Page 5 of Wishes in the Moonlight (Rocky Mountain Wolves #4)
~Amanda~
By nine o’clock that morning, anyone who walked into the Alpha’s office would never have guessed I’d been up half the night.
Unable to get back to sleep after meeting with Troy, I went to the pack house gym instead, working off my frustration through physical exertion.
After a long shower and a facial mask, I got dressed for the day in my carefully chosen clothes, elegant but not too formal, and did my makeup in a way that conveyed femininity without being too flirty.
As the Alpha’s daughter, I’d been walking the tightrope between competent and desirable for as long as I could remember.
Appearances counted for a lot, especially in a traditional pack like ours.
The pressure could be intense but knowing how to play the game gave me a sense of power.
I prepared for the day like a warrior preparing for battle, and Savannah whistled in appreciation when she and Jasper sat down to join me at the oval table I used for informal meetings.
“Do you ever take a day off, Amanda? I mean: sweats, no make-up, eating ice cream out of the tub in front of the TV?”
She helped herself to one of the muffins I’d requested to be on the table this morning while Jasper poured a cup of coffee for his mate before taking one for himself. When he offered me one too, I shook my head. Caffeine wouldn’t help my nerves at that point.
“I can’t remember the last time I had a day like that,” I told Savannah truthfully, glancing down at her more casual clothes with a pang of something that felt suspiciously like envy.
Her curly hair bounced around her shoulders in a haphazard way that complemented her energy and her lack of conformity.
She looked completely comfortable in her skin, unconcerned with how anyone else viewed her, and it made her shine.
Did that come from having found her mate, I wondered, or had she always been that way?
Savannah had an Alpha for a father too, but our situations were different. Her brother had always been the heir, bearing the weight of that responsibility and giving Savannah more freedom to live her life on her own terms.
At least it seemed that way to me, looking in from the outside. She probably saw it differently since she made the choice to stay in my pack when I offered her the position as my Beta rather than returning home.
“Are we expecting someone else?” Jasper asked, his attention snagging on the fourth cup and plate that the staff had set out when I requested refreshments for the meeting.
“Yes. Troy from the external security team will be joining us.”
It would have been impossible to miss the glance shared between the two people across from me, or the way that their eyes momentarily glazed over, indicating that they were speaking to each other through their mind-link.
It also didn’t take a genius to guess what they must have been discussing.
Savannah and Jasper were both present when Troy made his declaration to me, after I became Alpha, that he wanted to acknowledge our mate bond at long last.
So far, neither my new Beta nor her mate had mentioned it again or questioned me about it, but they wouldn’t have been half-human if they hadn’t wondered about our situation.
As if me saying his name broke the taboo on the subject, Savannah blurted out a question I’d been anticipating. “Is he still your mate?”
Lying to my Beta would be pointless, especially when we were still building trust between us, so I gave her the truth. “He is. I asked him to reject me and he refused, so for the time being, we’re at an impasse.”
Jasper’s full lips pursed into a frown. “Why do you want him to reject you?”
“Because he didn’t put her first,” Savannah answered for me before shoving a large chunk of the blueberry muffin into her mouth and chasing it down with a gulp of coffee. “He kept her dangling for seven years. I’d tell him to take a fucking hike too.”
Jasper winced at the expletive, or maybe the fact that his mate used it in front of me, but I didn’t mind her cursing. Savannah’s lack of filter was one of my favourite things about her.
“He must have had his reasons,” Jasper pointed out, his tone cautious but firm. “It can’t have been easy for him either, so there had to be a reason he kept hanging on.”
“Not a good enough one,” Savannah responded with equal certainty. “Felix just nearly started a war with an entirely different realm to win his mate. And look at Vaughan and Calista! Duty’s all well and good, but when it’s your mate, you gotta throw caution to the wind and go for it. Sorry, Amanda.”
She grimaced as if only just remembering my place as the ‘other woman’ in Vaughan and Calista’s story, but I shook my head to dismiss her apology as unnecessary.
She had it exactly right. By rejecting me, Vaughan risked the treaty with my father and the safety of his pack so he could be with the woman he was fated to. Why did I deserve any less than that?
“All I’m saying is that there might be more to the story than we know,” Jasper suggested. “Jumping to conclusions doesn’t help anyone.”
“He said something recently that I didn’t know,” I found myself admitting. “He said he requested to be on my escort team whenever I left the pack’s territory.”
Jasper frowned over his cup of coffee. “You didn’t know he was there?”
“No, that part I knew. With his scent and the way he scowled at me every time we were in the same room, he would have been hard to miss. But I thought he was as unhappy to be in that situation as I was. I thought my father arranged it as some kind of test. I didn’t know Troy requested it.”
Why would he, other than the reason he gave me: because he didn’t trust anyone else to protect me as fervently as he would? But that raised more questions than it answered. His actions and his words didn’t match up and I didn’t know which to believe.
“Well, until he convinces me otherwise, I still think Troy can go fuck himself,” Savannah declared before popping the last of her muffin into her mouth.
Before either Jasper or I could respond to that, someone else cleared their throat from the doorway.
“Sorry I’m late.”