Fate Picked Me, the Alpha Passed, and I Felt Nothing novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: Courting Hours

On Wednesday morning the Alpha of the Notch pack was holding my ladder.

I was up on the second plate of a new boathouse frame on the Marsh property, and he stood at the bottom with both hands on the rails.

He had been there since seven.

He had arrived in his truck with a thirty-foot extension ladder in the bed, two lunches in a paper sack and no explanation.

"Nail," I said from the top.

A hand came up with a pouch of sixteen-penny nails.

I took one.

"You don't have to stand there."

"I know."

"The client is going to think you're my helper."

"I am your helper."

"You're the Alpha."

"Today I'm holding a ladder."

I drove the nail, and it went in clean.

He didn't ask for anything and he didn't say sorry.

He hauled studs from the truck and cut them to length when I told him the number, and he carried them up in pairs without being asked twice.

He didn't touch me, and I didn't touch him.

I could feel him watching me from the ground the whole time.

At noon I came down the ladder and wiped my forehead with my wrist.

"Lunch is at the Pine Cup," he said.

"You packed a lunch."

"I did. But I'd like to eat at the Pine Cup. If you'll come."

I looked at him.

He looked back, perfectly steady.

"Why?"

"There's something I have to do there."

The Pine Cup is the only diner in Tupper Notch, and at noon on a weekday it is full of wolves in work boots.

We walked in together.

The bell over the door rang, and the room went quiet in a ripple, table by table.

Dray stopped just inside the door.

Forty people were looking at us.

"Rue," he said quietly. "Would you stand here?"

"Sure."

He walked three steps forward, into the middle of the aisle between the booths.

He turned around to face the room.

"Everybody," he said.

His voice carried.

He had never been a loud man, but he knew how to be heard.

"Saturday night I refused my mate in front of this pack."

Nobody moved.

A fork clinked against a plate and went still.

"I turned Rue Tolland away in front of all of you. Tonight I'm asking this pack to hold me to account for it. Anyone who wants my seat over it can stand up and say so now."

A woman in a booth by the window put her hand over her mouth.

"She did nothing wrong," Dray said. "She stood there and took it. She owes me nothing, and she owes this pack nothing, and if anybody in this room says she was rejected, you can say this to them instead. The Alpha was a coward. And the carpenter walked out on her own two feet."

He stopped.

The silence was total.

My chest was tight.

I hadn't asked for this, and I hadn't known he would do it.

But he wasn't looking at me for approval.

He wasn't looking at me at all.

He stood in the middle of the Pine Cup with his hands at his sides and let forty people look at him.

Joss Brannigan, in the back booth, set down his coffee and began to clap.

It was one slow clap, and then the old man beside him joined in, and then the woman by the window, and then half the room.

Dray flinched.

"No," he said. "Don't. I'm not asking for that."

"That's why," Joss said.

I walked up and stood beside him.

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