“He was what you needed, and I think he still is.”
“But we’re fated, and he’s—"
“You chose him, Dale. That’s all that matters.”
“He’s still going to be pissed off about all of this,” he tells me, smiling wryly. “Even if he does agree to this crazy arrangement you’re trying to pull together.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
“Well, if you want to clean this room up before Zoey wakes up, we should get started.”
I let out a sigh. “You’re probably right.”
Chapter Fifty
Dale
Zoey’s old childhood bedroom looks like a tornado crashed through it. Kind of makes it hard to know where to start. Of course, Zane put this room together in the first place and he’s got that take-charge Alpha attitude so picks up a pile of clothes on hangers and starts putting them straight back into the open closet where they belong. The temptation to follow him around the room and just help with what he’s doing comes and goes. He’s still not officially my Alpha, and that kind of help isn’t that helpful, especially if I’m mostly doing it so I can stare at his muscular body while he works and wonder about the huge lump in the front of his pants.
An Alpha’s knot doesn’t form until he’s inside an Omega. If that’s how big he is without a knot, my slick better be extra productive when he’s ready to claim me.
Get a grip, Dale. Stop thinking about sex. You know what comes after a claiming, and you’re not ready to let him mark you.
Right. I don’t want Cameron showing up here thinking I’ve let Zane talk me into something. He’s going to be mad enough about this whole thing. Fuck knows how he’ll take me asking him to become part of a pack. After high school, he threw away the popular guy mask he’d been wearing, and he became kind of reclusive. I’m pretty sure he won’t be into the pack lifestyle.
Looking around the room, I try to decide what I should tidy up while Zoey sleeps.
Zane is taking care of the closet, so I move toward the side of the bed, where the nightstand and dresser are. The nightstand’s drawer has been yanked out and left upturned on the carpet. Picking it up, I let the contents scatter while I fit the drawer back into place.
Then I start picking up the girly bits and pieces and putting them back into the drawer. Zane really spent a lot of time on this room. Everything looks like stuff she had, or stuff she would have had.
There’s a lot of pink and purple, and glitter, and fluff.
I close the drawer once it’s full, and I move on to the dresser.
Putting the drawers back inside, one by one, I can’t help wondering how Zane pulled this off.
Everything really looks like it belonged to her, but it can’t all be hers. Can it?
He comes over beside me, and I realize he’s done with the closet.
He’s putting the dollhouse back on top of the toy chest it was displayed on.
“How did you do all of this?” I ask him.
He looks up at me, and I can tell he doesn’t know what I mean.
“Is this actually Zoey’s old stuff?”
“The furniture isn’t,” he admits. “But that was easy to replicate.”
“So, her parents just gave you all of this?”
“Not exactly,” he murmurs.
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
He blows out a breath. “Her mom told me to stop coming around after I showed up to tell her about Zelena. She told me I needed to accept that Zoey was gone. She told me I was breaking her heart.”