That’s when I noticed it on the nightstand. It was arranged with a neatness that was not mine with a glass of water. Two white tablets beside it. A small folded piece of paper that just said take these in handwriting I recognized.I stared at it for a long moment. He’s left me hangover medicine.He came in here

WREN’S POVWe found a bench near the shoreline on the way back, one of those weathered wooden ones that looked like it had been sitting there long enough to become part of the landscape. The bench has probably witnessed a hundred difficult conversations.Camille sat down without me suggesting it, which meant she’d been carrying this long enough that her legs were tired from it. I sat beside her nd waited.Camille was quiet for a long moment, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes on the water.“It happened three days ago” she said finally.I kept quiet waiting for her. “There was a group visiting. Wolves from different packs, just passing through the island on their way somewhere else. Alpha Mason was hosting them for two nights.” She paused, something working in her jaw. “I was helping coordinate the guest accommodations because Lena had called in sick and I was covering.”“Okay” I said softly.“I walked into the main hall with a stack of room assignments and I just –” She stopped and

WREN’S POVHe stopped at the edge of my table with the courtesy of a man who understood his own power well enough to be careful with it.“You’re alone” he observed.“Camille had to leave.”“Mm.” He glanced at the chair across from me then back at my face. None of the presumption I’d expected, none of the easy entitlement that most alphas carried into every interaction like a briefcase. Mason is not the arrogant kinda alphas. “Would you like some company? I can just as easily sit at the bar if you’d prefer the quiet.”He meant it. That was the thing that caught me off guard. His genuine offer of the alternative, the way he left actual space for me to say no. I thought about it honestly for a second.I’d been avoiding him. Steering clear of situations where it would be just the two of us without the buffer of a crowd or Camille or even Ronan’s looming presence to hide behind. Because Mason was perceptive in a way that made me feel slightly transparent and transparent was not something

WREN’S POVI woke up wrong. Not the gentle wrong of a bad dream or an uncomfortable sleeping position. Wrong in a deeper, more physical way like my body had made a decision overnight that it hadn’t consulted me about.The ceiling swam when I opened my eyes. I lay very still, doing an inventory the way I’d been trained. Nausea was sitting high in my chest and threatening. There is bone-deep tiredness that had nothing to do with how long I’d slept. I pressed my lips together and breathed carefully through my nose. The nausea faded slightly. Then a wave hit that made my body make the decision for me.I moved faster than I’d moved in days, untangling from the sheets and making it to the bathroom with approximately three seconds to spare.Afterward I sat on the cool tile floor with my back against the bathtub and my knees pulled to my chest, waiting to see if there was more coming. The floor felt wonderful against my overheated skin. I pressed my cheek to my knees and focused on breathing