Page 4 of Impregnated By the Alpha

At quarter to seven, she started the coffee pot and flipped the sign on the door to open it. Right on cue, her sister, Vera, swept into the bakery ten minutes before the hour, setting the chime off with a clatter.

“Moira! Where are you?” Vera called, like Moira would be anywhere but at the back of the shop.

She put the piping bag down and came out with a tray of cinnamon rolls and doughnuts for the display case. “Here, Vera. You’re going to wake the whole town.”

Vera dropped her bag and keys onto a table and joined Moira behind the counter, helping herself to the fresh pot of coffee. “No one’s still sleeping at this hour.”

Moira shot a pointed look outside, where the sunrise was just beginning to stain the sky in shades of pink and orange. “I… don’t think that’s true. At all.”

“Well, whatever, I don’t care about them,” Vera said, leaning against the counter, watching Moira work. “You might want to fix your hair before the customers come in, though. You look like a hot mess.”

Catching sight of her reflection in the glass case, Moira had to admit that Vera had a point. The steaming hot ovens hadn’t done her appearance any favors, and she’d dressed in a hurry that morning, jarred from a dream when her alarm had gone off at five.

“I don’t know why I bother,” Moira said on her way to the backroom, Vera trailing behind. “No one comes here for me; they come for the cakes.”

Vera refilled her coffee cup on her way by, though she was probably already buzzing from the caffeine she’d had at home. Moira used the mirror hanging above her office desk to straighten her black-as-ink bun and wipe the worst of the stains from her apron.

“I come here for you,” Vera pointed out. “Here I am right now.”

“Like you’re not drinking my coffee, like you’re not going to grab three doughnuts on your way out. Without paying!” Moira added. She swiped on a coat of lipgloss and called it good enough. She was a baker, not a model.

Vera shrugged her shoulder, following Moira into the main cafe again, shadowing her as she started balling the cookie dough onto trays. “I figure it evens out with the free vet care.”

That was true. Vera was the vet in town and had been taking care of Moira’s cat, Loaf, for free ever since she’d found the kitten behind the bake shop. Without Loaf, Moira never would’ve made it through the move from her home to the apartment, the cat keeping her company through her first nights alone, curling up on her lap through all the scary movies, the blizzards, the heartbreaks.

“Fine,” Moira said, snatching the coffee pot out of Vera’s hand before she could refill her mug again. She poured some into her mug and added a scoop of sugar and a swirl of cream until it was honey-colored. “But I’m cutting you off for your own good. You are not having a heart attack in my shop. It’d be terrible for business.”

“Speaking of business,” Vera said, staring at the sea, rather than Moira in a way that told Moira she wasn’t going to like what she was about to her, “I’ve got some to tell you.”

“Is it about Mrs. Alden?” Moria asked, dread unspooling in her belly like spilled ink. “Did she sell to someone else?”

Moira had been working every hour she could to save up to buy the bakeshop when it finally came up for sale, but between rent and other living expenses, it had been a slow trickle into her savings, not the dragon’s hoard she’d been hoping to have by now. Her mind was spinning up ideas on what she could do to get the money quick—sell a kidney, knock Vera off for the life insurance—when Vera finally went on.

“No,” she said, drawing out the word. Moira’s fingers white-knuckled the dough scoop. She was about to bludgeon Vera if she didn’t spit it out. “It’s about Jonah.”

Jonah. It was a name from Moira’s past, one she wished had stayed firmly buried there. When she’d left the Silversand pack for the Rosewoods, she thought she’d seen the last of him.

“What about him?” Moira asked, crossing her arms over her chest as if they could protect her from the childhood wounds still buried under her skin.

This time, when Vera grabbed the coffee pot, Moira let her. She refilled both their cups and added an extra spoonful of sugar to Moira’s before going on.

“Well, his dad died. The Silversand Alpha. Adria told me she passed the message on to the White Winter pack herself. That’s where Jonah has been these past years. Did you know he left the Silversands, too? Guess we could’ve stayed, after all.”

Moira glanced at the door, grateful for once for the lack of customers. She couldn’t handle pleasant conversations with strangers right then, not when the world was shifting under her feet. She had known Jonah had left the Silversands not long after she had but hadn’t known where he’d ended up. Hadn’t cared, either, as long as it was far, far away from her.

“And?” Moira prompted, like she didn’t already know where it must be going. She was just hoping and praying what Vera said next would surprise her.

Vera was still looking anywhere but at her. “Well, they asked him to come back to the pack. So, I just think, given the close proximity, that you should maybe be prepared to run into him.”

She wanted to say that she was so far over what had happened in high school between her and Jonah that she didn’t have to prepare to run into him, that Vera’s fears were absurd, that she was a grown woman now and not afraid of a childhood bully. But she couldn’t lie to her sister. Too many years together had taught both of them each other’s tells.

“I’ll be fine, Vera,” Moira insisted anyway. And she would be. Fine had a very broad definition that could encompass everything from sobbing after seeing him on the sidewalk to punching him in the local cafe.

“Really,” Vera said flatly, a statement rather than a question. “So, everything you spent your teenage years crying about on my bedroom floor, that's deeply buried in the past? The whole entire reason we had to leave the Silversands in the first place, that’s all water under the bridge?”

“Yes,” Moira snapped, yanking the tray of cookies out of the oven just as the timer dinged. “Like I said. Look, customers are about to start coming in, and you’re a distraction. Can we talk about this later?”

Vera rolled her eyes, and Moira wondered if she had time to throttle her before the first customer rolled in. “I’m just not looking forward to saying ‘I told you so’ in a couple of weeks,” she said in a singsong voice, pulling three doughnuts from the case and tossing them into a paper bag.

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