Page 24 of The Alpha's Mail Order Bride

“Oh, because I overheard you and Reeve screaming about it,” she said matter-of-factly, and if it hadn’t been for the dread in his gut he might have laughed at her incongruously cheerful expression. “I’m guessing it’s a shifter thing?”

He remembered what Reeve had said about Syrra and Renfrey. “Probably,” he allowed. Then he frowned. “You’ve been talking with everyone on the island for weeks, this subject hasn’t come up?”

She shrugged. “People have used the word a few times, but nobody’s really explained what it means. I figured it was just a weird translation for ‘life partner’ or whatever, but then I heard you and Reeve shouting, and now I’m not sure.”

He exhaled. “It’s complicated.”

“Try me. What’s the difference between a soulmate and a wife?”

“I don’t know. What’s the difference between a brother and a friend?” He grimaced, already second-guessing the metaphor. His English wasn’t good enough for this kind of conversation. Nor was his emotional intelligence, for that matter. “It’s difficult. It’s—a bond that wolves find. It’s in our blood, that connection. It’s more than just a feeling, it’s—” he gestured helplessly. Claire was watching him very closely, and he couldn’t get a sense of what she was thinking behind that simple, pleasant smile of hers.

“So every wolf gets a soulmate?”

Trust Claire to go straight to the most difficult question. “That’s a matter of opinion. I can tell you that some wolves never find theirs.”

“But they’re out there somewhere.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Makes sense.”

“It does?”

“Yeah. There’s something like that in the romance genres I write, actually,” she said, a faint flush rising to her cheeks. Despite his discomfort, Darion couldn’t help but feel a spark of curiosity at that. “A kind of—predestined, physiological compatibility. Love at first sight on steroids. It usually gets very horny and graphic—”

“You write about this?” He could feel his cheeks heating up.

“Not me,” Claire said, shaking her head. “In my books, that kind of bond is something you choose, something you build together. Maybe that’s boring, but…I don’t know. Guess I never found mine, so I didn’t want to have missed out.” He turned away, acutely aware of the magnetic draw of her dark eyes, not wanting her to see too much on his face. “So when Reeve brought me here, he thought—”

“He thought that we might be soulmates, yes.” Darion braced himself to deliver the explanation he’d been trying to rehearse all afternoon. But before he could, Claire put a hand on his forearm.

“Don’t worry,” she said, an easy laugh in her voice. “I’m not upset that he got it wrong.”

“What?”

She smiled warmly up at him. Was there a touch of wistfulness on her face, or was that just wishful thinking on his part? “I mean, I’m no expert, but I’m guessing that if I was your soulmate, you might actually like me.” With a little laugh, she tugged her jacket a little closer around her shoulders, looking up the path toward where their house—his house, he corrected himself—was just coming into view. “C’mon,” she said cheerfully, dismissing the previous subject with a lightness that staggered him. “I wanna do some sword practice before it gets dark.”

Darion drifted along in her wake, feeling like he’d been punched in the gut. Why was he so hurt by her joking that he didn’t like her? He should have been relieved that she had no illusions that the two of them were destined to be soulmates, or husband and wife, or whatever their respective societies called it. But as he followed her into the house, all he could feel was a dull, aching pain that seemed to spread from the middle of his chest to every single part of his body.

Chapter 13 - Claire

Claire was feeling less and less like the book she was writing was going anywhere. She’d started out with such conviction, full of real-life inspiration for her heavily fictionalized leading man version of Darion, but now, she scrolled lifelessly through the pages. It was good stuff—it might be some of her best, once the careful hand of the editor had been over it a few times—but what was the point? She’d run out of steam in the middle of the story, and she had no idea what could happen next. And if her conversation with Darion on the way back from Lyrie’s place was anything to go on, she wouldn’t be getting any inspiration from real life any time soon. It was the morning after what had otherwise been a rather pleasant day, and Claire was deep in her feelings.

“Your fault,” she told herself irritably, snapping the laptop shut and taking a few restless laps of her room. “You know better, but you did it anyway, didn’t you? Fell for the imaginary guy in your head, pretended he was the same as the real guy in your face.” Wasn’t that the oldest story in the book? How many times had she done that? Found some guy who put in the bare minimum of effort to let her know he was interested, spun his every gesture into some indicator of the powerful, passionate feelings he was keeping back from her for some noble reason or other, then crashed and burned in a few months when it became clear that the reason he never expressed those strong feelings was that he simply did not possess them.

This time, though…this time, she really thought she’d been onto something. Everyone she’d talked to about Darion said the same thing: a good man, but harder to get a read on than a brick wall. But there had been clues, hadn’t there? The way he’d invited her to stay, that first night. The way he’d slowly warmed to her presence in his house. The way he cooked meals for her, checked that her room was comfortable, checked that she was eating and sleeping well. The look on his face after he’d saved her from that demon in the forest…that particular memory got revisited more often than most of the others. And there had been that day after the Council meeting, when even with all that fury in his body, he’d still wanted her to stay here. But had he really wanted her to stay, she wondered now? He hadn’t actually said so. All he’d done, actually, wasnottell her to leave…because that was all she’d asked of him. After everything she’d been through on this deeply strange island, after that whole horrendously stressful day, the only demand she’d been brave enough to make of him was silence.

And silence he’d given her in abundance. How had she managed to do this again? And how had she managed to do ithere? She’d literally gone to a tropical island in the middle of nowhere to marry a man who wasn’t even a human being—if that wasn’t enough to break her old patterns, then she might have to accept that nothing would. She spent the rest of the afternoon writing as much in a detailed email to Suzanne, keeping back, of course, the more supernatural details. And then, her burden eased for the time being, she walked out into the early evening air and headed for the community center. There was a dance there tonight, though calling it a ‘dance’ gave it a formality it didn’t really need—a few of the teenagers liked to play very loud music, and the older wolves of the island had managed to get them to limit that activity to one night a week by giving them a venue to do it in.

Claire had never been any good at dancing. Thankfully, she’d spent most of her twenties with Suzanne, who refused to accept such a paltry excuse for not getting on the floor, so she was entirely comfortable making an absolute fool of herself in public. Even here on Kurivon, surrounded by well-trained and drop-dead gorgeous warrior wolves, Claire threw herself onto the dance floor with as much enthusiasm as she could muster. She spent the whole evening dancing, staying on the floor even for the songs she didn’t know, and by the time an irritable old wolf in the robes of a lorekeeper rapped his staff on the door to bellow for silence, Claire was equal parts exhilarated and exhausted. She said her goodnights to the friends she’d been dancing with, not missing the looks of grudging respect the teenagers were giving her from a vantage point where they thought she wouldn’t see them, and then headed home.

As she walked, her smile faded, just a little. She’d had a great night, and a good burst of endorphins never went astray…but she was a little troubled that the problem subject of Darion didn’t seem to have left her mind. Quite the opposite, if anything. He was stuck in there, wedged in deep like a splinter. Dancing had always cleared even the most troublesome of men out of her mind, at least for a little while. Why hadn’t it worked this time? It felt a little too late in life to go looking for a new coping mechanism.

Claire slipped into the house as quietly as she could, aware that it was past midnight and Darion was most likely asleep. Not that she had any proof of that, she thought crossly. She’d never seen any indication that he slept at all—his bedroom door was always shut tight, and if she caught a glimpse of the interior when he opened it to enter or exit, the bed in the background was always made with the relentless precision of a drill sergeant. In that moment, a great wave of vexation rose up in her chest. She wanted to knock down that stubbornly closed door, to toss back his bedsheets and disrupt his neatly ordered room, to grab him by the shoulders and shout into his face until he gave her something,anything,beyond that stiff, grumpy silence.

She couldn’t bring herself to approach his door. But she did pull her phone out of her pocket, thinking back to her early days here, when he’d walked in on her singing along to her music and she’d been so embarrassed by the look on his face she’d sworn never to play music in his presence again. Well, tonight had reminded her that she loved music. She scrolled through her playlist until she found one of the tracks that had played that evening; an oldie, the teenagers had called it, rolling their silver eyes. How did teenagers on a remote tropical island curate such sophisticated tastes? She hit play and poured herself a glass of water, eyes flicking occasionally to Darion’s door. It remained closed. Her exasperation rose. After all the creeping around she’d done, fearful of disturbing him, he couldn’t even hear her through his door. After a moment’s consideration, she turned up the volume.

Five minutes later, she was singing along at the top of her voice. And finally, she heard what she’d been waiting for—the tell-tale scrape of Darion’s door swinging open. Claire kept dancing, though she let her body turn to give her a glimpse of him, standing like a statue in the doorway, and her heart skipped a beat when she realized he was shirtless. A pair of tracksuit pants hugged his hips, but she’d have been hard pressed even to guess what color they were. Her attention was held by the rippling shape of his torso, the way the muscles of his chest bulged, the overhead light casting deep shadows across his body…

“Claire, what are you doing? It’s the middle of the night,” he pointed out in that carefully moderated tone, his permanent expression of faint disapproval creasing his brow. Claire met his gaze squarely and danced closer. She had no idea what she was trying to do here, she realized faintly. All she knew was that she wanted more of a reaction than she was getting from him. She’d been wanting more from him ever since she’d arrived, in fact. Seeing him with his shirt off was a good start. Now…the next move was obvious, and she felt her cheeky grin widen as she reached out to grab his wrist and pull him toward her.

Darion was twice her size. If he’d really wanted to stay put, he simply would have stayed put—she could no more have moved him against his will than she could have persuaded Kurivon’s tides to turn back at her whim. Nevertheless, all it took was the slightest tug of his wrist and he was moving toward her, confusion giving way to outright surprise as she pulled him into a passable dance frame. She put one of his hands on her shoulder and kept hold of the other, and when he opened his mouth to question her, she drowned him out by singing along to the music.

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