Page 15 of Alpha-Ex Wedding Ruse
He didn’t even look at me again.
I watched him walk away like he was dragging half my breath with him.
And I hated that. Hated him.
Hated that something deep in me stirred at the sight of him.
And in that moment, I had no idea if meeting him was the best or worst thing that would ever happen to me.
All I knew was…it changed everything.
When I got home,after spending the better part of the day trapped in my own head, circling back to him, I found my father at the dining table.
He had a bottle of gin in one hand, half of it already gone, and a paper in the other.
“Rent bill just came through,” he muttered without looking at me.
Another bill we couldn’t afford.
I swallowed the sigh before it escaped.
Since losing his job, I’d watched my father shrink from the manwho taught me how to ride a bike without training wheels, to someone I barely recognized. A man drowning in bills and silence. A man I couldn’t save. It was at times like this that I wished my mother was around. Although I had never met her, as she died while birthing me, the way my father had spoken about her—fondly, like she was his peace, his comfort—I could tell she had been a good woman.
“Hey, Dad,” I said, forcing my voice to sound light. Upbeat. Like maybe, if I said it brightly enough, it could pull him out of whatever place he kept sinking into.
He looked up and smiled. But it didn’t reach his eyes.
“How was your first day at Vaughn Industries?”
“It was…fine.”
And it was.
But also? It wasn’t.
Because I couldn’t stop thinking about the man with the steel eyes who made my skin crawl and my wolf purr.
For a second, I thought about telling him. He used to be the person I told everything to. Before he lost his job. And I missed that version of him. Missed the version of us where we still talked.
So, I pulled out a chair and sat beside him.
“Actually, Dad…” I hesitated, fingers tracing a scratch on the wood. “Something strange happened today.”
I spent the next five minutes telling him all about the asshole that is Luca Vaughn, and the emotional hurricane he stirred in me and my wolf.
When I finished, I expected…I don’t know. Sympathy? Outrage? Parental concern?
What I got was a smile.
My father stared at me like I’d just told him we won the lottery. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, there was actual joy lighting up his face.
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re smiling? I just told you my new boss practically called me a slut. And somehow, that made my wolf lose her damn mind, and you’re smiling?”
“Leila,” he said, reaching for my hands like he was about to share the meaning of life, “the gods have finally smiled upon us.”
I blinked. “How, Dad?”
He cleared his throat, pulled his chair closer, eyes gleaming.
