My Fated Mate Was the One Man I Could Never Have novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Cream Envelope
Jessa refuses the Alpha's mandatory engagement party, goes anyway, and answers his public rejection with one word before her wolf goes silent.
"Tell Rhett Stallard he can kiss my ass, because I'm not going."
My mother went still at the kitchen table.
Mom only goes still when I have said the wrong thing in the wrong way, and I had just managed both.
"Jessa," she said.
"No." I pointed at the cream envelope lying between us with its wax seal and the pack crest on the front. "I'm not putting on a dress to stand in his house and clap for his engagement."
Dad lowered his newspaper until one gray eyebrow showed over the top.
My father has a calm that makes people think he's slow.
He is not slow.
"It's a mandated pack event," he said.
"It's an engagement party."
"It's both."
I opened my mouth and closed it again, because he was right, and because the real reason was not something I could say at this table.
Three months ago, at the Midsummer gathering, Rhett Stallard took my hand to help me over the creek stones.
Every nerve I own lit up at once.
I watched it hit his face too.
He let go of me and did not speak to me again, and two weeks later the Alpha of Cedar Ridge announced he was marrying the daughter of the Blackwater Alpha.
"Everyone will be there," Mom said quietly.
Dad turned a page. "Deirdre is right." "If you're missing, they'll say what they've already been saying."
"That I'm his mate?"
"That you're the Rawson girl who never shifts, and he looked at you at Midsummer anyway."
That was worse, and Dad knew it.
I went upstairs and put on the green dress.
I reached for the garnet necklace on my dresser, and Mom's hand closed over mine before I had it off the hook.
She had followed me up without a sound.
"Not that one," she said.
She tugged the silver chain at my throat back inside my collar, where the little moon pendant belonged.
"It's a dime-sized moon, Mom. It doesn't go with green."
"It goes with you."
I was eight months old when my parents brought me home, and she has fussed over that chain every day since.
So I wore it, and I went.
The Stallard estate had lanterns strung through every pine on the drive.
About three hundred wolves stood on the lawn, all of them dressed better than me.
I took a plate to look busy.
A freckled woman with short blonde hair stood next to me at the buffet and slid the blue cheese aside with one finger.
"Don't," she said. "It's been sweating since four."
"Thank you. I'm in your debt."
"Are you with the groom's side?"
"I'm with the side nearest the exit."
She laughed, a real one, and I liked her at once.
"Stay by me," she said. "I'm the only person here who doesn't know anybody, and I'd like it to stay that way."
A glass rang against a glass, and the lawn went quiet.
Rhett Stallard stepped onto the porch steps in a black suit, tall and dark-haired, with the pale scar through his left eyebrow.
His eyes went across three hundred people and landed on me.
My blood went hot and then cold.
Beside him stood a man in a gray coat, a stranger sent from far away to watch it all get signed.
"The treaty requires one custom before the betrothal is sealed," the man in gray said. "The Alpha clears every prior claim of fate, in front of his pack."
The freckled woman next to me put down her plate.
"Oh no," she said softly. "Not that."
Rhett spoke in a flat voice.
"I am Rhett Stallard, Alpha of Cedar Ridge. I name the claim of fate between myself and Jessa Rawson."
A hundred heads turned.
My name went across the lawn and nobody moved.
"I refuse it," he said. "I refuse the bond between us, and I..."
He stopped.
His jaw worked, and nothing came out of it.
The last words of the rejection hung in the air, unsaid, and every wolf there knew exactly what they were.
I could have let him choke on them.
I could have stood there and let three hundred people watch me wait.
"Accepted," I said.
It rang out clear across the grass.
Rhett flinched.
"Congratulations, Alpha," I said, and I put my plate down on the nearest table, because I was not going to drop it.
The freckled woman put a hand on my arm.
"Wait," she said. "Please. I'm Lorna Pierce."
I walked.
Past my father, who did not stand up, and my mother, who had gone still again by the lemonade.
Past the lanterns, down the gravel, out of the light.
Behind the stable I stopped, shaking, and shut my eyes and called my wolf, the way I had tried to every year since I was twelve.
Nothing answered.
Not a growl, not a stir, not even the old faint scratching at the back of my skull.
It was gone completely.
And a hundred yards behind me, in the house I had just left, I could still feel exactly where Rhett Stallard was standing.
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