MATED TO FATHER, FATED TO SONS

Chapter 165: WORTH HAVING

AMARIS

I opened my eyes.

The blue hit me first.

Soft and deep, coming from behind glass walls on every side, and inside the glass fish moved slow and silent.

The tanks were enormous, floor to ceiling, and the light coming through the water turned everything it touched a different colour.

The stone floor went blue. The candle flames went gold. Rose petals on the ground, dark red against the stone, leading toward a table with white linen and two chairs and candles burning at every height, all of them lit, the whole space warm and beautiful.

A full course meal already laid out. Covered dishes, glasses poured, white flowers arranged in the center of the table.

Nobody had ever done anything like this for me.

I stood there with my mouth open and my heart fluttering in waves at the sight of what was before me.

I turned around.

He had his hands in his pockets. His chin was up and his jaw was set and he was watching my face and trying very hard to look like he was not doing that.

"You are a secret romantic," I told him.

He straightened. "I am not a romantic."

I gestured at the candles. All of them. Every last one he had lit in a glass aquarium in the middle of a forest. "The candles would like a word."

He crossed to the table and pulled out my chair. I took in the chair and then took in him.

"You’re holding my chair," I noted.

"I’m trying." His jaw shifted slightly. "Don’t make it strange."

"I’m not making it strange." I sat. "I’m commemorating the occasion."

He sat across from me and the fish moved slow behind the glass and the candles threw our shadows long across the linen and the whole thing was so real that I ran out of words, which was a first.

I picked up my fork.

The food was extraordinary. Lamb with herbs and dark wine, roasted vegetables with edges that had caught just right, bread still warm, a soup to start that I ate more of than was polite. We ate and talked and he ate and talked back and somewhere between the first course and the second I told him about my mother.

He asked about her. So I told him about her.

"She died the day I was born," I told him. "My father made sure I knew it was relevant information."

Ryker set his fork down. He did not rush to fill the space after it, which was exactly right.

"What’s the happiest memory you have," he asked. "Not childhood in general. One moment."

I had to think about it. The thinking took longer than it should have and he waited.

"There was a woman in the pack," I started.

"Mara. She used to make bread on Tuesday mornings."

I turned my glass slowly on the linen. "One Tuesday my father left for three days. The second he was gone she knocked on my door and said come on then and I followed her to the kitchen and we were there all afternoon."

I paused. "Flour everywhere. She kept correcting my hands and I kept getting it wrong and she never got frustrated, she just moved my hands again. We burned the first one." I smiled at the table. "Ate it anyway."

He was quiet for a moment. "That’s your happiest memory. Burned bread."

"It was my afternoon." I glanced up. "Nobody was watching. Nobody needed anything from me. It was just flour and a warm kitchen and someone who didn’t need me to be anything."

He held my eyes. Then he leaned back in his chair.

"Me and Rowan," he said, "found a river behind the east wood when we were nine. Wide one. Good current." He picked up his glass. "We decided to dam it."

"Of course you did."

"Took us three days." His mouth moved at the corner. "Rocks, branches, mud. The whole thing. We were completely filthy every night and Father didn’t know where we were and we didn’t tell him."

"And."

"It held." He set his glass down. "For four hours. Then it broke and flooded the entire south path."

"Alpha Corvin was furious."

"Apoplectic." Something caught in his throat before it could become a laugh. His face did something it didn’t usually do, just for a second, every guarded thing in it going somewhere else. "Completely worth it."

I smiled into my glass and he saw me do it and I did not look away.

Then he set his glass down.

"Why did you admit it," he asked. "At the ceremony. Why did you tell everyone."

I put my fork down. "Because it was true. I came to this pack a virgin." My eyes stayed on his. "I am not one now."

He went quiet. I watched him do the arithmetic.

"And where does this end," I asked before he finished. "You and me and whatever tonight is."

"I’m going to form a coup," he said. "Take the pack from my father. That’s where it ends."

I held his eyes.

He leaned forward. "Why do you look like that. Is it because of him. Is there something—"

Both my hands went flat on the table. "This was supposed to be a date." I kept my voice even. "I am not going to sit in a candlelit aquarium with rose petals on the floor and be interrogated about my feelings for the man who purchased me with my dead father’s debts. That is not what tonight is."

He pulled back. His eyes went to the table. "You’re right. I’m sorry."

I stared at him.

He glanced up. "What."

"You apologised."

"I do that sometimes." He looked genuinely annoyed to be having this conversation. "Occasionally. When I’m wrong."

"Noted." I picked my fork back up. "For the record, I am not trying to change you. I don’t want a different version of you. I just want you to trust me enough not to turn everything into a fight."

His eyes came back to mine across the table. "Okay."

He got up from the table and went to the small stereo sitting against the aquarium glass and pressed play. Something slow and low came out of it, the kind of music that had no agenda, and he crossed back and held his hand out.

My eyes went to his hand. Then his face.

I took it.

He pulled me in, his hand at my waist, and I put mine on his shoulder and we moved slow in the blue light with the fish behind the glass and the candles burning low. His hand at my waist was warm and steady and he moved us at a pace with no destination, just the music and the blue and the petals soft underfoot.

I had never slow danced with anyone before.

I did not say that.

His jaw was near my temple and I could feel the warmth of him and the quiet of his breathing and the way his hand tightened once at my waist.

I pressed slightly closer and felt his arm adjust around me and then hold, his whole body a quiet steady thing around mine.

I closed my eyes.

The music was slow. The room was blue. Somewhere behind the glass a fish drifted past and none of it needed to be anything other than what it was.

Then I heard it. Up in the trees above the open section of the structure. A sound, a rushing, building fast.

He heard it the same second.

We both tipped our heads back.

The rain came through the gap in the roof and hit the petals and the white linen and both of us at once, and we looked at each other and then we were grabbing things and running, laughing before we were even out the door, out into the trees and into the rain coming down hard now, warm and loud and absolutely everywhere.

My shoes were finished. My dress soaked in the first twenty seconds. His shirt went dark with it and his hair was flat against his forehead and I was laughing, really laughing, full and unplanned and real, and I did not try to stop it.

He grabbed my hand and we ran through the trees together, rain loud in the branches above us.

He caught me against a tree.

Both his hands on the bark on either side of my head, my back against the trunk, both of us breathing hard and soaked and still half laughing, rain running down my face and his. His face was very close.

He looked at my face for a moment. Just looked.

Then he took it in both hands, his palms warm against my cold wet skin, and his mouth found mine and his hands slid into my wet hair.

I grabbed the front of his soaked shirt and pulled and the rain came down around us and the forest was loud and dark and none of it mattered at all.

"I want to have you here," he groaned.

"What’s stopping you,"