My Alpha's Regret Came Too Late novel · Chapter 22 of 24
Chapter 22: Chosen
I looked at him.
He was still looking at my hand.
"Is that you asking?" I said.
"That's me asking if I'm allowed to ask."
"At three in the morning. Soaking wet. On the kitchen floor."
"I didn't plan it."
"I can tell."
His ears went red.
"Forget it," he said. "I'm tired. I'm an idiot."
"Emrys."
He looked up.
"Ask me properly," I said. "In daylight. After you've slept."
Something went across his face, slow.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
He fell asleep sitting up against the wood box ten minutes later.
I put the widow's shawl over him and went to bed smiling into the dark.
He asked at nine the next morning.
He'd gone home across the bridge road, slept four hours, shaved, and come back in a clean shirt.
He found me on the front step of the inn with a mug of coffee and twelve strangers' laundry hanging from every rail.
He didn't sit down.
He stood at the bottom of the steps in the snow.
"The old keeper found me on this step," he said. "When I was fifteen. I couldn't feel my feet."
"I know."
"I've wanted this place open since the day she died. I thought that was the thing I wanted most." He stopped. "Then you slept in your truck on my well."
"Next to your well."
"Next to my well." The corner of his mouth went. "There's no fate in it. Nothing pulled us. I'm asking you to choose me, on purpose, the old way. A bite given and a bite taken, in front of both packs. And I'll choose you back every day after, on purpose, and I'll never once make you prove it."
The river ran.
Behind the kitchen window, somebody dropped a pan.
Probably on purpose, so they'd have an excuse to be standing there.
I took a sip of coffee.
"Ask me tomorrow," I said.
He blinked.
"Tomorrow?"
"You made me wait a moon. I'm making you wait a day."
"That's not the same."
"It's much shorter. You're welcome."
He stood there in the snow, a huge man in a clean shirt, completely lost.
Then he laughed.
I'd never heard him do it out loud.
It was big and rough and it startled a crow off the stable roof.
"Tomorrow," he said, and went to help the carpenter with a broken bed frame.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–12 of My Alpha's Regret Came Too Late are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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