Stone-Hearted Alpha by Eve Bale

Chapter Two

“He’s hot,” Talis murmurs as we start down the front steps of the main house.

I doubt I have long to pack and say goodbye to everyone before Dayne kills Jeremy for invading his territory.

The only thing that calmed him down was Talis and Regan’s offer to come to my cabin and help me pack. It also means Talis isn’t anywhere near Jeremy, which I guess was the reason Dayne practically shoved her out of the door.

With Talis and Regan helping me, it means I can get packed sooner, and Jeremy and I can be on the road before ten.

As it’s late already, it’s going to mean us staying in a motel on the way to wherever we’re going, which sounds like fun. Not.

I shoot a glance toward the office window where Dayne and Jeremy are having their discussion. “I wouldn’t let Dayne hear you say that, what with the baby making him crazy and all,” I warn her.

Talis places a hand over her rounded belly and grimaces. “I know right. Just think what he’ll be like when Squirt’s actually running around. Will he even let me pick her up?”

“I’m still not convinced it’s a girl,” Regan, who’s been quiet up to now, offers.

Talis glares at her. “Don’t you dare even suggest such a thing. God, if I’m wrong Dayne will never let me live it down.”

“You don’t want a boy?” I ask as I lead the way through the forest toward my cabin, relieved for the time being no one is asking me questions I’m still trying to formulate answers to.

Talis’ expression softens, and her large brown eyes warm. “I didn’t say that,” she murmurs. “I think a mini Dayne would be the cutest thing ever.”

Every time I speak with Talis, I’m always surprised by how much energy and spirit she has, considering everything she went through. She’s all alpha. Protective, fearless, and strong.

That kid is going to know so much love.

“He was a cute kid,” Regan concedes.

“Yeah,” I add. Dayne was blond-haired and blue-eyed, and very cute. Even if he was just as demanding as he is now. “But bossy. So, good luck raising an alpha kid like Dayne.”

It provokes the terror I was hoping to inspire, and Talis looks so horrified that I can’t help but laugh.

“So, Jeremy Stone,” Regan prompts.

When I turn to her, I find her waggling her eyebrows suggestively. “Give us the dirty. The low down, deep down, dirty. And hold nothing back. The nastier, the better.”

“Can you stop doing that, please?” I say coolly. I imagine I’m meeting a new client and eager to prove I’m the experienced model they’re looking for.

Regan snorts. “That won’t work on me, you know. Not after I caught you burying your poop in the sandbox that time.”

My face is flaming hot in less than a second.

Talis’ laughter explodes out of her. “What!” she gasps.

“That wasn’t me. I told you I was—”

Regan raises an eyebrow. “Somehow, I doubt it was Dayne. I didn’t believe you then, and I don’t believe you now. So, Jeremy. Spill. Now.”

Talis hunches over, tears streaming down her cheeks. “No, no. Let’s go back to the sandbox and the poop. I don’t even care about Jeremy now.”

It’s so mortifying, I can’t help but shoot a glance back at the house and hope that we were far enough away that Jeremy didn’t hear Regan.

“Well, tough, I do.” Regan’s narrowed hazel-green eyes warn me she’s not about to back down anytime soon. “But I can tell you later since Savannah will only keep interrupting to deny it, anyway.”

Sighing heavily, I wait for Talis to stop dying of laughter as we approach my cabin, a small log structure in the forest.

It was an older, abandoned building built by the alpha before Owen, but it was Dayne who spent a lot of time and money making it—and a couple of others nestled in the forest—liveable.

“Don’t you have work early tomorrow?” I ask, leading the way into the one-room cabin.

“Day off. So… Jeremy Stone.” Regan goes straight to the refrigerator in the tiny kitchen and pulls out bottles of water for us.

I drag my big work suitcase out from under my bed and dump it on top.

When Regan is like this, it’s impossible to shake her off the scent. There’ll be no convincing her to drop it until I tell her something about Jeremy.

Once Regan’s handed out the water and settled on the couch alongside Talis, I open my suitcase and start talking, “I met him in a bar in Chicago.”

“When? ‘Cause I’m sure you weren’t rocking that bite when we were in Dawley,” Talis says, opening her bottle. “One of us would’ve seen it.”

“No. It wasn’t then. It was when we’d got back, and I had that work trip in New York.”

Or at least I told them I had a work trip. That’s not to say I didn’t go to New York. I did, but to meet with my agent to talk about a big Paris job I wasn’t—and I’m still not—ready to tell anyone about.

“Anyway,” I keep talking when it looks like Regan’s about to ask me a question, “the trip isn’t important. After, I decided to take a couple of days for myself in a place I’d never been before.”

“But… Chicago?” Talis wrinkles her brow. A glance in her direction proves she isn’t buying this. “You go to Paris, Monaco, and London. Why Chicago?”

I grab a handful of clothes at random from the dresser and start folding. “That’s for work. And it’s not like I’m ever really visiting anywhere interesting. More often than not, I’m in my hotel, or working, or grabbing takeout to bring back to my room. It’s not all that exciting.”

“But then why do you do it?” Talis asks. “I’m sure you don’t even have to work at all. The pack does well enough.”

She’s right.

Things are good now. But they weren’t always.

When Dayne took over as alpha, pack finances weren’t great. If anyone less determined than Dayne had taken charge, I doubt the pack would have had the main house now.

None of us realized how bad things were until Dayne found all the letters Owen had been hiding. He’d mortgaged the pack land and the main house to the hilt, and it was only a matter of time before he lost everything.

Things were so bad that Dayne pretty much worked from dawn to dusk. First, to uncover all the things Owen had been hiding. Then he was down at the bank, trying to convince the bank not to foreclose because of all the missed payments.

Since Dayne had always taken an interest in finance and investing, he took what little money was left and kept investing it over and over.

It took years. And in those years, he barely slept. And somehow, in the middle of it, he lost even more sleep trying to track Talis down.

I still can’t believe he did, and that he had time to check up on me as well.

Things are a little different now he’s mated.

Dayne still works longer than he should, but he takes more time off to spend with Talis, and all the time he put into learning about investments and pulling the pack out of the red and into the black has more than paid off.

Now that he has Talis to help, we all see him more than we did before.

I’m sure if I didn’t want to, I wouldn’t have to work at all, but not working would mean staying here in Hardin permanently, and I can’t do that.

So, I push myself to keep on doing it, not because I have any real desire to be a model, but it gives me an excuse to be away from Hardin.

All because I can’t bring myself to tell Dayne I don’t want to be here anymore, and that I haven’t for years now.

I shrug. “It’s what I know.”

When Talis’ brow creases and she looks poised to push, I smile gently. “I thought you wanted to know about Jeremy?”

“I do,” she admits, though her frown remains. “But not at the cost of talking about something important, like you.”

And that’s when I know how far she’s come.

In four months, she’s become the Luna this pack didn’t know we needed. She’s grown so much, which only serves to remind me how little I have, and how stagnant my life has been for years.

“I don’t, but thanks, Luna,” I tell her.

Although she flushes, and waves her hand at me with a hurried, “No need to call me that,” it’s hard to miss how much she likes the title.

“So.” I resume folding. “Chicago was just a short break. It was close. It was the next flight leaving New York, and I thought, why not?”

“And you met your mate. It must be fate.” Regan slumps back on the couch with a happy sigh, her long honey-brown hair fanning behind her.

I think back to the dark and dingy bar I met Jeremy Stone and my reckless act.

Fated mates? Not a chance.

If Regan ever learned how we met, she’d either laugh herself silly or refuse to believe I was telling the truth.

The idea of the serious, prefers-the-quiet-of-living-in-a-cabin-in-the-woods-with-books-for-company Savannah Blackshaw going prowling for a one-night stand is impossible to imagine.

Even now I struggle to believe it happened.

“Well, we met in a bar, and we hit it off.”

I told him I wanted a one-night stand, no strings attached. He bought me a drink and slipped his hand under my skirt. I came that first time in a dark corner booth with the people all around us none the wiser.

“We talked a little, and we realized there were some things we had in common.”

Namely that I wanted to fuck him, and he wanted to fuck me.

“So, we decided to go someplace else and get to know each other a little better.”

We fucked again in the back of his car. I came twice then.

“It wasn’t long before we realized we’d formed a real connection with each other in a short time. It seemed impossible, but it was true.”

He took me back to his place, and we had sex again in the elevator going up, against his front door before he got it open, and then on the floor just inside.

At that point, I passed out or fell asleep. I’m still not sure which, but when I woke up, we were in his bed, and he had his mouth between my legs.

“I don’t know if you can call that fate. But it was intense.”

For nearly forty-eight hours we never left his bed unless it was to use the bathroom or get food. We barely spoke a word to each other. Just fucked like bunnies, and no matter how many times we did, I always wanted more, and he never seemed to get enough of me either.

“So, that’s about it, really.”

As Jeremy and I lay there on the second night, which should only have been one, I’d started thinking about when I’d have my next one-night stand because clearly, I’d been missing out. I figured if this is what it was like, I needed to start spending a little less time in my cabin and a little more time hitting the bars.

Sometime between us talking, and my making plans to leave, we had sex again. And that was when he bit me.

Mated us together, in other words.

I finish folding the last of the clothes I’m taking with me and turn to the bookcase but pause when I find Talis and Regan staring at me with their faces expressionless.

Regan sucks in a breath. “That’s the biggest load of bullshit that I—”

“—Regan!” Dayne’s voice from the doorway cuts her off, and Regan closes her mouth, even though I can see she still wants to argue.

I peer around Dayne, but there’s no sign of Jeremy filling the doorway.

“He went to get his car,” Dayne says, stepping into the cabin and closing the door behind him.

“Oh.” I wait for the inevitable explosion or the flurry of questions because Dayne knows me well enough to know a story when he’s heard one.

And although he gazes at me seriously, he doesn’t look as pissed as he did earlier.

I can’t help but wonder what they were talking about, and why their conversation didn’t take near as long as I thought it would.

“He’ll be back for you shortly,” Dayne adds.

He stops to press a kiss on Talis’ hair as he passes her on the couch.

It’s so sweet to see how instinctive, how natural, it is for him to kiss her, and for her to kiss him back.

They’re in harmony with each other.

Sometimes, I see it when they’re walking together. They adjust their pace and it’s like they don’t even realize they’re doing it.

Part of me wonders if it’s the mate bond that makes them so good at reading each other, or if it’s love.

“Oh, okay,” I say, and resume packing.

Since I alternate between jeans and the occasional sundress, there’s little in the way of clothes I’m attached to. Not like some girls I’ve worked with who would’ve happily stabbed another girl in the back to get the better outfits.

But like I said, I never became a model because I like the idea of travel, or fashion, or a need to be famous.

Those were never my reasons.

“And you’re happy about leaving?” Dayne asks as I head to the bookcase and take a lot more care in choosing out my favorite books.

With the shelves full to bursting, I know I can’t take everything, but I’ll take a good handful. Maybe twenty for now, and I can always come back and grab more in a couple of weeks.

“Sure, I’m mated to Jeremy. I know we couldn’t stay. You’d want to challenge him, and he would want to challenge you. So, I have to leave.”

“But are you happy?” Dayne’s stare is probing. “Because if you’re not, I can kill him, and then there’d be no question of you leaving.”

I can’t help but smile as I place the books in the suitcase before I cross over to the couch and pull him into a hug. “I love you for the offer, and I appreciate it, but there’s no need for you to kill Jeremy.”

I can get myself out of this on my own.

“You know you’ve always got a place here, right?” Dayne’s arms are a familiar warmth around me, and I feel my eyes fill with tears.

Family.

He’s the only family I have left in the world, and it doesn’t matter that I’m adopted, because it doesn’t feel like it. He’s never treated me anything less than a full sister.

“I know,” I say with a voice husky with tears. “But I have to leave now.”

And not just because of Jeremy.

I know that if I don’t leave, and soon, I’ll fall so deep into myself that my misery, guilt, depression, and anxiety will swallow me whole and I’ll never be the same anymore.

Dayne squeezes me hard and edges back to press a kiss on my brow. “I know,” he says in a way that has me searching his eyes because it sounds like he really does know.

But he’s got his unreadable expression on. The one that had everyone convinced for years he was the cold-blooded alpha when nothing could be further from the truth.

I blink my tears away and force a smile on my face. “I know this is all very last minute, my leaving like this.”

“Come back next weekend,” Regan says, rising from the couch. “We’ll go for a run and have the BBQ we were supposed to have tonight.”

In response to her words, Talis’ stomach rumbles. Loudly.

We all turn to find her glowering, her hand over her belly as if to muffle the sound. “What? I can’t be the only one hungry?”

Dayne slips an arm around her waist and tucks her under his shoulder. “Nope. Just you, piggy.” He gives her head a hard kiss, and when I see the violence in her eyes, I wonder how Dayne can sleep with both eyes closed.

“You’re playing a dangerous game riling a pregnant woman like that,” I warn him.

Although I’m an alpha, I’m nowhere near as hot-tempered as Talis can be. She’s like a lit firework. There have been more times than I can remember that my packmates have come to my cabin to wait out one of her explosions.

Once Luka joked that Dayne only built her a cabin so he could get some peace in the main house.

Luka spent the next week hiding out in my cabin. She got him eventually, though he refuses to say what she did. Whatever it was, it must’ve been bad, because he hasn’t taunted her since.

Dayne’s grin comes out of nowhere. “I know, exciting, isn’t it?”

“Alphas,” Talis grumbles, giving me a loaded look of warning, “just you wait.”

“Which is why you won’t catch me making that mistake,” Regan says smugly, ignoring mine and Talis’ glare. “So, do you know where you’re settling?”

Since I have no plans of sticking with Jeremy for too long, it doesn’t matter, so I shrug. “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it.”

And it’s the truth. We haven’t. We haven’t talked about anything. Not even this mating. I foresee hours of fun in his car when he arrives.

“Since Jeremy doesn’t have a pack of his own, and Dawley’s in need of one, he suggested checking it out.”

At Dayne’s words, a chill spreads over me, and for a second I remember the cold eyes filled with malice glinting at me from Dawley National Forest.

The same stare chased me back into the main house when I caught sight of the unknown shifter outside my cabin.

But Abel’s dead. Dyne killed him. I know this. But it still isn’t enough to silence my fears.

I consider telling Dayne I don’t want to go with Jeremy, that this is all a terrible mistake. But then I imagine what would happen if I told him I didn’t want to go.

Dayne would fight Jeremy, and Jeremy had tracked me down here intending to claim me.

There’s no way he’s going to walk away without a fight.

A big one.

I’m sure Dayne could defend himself—win, probably. But what if he doesn’t? What if Jeremy hurts Dayne badly, and he dies? What happens to Talis and their baby then?

“Savannah, are you all right?” I jump, startled, at Talis’ hand on my arm. I have no memory of her moving closer to me, but she’s close enough I should have noticed.

There’s worry deep in her eyes. Worry for me.

I can’t let anything happen to Dayne. I can’t let anything threaten her new happiness, a thing she’s fought so hard for.

And anyway, I have no intention of staying with Jeremy for long. Just long enough for my backup plan to kick in, and then I can invent some story about how things didn’t work out when I come back to visit Hardin.

It’ll only be a couple of days.

But first I’d need to have built a new life for myself, otherwise everyone will just expect me to move back to my cabin and everything will go right back to the way it was before. Something I can’t let happen.

“I’m fine,” I reassure her.

“You look pale,” Regan says.

I plaster a smile on my face. “I’m okay, promise. Come on, let’s finish up here and go feed Talis before she kills Dayne,” I joke.

I head back to the bookcase to grab more books, but the moment I’ve turned my back, my smile slides away.

I’m going back to Dawley, a place I swore I’d never return, and a place which has done nothing but reawakened my nightmares.

How the hell am I supposed to hide them from my new mate?