Page 8 of The Alpha's Mail Order Bride

Reeve was up to something. Darion could always tell when his brother was scheming—he always took on a kind of relaxed, aloof persona that was a dead giveaway that he was in fact up to no good. Usually the schemes were harmless enough. The most objectionable had been a surprise party he’d arranged for their most recent birthday, nearly giving Darion a heart attack when what felt like the entire population of the island came jumping out at him on the beach at dusk one evening. But their birthday was months away. Besides, he’d extracted a promise from the unrepentant Reeve that he’d never do that to him again. No, it had to be something else. Something he worried might have something to do with the conversation they’d had on the beach.

Weeks had passed since that awkward day, and neither Lyrie nor Reeve had brought up the subject again. He must have been ruder than he’d thought with them, even after he’d gone for a long swim to cool his head. It was a common enough occurrence—he often came across as more formidable or intimidating than he intended, especially with new people. Reeve and Lyrie were the people who could see through that facade better than most. Not this time, he supposed. Well, with any luck, they’d take it as a warning to leave the subject of his personal life alone. It was bad enough having to see all the new families in the neighborhood every time he left his house without having to constantly discuss it.

But his suspicion turned to worry when Lyrie came to speak to him. It had been a few weeks since their beach day, and they’d seen a little less of each other than usual since then. The knock on his front door startled him out of a vaguely meditative trance, and he realized as he hastened to the door that he didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there on the couch, staring into space. No patrol until tomorrow, that was the problem. He never knew what to do with himself when he wasn’t working, and with so little work to go around, his free time was occupying far too much of his day.

“Hi, Darion. Sorry if we’ve disturbed you.”

“It’s alright,” Darion said gruffly as he stepped back to show her in. Lyrie didn’t need to know that the only thing she’d interrupted was a long period of zoning out. She had Ilya with her, wrapped up against her chest and held there comfortably by a sling that left both her hands free. The baby was dozing, but she still opened her sleepy silver eyes to smile up at Darion when he leaned down to greet her. “What’s up? D’you need me to watch her this afternoon?”

It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d been called on for some last-minute babysitting, but Lyrie shook her head absently at the question. She took her usual seat at the kitchen counter as Darion set about making tea. Something about her demeanor made him frown, but he kept his curiosity to himself, letting the silence spread out comfortably between them. He’d known Lyrie long enough to know that if something was bothering her, she’d bring it up when she was good and ready. And his suspicions were confirmed when she took a careful sip of her tea, then set it down and closed her eyes.

“I’m wondering if you know what’s going on with Reeve,” she said finally. Her voice was low and soft, a habitually gentle tone she used whenever her daughter was close by, but Darion could hear a touch of tension in it. “He’s up to something.”

“Agreed,” he said without preamble, seeing the relief in her eyes. “I’m afraid I can’t give you any more insight than that, though. To be honest, I was fairly sure you were in on it. You usually are.”

“I deserve that,” Lyrie said, a smile twitching at her lips. “I bear partial guilt for the birthday party fiasco, and will carry it to my grave and beyond, I’m sure. But no, this time I’m in the dark too.”

“Strange.” Darion frowned. “My brother’s not foolish enough to keep a secret from you. Or clever enough to do so for very long,” he added, winning a soft chuckle from her. “Could it have something to do with the company? Some kind of Earth problem?”

Reeve had left Halforst when the two of them were very young, determined to make his own destiny in the world that lay beyond the portal at Halforst’s heart. Ironic, then, that it had been that very portal that had brought the two of them back together years later, after Reeve had established an impressive empire in this new world and built a pack of his own.

These days, the tension between the wolves from Halforst and the wolves from Earth was a thing of the past. They’d found a way of embracing their differences, learning one another’s languages. Even Darion was reasonably fluent in the strange tongue the Earth wolves called English, though he didn’t get many opportunities to practice these days.

“Could be,” Lyrie said, still looking troubled. “He’s stepped back a lot since Illy was born. He barely talks about the company anymore. Though he has been spending more time on the yacht than usual.”

Darion frowned. The luxury yacht moored a little off the coast of Kurivon was where Reeve had lived for the first year or so of Kurivon’s settlement, working hard to balance the running of his company with the mission on the island. But once he’d found his soulmate in Lyrie, his priorities had shifted, and he’d had less and less reason to live so close to his office. “What do you think he’s up to?”

“I don’t know.” Lyrie exhaled. “I mean, I trust him. If there was something wrong, some problem he was dealing with, he’d tell me about it.”

“Maybe he’s planning a party foryou,” Darion suggested, but the joke didn’t lighten the mood much. They agreed to keep a close eye on Reeve, and to share anything they might find out, but Darion didn’t have high hopes. His brother had always been good at keeping secrets. He had a talent with words that Darion had always envied, a way of wriggling out of even the most direct line of questioning. Whatever he was up to, if he’d decided to keep it from his brother and his soulmate, there was very little Darion could do about it.

He’d almost forgotten about the conversation with Lyrie when another knock came on his door late one afternoon, a few weeks after they’d shared their suspicions. His eyes flicked immediately to the cabinet by the door where he kept his weapons, heart thudding hard against his ribcage.

He’d just dropped Illy back home after a morning of babysitting. It was Reeve’s day in the office, so he’d be on his yacht, and Darion had just left Lyrie at their cottage—there was no reason either of them would be on his doorstep so soon. And nobody else would have any reason to visit him other than to give warning of an attack. He was already bristling with adrenaline and anticipation for the fight when he yanked the door open, but the sight of a complete stranger on his doorstep stopped him dead in his tracks.

She was a small woman in a floral-patterned sundress, a hesitant smile playing across her crimson-colored lips as she met his eyes. Even with the settlement’s growth over the last few years, there were still less than a hundred wolves on the island, and even a social recluse like Darion was well and truly familiar with all of them. He’d never seen this woman before in his life. But it took him another few frozen seconds to realize what had really thrown him off about her. It wasn’t her unfamiliar face, it wasn’t her expression of vague recognition, it wasn’t even the suitcase that was sitting beside her on his porch. It was her eyes. They were a rich, deep brown, almost black…a far cry from the ancestral silver eyes shared by every wolf in this world and the other. Beautiful, yes, but impossibly strange.

This woman wasn’t a resident of Kurivon. She wasn’t even a wolf.

“You’re Darion, aren’t you?” the stranger broke the silence, and it took Darion a moment to work out what she’d said. She was speaking English, the strange Earth language spoken by the wolves who’d come to Kurivon from this world. “It’s so good to actually meet you in person.”

Darion took a breath before he responded, his mind protesting as he reached for the less-familiar syllables of the other language. “Who are you?”

The woman’s smile faded a little, a faint crease of confusion appearing between her brows. She tilted her head, and the movement made her curly black hair swing prettily around her ears. Her smile re-emerged, even brighter than before, as if something had struck her as funny. “I’m Claire, obviously. Your new wife!”

That couldn’t be right, Darion thought, feeling his own brow furrow. He was fairly certain he knew the word she’d used—it had a particular cultural meaning in English that was often lost on wolves, for whom the soulmate bond was obvious enough not to necessitate any kind of official ceremony to mark. In Halforst, a wedding was an unusual, fairly antiquated ritual used to bind two wolves together for political purposes. On Earth, he’d learned, they were a lot more common, a way of announcing to the world that you loved each other. But that still didn’t make what this stranger had called herself make any more sense. A lot of words in English seemed to have double meanings—maybe this was one of them?

“Sorry,” the woman said now, that bright smile faltering again with fresh uncertainty as his silence stretched out between them. “Would you prefer not to use that word? It’s all—pretty strange, I know. Part of me thinks I’m still dreaming. But we’ve got plenty of time to get to know each other, right?”

“I don’t understand,” Darion said, the foreign syllables feeling clumsy on his tongue. “What are you doing here? How did you find this place?”

He felt strangely cruel to be the cause of this young woman’s confusion. Her smile was all but gone now, replaced by a look of uncertainty that was beginning to rival his own. “I—I arrived last night,” she said, glancing back over her shoulder in the direction of the docks. “I stayed on the yacht, then Reeve rowed me over. Did he not tell you I was coming?”

A sudden, horrible clarity descended the moment Claire said his brother’s name. It must have showed in his face, because the woman shrank back from him a little, hand going out to rest protectively on the suitcase beside her. “He did not,” he said darkly. “My brother has a habit of keeping things from people.”

“But he told you I was coming atsomepoint.” Those strange, dark eyes of hers were growing wider and wider. Darion had to force himself to break away from that oddly magnetic gaze. It was too distracting. He needed to think, needed to figure out exactly what kind of trick his brother thought he was playing. “You—you do know about me, right?”

“No.” He shrugged helplessly, not liking how cruel it felt. He was speaking the honest truth, and yet it felt like he was plunging a dagger into this woman’s heart. Her shoulders dropped, and he watched her take a deep, deliberate breath with her dark eyes fixed on the ground.

---