Page 66 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

I sighed heavily. Damn it. “Come here, omega,” I said, gesturing for her to come and sit next to me. “Don’t worry. You can absolutely have him. I can’t deny you anything, and you know that.”

She brightened, coming over to sit down next to me and kissing me on the cheek. “Really? How will that work?”

“Wait, what?” said Corentin, his voice rising.

I sighed again, leveling an annoyed gaze at him. “She’s an omega, and she has needs. I was never intending to keep her all to myself. If she wants you, of course she’s allowed to indulge—”

“Allowed?” said Corentin. “You don’t own her. You can’t give her permission—”

“Corentin,” she broke in. “He’s my mate.” She tugged down her shirt to show him my mark, which made something pleased and feral rise in me.

I couldn’t stop myself from bending down and running my tongue over it. A purr rose in my throat.

She sighed into me, her scent going soft and satisfied.

Corentin’s scent filled the room, brash and intense. He clenched his hands into fists. “I need to talk to you alone, Aurelie.”

“Anything you need to say, you can say in front of him,” she said, taking my hand and entwining our fingers. “We’re getting married tomorrow, and I want you to be there, of course, my special guest—” She looked up at me. “We can make that work, can’t we? Shuffle around the seating arrangements last minute? I know it’s a hassle, but I can’t believe he’s here. I’m going to go to sleep and wake up and think this was all a dream. It’s…” She let out a little laugh. “It’s so good to see you, Corentin. I hadn’t realize how much I missed you.” There was a thread of something in her voice, some strange longing that pierced me somewhere.

I squeezed her fingers, too tight, because she winced and pulled her hand out of mine.

Damn it.

Corentin rubbed his forehead. “You… you like him.” This was a revelation to him. He had never considered that could be a possibility.

“I’m in love with him,” she said.

It was so good to hear her say that out loud. It was steadying. I reached for her hand again.

But she tucked it away onto her lap.

Corentin leaned forward, across the table, his voice going low and urgent. “Whenever we talked about him, about how that arranged marriage had fallen through, you said you were relieved. You said you never wanted that. You said you didn’t even want the sort of life you had with your family, that you wanted to be free—”

“I was sixteen, Corentin. Everyone wants to be free at that age.”

He sat back in his chair, his jaw tightening.

It was quiet.

“I did this for you,” he said. “I did all of this—”

“What did you do?” she said. “How are you an alpha?”

“It’s not just that,” he said. “I have… money. I started a little company, and it ended up taking off, and—”

“A company?”

“We make skateboards,” he said. “Euphoric Wheels.” Oh, wow, that was a pretty big name in skateboards. Even I’d heard of it, and I didn’t know anything about skateboarding.

“Really?” she said.

“I told you this,” he said. “I told you, I swore to you that I was going to make this happen, find away to give you the life you deserved so that we could be together, and I’ve been working on it, and you… then I see the news, and you’re getting married, and I had to rearrange everything to get here to try to stop it, but it took longer than it should have, and now…” He pointed to her mark. “I’m too late.”

Her lips parted. “You’ve been working on it? All this time?”

“You didn’t wait for me,” he said.

“You didn’t tell me to wait for you,” she said. “You disappeared. You broke my heart and I sent ten thousand texts to your phone and called you and called you, and you ghosted me, and made your mother say that she didn’t know where you were—”

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