Page 68 of Promised to the Alpha Prince

“So,” I said in a not-very-nice voice, “I guess while you were out there ‘working on it,’ you weren’t exactly celibate.”

He shifted uncomfortably on his feet.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I don’t need that from you.”

“Right,” he said. “I’ll be in your harem, and you’ll be fucking other men, so I can fuck other people, too, huh? Fair’s fair.”

“Generally the way it works, yeah,” I said. Even though, admittedly, I wasn’t exactly really well-versed in the ways of polyamory.

“No,” he said. “No, that’s not…” He came around the table to take both of her hands in his. “This is us, Aurelie, you and me. This is our story. This is not the way it ends.”

She was affected by this. She gasped a little, and her perfume was like bright blossoms in the sunlight.

“Come with me,” he said. “Come with me now. You know it’s right. You feel it.”

She made a little noise in the back of her throat, shaking her head back and forth, overcome.

“Aurelie, I love you,” he said. “And you love me. This—what we have—this doesn’t happen every day. This is bigger than this, than him, than a harem, this is… Let’s go. Now.”

She tugged one hand out of his and fingered my mark on her chest. “He bit me, Corentin!”

“We’ll work around it,” he said.

I got up from the table. “All right, enough.”

He hung his head. He let go of her. “Aurelie, just talk to me alone? Please.”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not letting you coerce my omega into making some ridiculous mistake that will make her miserable in the end. I’m not saying she doesn’t care about you, or that you’re not important to her, Corey or whatever your name is, but you have no idea what it is to separate an omega from her bonded mate. If you really loved her, you’d—”

“Share her?” He let out a caustic laugh. “You people don’t even know what love is.” He turned and went for the door.

He might have had a dramatic exit, but the staff was coming in with the cart with pastries and tea I’d called for, and Corentin had to awkwardly dance with them until he managed to get around them and stalk out of the door.

Aurelie clapped a hand over her mouth. She shook all over. Then, she burst into tears.

I was going to strangle that man.

How dare he?

On the night before my wedding?

aurelie

ILSE POURED US shots of marshmallow-flavored vodka. We were in her bedchamber, and she had a pretty impressive drink cart in the corner of her room, practically a full bar.

I had fled from Dmitri. He wanted to talk, to comfort me, but I couldn’t talk to him about this. I needed someone else, someone impartial, someone who felt more like a friend.

So, I’d come to Ilse.

My family was actually here in Koch. They’d all come in for the wedding. Maybe someone else would have gone to her mother about something like this. Maybe someone else would have been closer to her sisters. But my parents had never approved of Corentin and my sisters and I didn’t talk about this kind of stuff.

It was nice to see my family again, but everything with them was always formal and stilted. I already felt closer to Dmitri than I did to them, even in such a brief time.

“Oh, fuck, the childhood sweetheart?” Ilse said. “He’s a bad boy? He’s dangerous? He’s run off and done a whole Jay Gatsby to win you back after all this time? What the fuck kind of literary nightmare are you living in, girl?”

I held out my hand for the shot. “Shut up.”

“Maybe it’s more of a Heathcliff, really,” she said. “Or Westley from The Princess Bride. Is he a pirate?”

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