Page 1 of The Alpha's Mail Order Bride

Chapter 1 - Claire

“I have been looking forward to this all week,” Claire said, sagging gratefully into the embrace of the worn couch in her living room. It hadn’t exactly been a long commute from her home office (which in this chicly shabby apartment did double duty as her bedroom), but she’d learned that marking the journey mindfully helped to break up the day.

“This? Wine on the couch? We do this every night,” her roommate pointed out. Suzanne was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a corkscrew in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, grappling unsuccessfully with the cork. Claire would quietly have preferred to opt for a screw top bottle—slightly lower chance of someone losing an eye—but that was blasphemy as far as Suzanne was concerned. She’d always had a taste for the finer things in life, and she insisted that corked bottles were much, much fancier than the alternative. With only two weeks until the end of their lease here, Claire was inclined to let her best friend have her way.

“Not every night,” she protested now, leaning discreetly away from where the bottle was pointing. It was chardonnay, not champagne, and the cork was unlikely to go flying, but better safe than sorry. “Just most nights. And soon, never again.”

“Right. Because the minute we move out of this place I’m going to forget who you are.” Suzanne rolled her eyes as she pried the cork loose. “Not like you’ve already got my new address memorized. I think you’ve actually been there more often than my fiancé has, and he’s paying for the place.”

“It is my sacred duty as your best friend to ensure that the mansion he’s built for you is up to scratch,” Claire said gravely. “Adequate parlors. Sufficient drawing rooms. Etcetera.”

“Indeed. Any less than three drawing rooms would be an insult.” Suzanne was grinning. Her fiancé wasn’t quite as rich as Claire liked to joke… but he wasn’t far off, judging from the house he was building for the two of them to move into after their wedding. Neither of them were sure exactly what it was he did for work. Something to do with selling houses, Claire had surmised with some difficulty.

“If that man had the audacity to suggest that a woman of your caliber could be satisfied with a mere three drawing rooms, I’d cancel the wedding myself.”

“What is a drawing room, anyway?”

“Dunno,” Claire said, digging her phone out of her pocket. “Oh, here. A room used for entertaining visitors.”

“I’d have thought an award-winning romance novelist would know that without Googling. Surely that’s where all the bodice-ripping takes place.”

“No bodices in my books. No drawing rooms, either. Too much research involved.” She grimaced. “Though maybe I should think about pivoting anyway.”

“Business is still that bad, huh?”

“Still that bad.” Claire sipped her wine as Suzanne scrambled onto the couch beside her. They fell into a comfortable silence as she flipped through Netflix in search of a suitably trashy movie that they could ignore completely while they gossiped. “I almost applied for a waitressing job today.”

“Absolutely not,” Suzanne said sharply. “We swore an oath, remember?”

“That’s what stopped me.” Claire grinned. She had first met Suzanne at the most unpleasant job either of them had ever had, waiting tables at what had to have been the worst-managed restaurant in California. Her friendship with Suzanne had been the only thing that redeemed those horrible six months. She’d been at college at the time, taking the job as a means of lightening the financial load for her parents a little. The college fund they’d painstakingly set aside for her had definitely helped with tuition, though not a lot with living costs.

But the job was unbearable. Between unreliable hours, a clientele whose likelihood of tipping had too much to do with how much cleavage the waitresses showed, and a boss who flew into a rage at just about any provocation, Suzanne had quickly realized that the paltry wages simply weren’t worth it. Claire had taken a little longer to come to the same conclusion—but Suzanne talked her around eventually. The two of them had found an apartment to share that was much cheaper than Claire’s exorbitantly priced dorm room, and the rest was history.

And now, Claire reflected sadly, that chapter of their friendship was coming to an end. They’d been living together for a decade, hopping from crappy apartment to crappy apartment all over San Diego. Suzanne had been there for every milestone in her life since college—her graduation, the writing of her first book, her first few dozen rejections from publishers and agents, the triumph of her first published novel, and all the giddy joy when her career had finally taken off and she realized she could support herself full-time by doing the thing she loved. And in turn, Claire had been there through all of Suzanne’s adventures as a San Diego socialite—the parties she’d attended, the scandals she’d been involved with, the series of sugar daddies who’d subsidized her often unbelievable lifestyle, helping her maintain the illusion of a far greater wealth than she possessed. And Claire had been the first person Suzanne told when she met the man she knew she wanted to marry. They’d shared every setback and every triumph. It was hard to imagine that all of that was coming to an end.

“Any luck on finding a place?” Suzanne asked, once the trashy romcom they were watching was well underway.

“Oh, yeah. I found a bunch today that look promising.” Suzanne shot her a sideways look, and Claire sighed. “Okay, so all the places I applied for last week turned me down. But I’m hopeful that—”

“You’re always hopeful,” Suzanne said, a warning tone in her voice that always made Claire feel guilty. “Hope doesn’t always make a shitty situation any better, though, does it? You can’tpositive mindsetthe San Diego housing market into being affordable—”

“You’re right, you’re right.” She grimaced. “There aren’t many places in my price range, that’s all, and there’s a ton of competition for the ones that are. People with real jobs always look better on applications. Publishing novels online…that doesn’t sound like a reliable source of income, you know? That’s why I was looking at jobs. Just to get me through.”

“What are you going to do if you can’t find anywhere?”

“I’ll find somewhere.”

“But if you can’t?”

Claire cringed. Suzanne had always had a knack of breaking through her habitual optimism with the hard questions. Of the two of them, she’d always been the pragmatist—the pessimist, Claire called her sometimes.

“If I can’t, then…I don’t know. I’ve got some savings, I can afford a few months at a motel or something—”

“You couldn’t move in with your folks for a while until things improve? It’s been a while since they moved, surely they’re settled enough by now to put you up for a bit.”

“Retirement village,” Claire said, shaking her head. “No spare rooms. Besides, Florida’s halfway across the country.”

“Sure, but…” Suzanne shrugged. “I mean, your work’s all online these days, right? What’s keeping you here?”

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