All Chapters of RECLAIMED BY THE ALPHA: THE ALPHA’S HIDDEN HEIR: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The blue dress caused Tension before I even put it on.Derek was right, it’s beautiful. Silk. Backless. The kind of blue that shifts in candlelight from navy to something almost black. I stand in front of the mirror and the woman looking back at me is someone I haven’t been in a long time. Someone who goes to dinners and doesn’t pack a medical bag in her purse.Alex meets me in the lobby with Mia on one side and Mason on the other. He’s been watching them while I changed, and Mason has whipped cream on his jacket from whatever bribery occurred during that window. His eyes sweep from my face to the dress to my bare back and his lips part.“Jesus, Em.”“Derek made it.”“Derek deserves a raise.”“He just got one.”“Give him another one.”The restaurant is on the resort grounds. Candlelit. White tablecloths. Mia holds my hand on one side and Mason holds Alex’s on the other as we walk in, and for a strange, suspended second we look like something I don’t let myself think about.Nick is alr

I wake up expecting the resort to feel emptier without Alex.It doesn’t.That’s the part I’m not ready to think about yet, so I put on my swimsuit and take Mia to breakfast and don’t think about it.Nick is already at the restaurant with Mason. They’re at a corner table by the window. Mason is eating pancakes with the precision of an engineer, cutting each one into identical squares before consuming them. Nick is reading something on his phone with one hand and holding his coffee with the other and he looks up when we walk in and his face does the thing — the small, private shift that happens before he has time to put the wall up. Something warm. Something that disappears the second he catches it.“Morning,” he says.“Morning.”I sit across from him. Mia climbs over Mason to get to the seat beside him because gravity still works.We eat. Nick passes me the sugar without being asked. I pass him the cream. We’ve been doing this for weeks the silent choreography of two people who’ve lear

A sound comes out of me. Small. From somewhere I don’t have a name for. My forehead presses into the curve of his neck and I breathe him in and I can’t think. I should pull away. I should step back and say goodnight and go upstairs. I should do all of those things and instead I am pressing closer, my fingers curling into his shirt, my nose against his throat where his pulse is jumping.The song ends. The speakers go quiet. The garden lights click off, one by one, until the only light is the bar’s dim amber glow and the moon through the window.We stop moving.We don’t step apart.His hand moves from my back to my jaw. Slow. His fingers tracing the line of my neck on the way up, leaving heat behind them like a trail of lit matches. His thumb settles on my cheekbone. He tilts my face up.He’s close. So close I can see the gold flecks in his grey eyes, not just the colour but the pattern, the way they fan out from the pupil like tiny fractures, like something that cracked and let light i

Mia appears with Mason. Both rumpled and half-asleep. Mia climbs onto Nick’s lap. Mason sits beside me and leans his head against my arm, my arm, not Nick’s, and the gesture is so casual, so thoughtless, so much like a boy who has decided I’m a safe place to lean, that my hand goes to his hair before I think about it.Nick watches me touch his son’s hair.I pretend I don’t see him watching.We check out. Load the car. Drive to the airfield. Mia falls asleep against Mason’s shoulder, clutching a stolen starfish soap. Nick drives with both hands on the wheel and I look out the window and neither of us mentions the bar, the song, the dance, the kiss, the sound I made against his mouth, or the fact that pretending is the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done and we haven’t even started yet.The apartment smells the same. Coffee residue and crayons and lemon cleaner. I put Mia in bed, Agnes under her arm, starfish soap on the nightstand because she refused to let it go even through security

My jaw snaps sideways. I taste copper. The wolf roars behind my teeth. Something old and patient and carefully banked just burned through the last of its fuel.“Don’t you ever talk about Alex like that,” she says.My head turns with it. Hard. My cheek burns and my wolf lunges forward so fast my vision goes dark at the edges. I swallow him down. The taste of copper fills my mouth. My jaw throbs. Something old and patient and carefully banked just burned through the last of its fuel.The room is very quiet. The amber light. The cold coffee. Her perfume reaching me now, coffee and fabric softener and the warm thing underneath that is just her skin. Just the scent I’ve been living inside for five weeks.I turn my face back to hers. Slowly.“Don’t ever put your hand on me again.”“Don’t you ever talk about Alex like he’s—”“Like he’s what? Say it. Say what he is to you.”“He’s the man who was there. When you weren’t. For years.”“I know exactly what he is. And I’m telling you right now, Em