Page 51 of The Alpha's Fake Mate

His chin went down. We were both so tired. The day had started wrong and now we were here with Holland displaced and me trying to play the hero without acting like a hero.

“We both need sleep. We have time to figure out all of this.”

“Not if he really produced a mate-bond.”

“We have a year at worst. No one knows. He’s a big mouth. He brags. He is mentally ill. And an ex-con. No one will believe him. We have time.”

He puffed air from his nose and turned away.

“Believe it, Holland. We have time!”

“Whatever.”

That night, we climbed the stairs to our rooms in silence.

It wasn’t a good start to our cohabitation, but it was a start.

Chapter Thirteen

Holland

My first night at Orion’s ostentatious house was both good and bad.

Orion sucked at pool and ping pong, and it felt good to beat him.

I luxuriated in my new bed. And there was a swimming pool I looked forward to visiting.

But the bad parts were bad. First, I was surrounded by unknown Alphas. He promised his servants were mate-bonded Alphas, but how could I be sure?

As the evening wore on, I kept thinking about Bosk’s claim of a bond. What if all of Orion’s money and lawyers and our fake claim couldn’t stand up to it? What if it was real and I had blocked it out?

I tossed and turned that night, the sheets soft and warm, my beautiful room in Orion’s estate a great gift I could not deny. But I kept thinking about taking the blood test. If Bosk was bonded to me, we could never fake a mate-bond even with all the proper paperwork in place because he would have his own blood test to refute my fake bond with Orion. To be sure, I needed and wanted the test. But I was so scared of the outcome I kept having to remind myself to breathe. No luxury could help me. No powerful and wealthy Alpha could stand against their own laws.

It was as if Bosk were attacking me all over again. I was afraid to search my thoughts in case I found some feeling there, some residual sense of him that had infected my flesh and blood to form an invader in my mind.

What did nature and the law do for unwanted mate-bonds?

I was jumping ahead of myself, as I often did when worrying details. Even as a kid, I had trouble sleeping the night before school exams.

I thought about getting up and searching the subject online, but my working computer was back at my office at Zilly’s, and my tablet with my personal belongings had been off all day. I hadn’t synched it to Orion’s Wifi yet, and I certainly wasn’t going to wake him for the code.

Feeling helpless, I tossed and turned. It wasn’t until the faintest early light shone through the curtains that I finally dropped off to a dreamless sleep.

*

I found the dining room by myself in the morning.

Orion, hair hastily tamed, clothed in his usual black suit, was already sitting at the table flicking through something on a tablet as he drank a steaming cup of coffee. He looked too damn perfect.

The cat I’d seen on my arrival yesterday sat in one of the dining room chairs licking its paw and ignoring everything else in the room.

Snowball. The black cat.

I saw food on the sideboards set out buffet style and began helping myself to scrambled eggs and bacon.

Orion glanced up when he heard me rattle a dish.

“Good morning.”