358

Book:Fated to the Alpha Published:2024-6-3

Sage glances at me from the corner of her eye. “What Alpha meeting?”
I scrub a hand down my face, and my father looks at me apologetically. “It’s next week. I didn’t want you to feel forced to go if you didn’t want to,” I explain, and she thinks for a second.
“Will there be a lot of people there?” She asks, and her heart rate spikes for a second. She is fine with our pack, used to the small human towns, but going to an Alpha meet is a little more intimidating.
“Kat, Mateo, and Ezra will be there. Zane and Derrick too,” I assure her.
“And the kids?” She asks.
“Of course, Kat is still funny with people babysitting,” Derrick tells her.
“Ok, that should be fine. So, can I go?” She asks, looking at me.
“If you want, then you can give them to the kids yourself,” I tease her, and she beams at me.
“Okay, well, I guess you don’t have to give them to Kat for me.”
Derrick smiles as he cups her cheek softly with his hand. “I will see you on Sunday.” He tells her, walking off, and she nods before wrapping the bears back in the tissue paper and placing them back in the gift bag.
“So you went to a baby store with Zane?” I ask her, but she shakes her head.
“No, to the craft place, and Zane spelled the kids’ names for me so I could stitch the names in for them after I made the bears,” she says, and I reach in the bag, grabbing one out.
“You put the names on?” I ask her, looking at the bear’s paws.
“Yes, and I made the bear. I put lavender in them, smell it,” she insists, and I sniff the bear smelling the faint scent of dried-out lavender.
“Hmm,” is all I can say because I don’t know what else to say.
“My mother showed me how to sew when I was a lot younger, it took a couple of tries, and I am a little rusty. I ruined one bear the first go before I made those two,” she says with a shrug, but I can’t find a stitch out of place looking at it.
“So you used a sewing machine?” I ask, but she shakes her head.
“No, by hand, I don’t know how to use a sewing machine.” She chuckles. I hand the bear to her, and she wraps it back up, putting it with the other.
I wrap my arms around her waist and tug her against me. “We have the entire house to ourselves tonight.”
“We do,” she agrees, turning in my arms.
Sage looks a little worried, and I know she likes it when my father is in the spare room down the hall. That fact always helps her find excuses not to do anything, my father being the main one.
He is the biggest cock blocker I have ever met, and he doesn’t even know it. Sage constantly uses the same excuse “your father is down the hall.”
But I know it is more to do with the rogues, which angers me because Donnie and I are patient, but her fear of intimacy is bothering me. Not that I need to tell her that, she can feel it, although she never acknowledges it.
It has been four months since I found her, and nothing has happened besides kissing, hugging, and holding my goddamn hand.
I sigh, kiss her head and let her go, she tenses at the realization of being completely alone with me once again. She shoves the bag in the closet and scurries back out, her brows pinch together like she is debating some internal battle.
No one has any idea how much I will give up to mark her, so that I can feel what she is feeling. She is sometimes hard to read, and while I can smell the faint scent of her fear, she is quick to mask it.
“Maybe we could try….” She stops herself, her cheeks heat with embarrassment like they always do when she or I mention anything to do with sex.
“You want to try…?” I ask her wanting to know exactly what she wants to try, so I can mentally prepare myself for the torture.
We tried last time, but the moment my hands went below her panties, she tensed and freaked out on me, so I haven’t tried to touch her since, not sexually anyway.
She doesn’t say anything as she chews her lip instead and looks away from me. “I’m sorry,” she whispers, the words barely audible.
“It’s fine, Sage. It will happen when it happens,” I reassure her, and she nods, her eyes turning glassy.
She has told me a few times that she wouldn’t blame me if I left her, not that I could nor did I want to. But she isn’t teaching me patience because I am already a patient man. She is taking me to new monk levels of patience.
“Come on, how about we have a movie night instead?” I stride over to her and sling my arm over her shoulder. “You can pick,” I tell her, kissing her cheek as I pull her from the room.
Sage
“We are gonna get caught, I don’t understand why you haven’t told him. He has been acting so darn good, Luna,” Casen whines beside me as we both carry our baskets toward the border near the waterfall.
“He doesn’t need to know. What if it triggers him, and he kills them? It is working, isn’t it? None of them have stepped over since we started this. Besides, even Derrick agrees, Andrei still isn’t in the right headspace to tell him anything about what we are doing here yet,” I explain as I look down at the basket of vegetables and bread.
Casen’s basket contains fruit and bottled water. I try to ensure we cover the necessary basics, and these seem to be good to put together some decent, balanced meals for those who struggle.
“If he catches you this close to the border, he will have all our heads, Sage. You know that he doesn’t want to see you this close to the front lines, it is dangerous,” Casen warns.
He is right, but I know Andrei would never see it the same way we do. So, every afternoon Casen or Zane take me to pick strawberries, when in reality, we have been dropping baskets of food to the borders.
No one has tried to cross over the border except those that meant harm. Malik and Zane have been good at holding them back. Of course, that is also made possible with Derrick’s help.
Derrick caught me the first time I suggested this. No matter how much I pleaded or tried to make them see reason, none of them initially agreed with me, so I went alone.
Little did I know back then that nothing gets past Derrick’s watchful eyes when he is in Beta mode.