Ruthless Alpha, and his Curvy Saint

Chapter 142: Chapter 142

Lord Merrick’s POV

I literally ran inside my room and jammed the door close behind me, my feelings flying all over the place.

I stood on my side of the door and breathed deeply.

What, I thought, was that.

I put my back against the door and I looked at the ceiling of my small inn room and I conducted a rapid internal inventory of my recent messed up decisions.

I had almost kissed Angel’s sister.

My wife’s sister.

The woman who had arrived in our lives just last week and had been, by any reasonable measure, the specific opposite of someone I should be developing any kind of - not that I had developed anything, this was just a proximity issue, this was the result of several days of close quarters and emotional intensity and the very charming quality of her eyes in low light...

Stop it.

I was not a man who kissed women he shouldn’t kiss. I was not a man who leaned toward people he had no business leaning toward. I had standards and I had sense and I had, historically, been considered to have reasonable judgment about most things. And most of all, I preferred thick women. I’ve always been attracted to curves.

When did I and Terrell suddenly switch preferences?

But she had raised her chin.

I pressed both hands to my face.

She had raised her chin and closed her eyes and I had... left. Which was the correct thing. The clearly, obviously correct thing, and I had done it, and that was the end of it.

I lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling and told myself to sleep.

Sleep, to its credit, eventually arrived, and I grabbed it with relief.

****

She was already eating when I came down.

I saw her before she saw me - the fraction of a second where I was at the bottom of the stairs and she was at the table with her back partially toward me - and I used that fraction of a second to assemble myself into a man who had slept well and had no complicated feelings about the previous evening.

Then she turned, and our eyes met, and I felt the heat arrive in my face in hot waves.

This was the second time.

The second time this woman had produced this kind of response in me, which was a response that had no business being here and which I was going to discuss firmly with my own physiology at the earliest opportunity.

She looked at me, then looked back at her food.

Neither of us said anything.

I sat down. My food was brought. I ate with great focus. Like the food was the most important thing in the room.

The silence had a texture.

The kind of texture where two people who had been in a room together the night before had almost kissed, and were now sitting at a breakfast table with that fact between them like a third presence.

I ate my bread.

Agnes ate her food.

At some point I looked up and found her already looking, and we both looked at our plates simultaneously with the awkwardness of two people doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time for exactly the same reason.

I cleared my throat.

She did not look up.

"We need to move," I said. "The sooner the better."

She nodded without speaking.

"Today," I said.

She pushed back her chair and stood.

We went in silence.

***

Heading towards the castle without soldiers felt different.

I had not anticipated this - arriving somewhere without the formal weight of an escorted visit, just two people on horses coming to a gate. The guards looked at us differently. The castle received us differently. We were not a delegation. We were visitors.

"The Alpha is not in," the gate guard told us.

Perfect. This was absolutely perfect.

"The Luna," I said. "Tell her Lord Merrick of Black Wolf and his companion are here. Tell her we’d like a private conversation."

The guard went.

We waited patiently in the entry, both of us, sitting on our horses and trying not to look at each other.

Eventually she came.

She came without the wolf’s form today - in her human shape, with the composed expression of a woman who had decided to receive us with civility and had made preparations for it. Her eyes went to Agnes and held there.

I cleared my throat.

"My lady," I said. I had been thinking about this since I left my room. About the best approach to use in this woman. "Thank you for seeing us again. I know our visit yesterday was..." I chose the word carefully. "Sudden."

She said nothing. But she was listening.

"We have been traveling for some days now," I said. "Five wrong doors before this one." I kept my voice quiet. "I would like to tell you what she has been carrying. If you’ll hear it."

The Luna looked at me.

Then at Agnes.

"Speak," she said.

I looked at Agnes.

Agnes, who had been standing beside me with a contained stillness, as if scared that if she moved, she’d loose everything - her son.

Then she told her.

The village. The dawn. Her husband waking her before light and pushing her out with the baby and the reason she hadn’t understood until she heard the fire. The hill. The flames. Terrell on the horse.

She told the story with every bit of emotion she was feeling at that moment. The slave traders and the separation and what they had done and the child taken from her arms.

The Luna listened.

When Agnes finished, the room was quiet.

The Luna looked at Agnes for a long moment.

Then she said: "How do I know you’re telling the truth? How do I know this particular child is yours?" She looked between us. "What if you’re lying? What if he isn’t even hers and she just wants my boy because she’s loosing hope of finding hers?"

I looked at Agnes.

And discovered, with a sharp realization, that this was a question I had not fully prepared for.

I had not, in the three days of planning approaches and considering arguments, established a method for proving the biological connection with anything other than Agnes’s word.

Agnes looked at me.

I looked back at her with a new suspicion.

What if the Luna was right?