Page 23 of Betrayed Kidnapped Mate

“What?”

“I made perfumes to support us,” she whispers, leaning forward toward me, and my heart flips at the proximity as she jabs her finger into my chest. “And yes, I did finish my degree, no thanks to you.”

I stare at her for a moment, shocked at this admission. Rosa, the most intelligent woman I’ve ever met in my life, has been using her biochemical engineering degree to make perfumes.

Grief and rage well up inside me. At Rosa, for not telling me about Kaila. At Amon, for creating this situation. At myself for not standing up to him all those years ago.

I’m the reason Rosa has been hiding out in a beach shack, making perfume to get by and raise our daughter without me. If I had been more courageous and cleverer, I would have been able to overcome Amon.

The threat he made to me that night came back to me, lightning-fast and sounding exactly the same as when he was standing in front of me outside Rosa’s apartment building.

If you don’t get out of here, leave my daughter alone, permanently. I will take the throat of every person she loves. I will murder her mother, that little friend of hers, all of her classmates in front of her, and I will tell her it was your fault.

“Rosa,” I choke out. For some reason, this is hitting me the hardest. I was there while she was completing her degree. I saw how hard she worked, studied, and was at the top of her class in everything she did. Rosa could have had a promising degree at any company of her choosing.

And instead, I reduced her life to this.

“Good night, Bigby,” she says, shaking her head.

“Wait,” I say, grabbing her arm and turning her body so she’s facing me again. She’s wearing a pink nightgown with lace at the collar, and her chest rises quickly, brushing against mine. When she looks up at me, it takes every ounce of self-preservation and willpower to not lean down and take her mouth with mine.

The worst part is that, with the look she’s giving me right now, it almost seems like she would let me. My eyes roam over her face, taking in her pink lips, the dusting of color over her cheeks, the dark look in her shining blue eyes.

My body wants her. Wants to be close to her, pick her up and bring her back to my bedroom, to make up for all this worthless, wasted time. Instead, I rock back on my heels, giving her space.

“Goodnight, Rosa.”

Chapter 12 - Rosa

As soon as Bigby closes the door to his bedroom, I sneak back out into the hallway and start snooping. The house is clearly older—Linnea said it belonged to his parents before. I hate that I love everything about it.

It’s so quaint and unlined the palatial mansions I grew up in; this house actually seems like somewhere a kid might enjoy growing up. I stand in the living room and look out the sliding glass doors. The backyard has enough room for water balloon fights and summer picnics. I bet I could even ask Bigby to build a deck, and he’d do it in a second.

I stop myself—what am I thinking? This isn’t my house. Not my life. Kaila and I need to get out of here as soon as possible.

Continuing my path through the house, I trace my finger along the mantelpiece. There are a few pictures of Bigby when he was a kid, ranging from him being in diapers to one of him in a football uniform, but I wish there were more. I stare at one of him and his parents, grinning brightly at the camera, and my heart aches.

I stop, resting my head on the wood and wishing I’d had the opportunity for a real dating experience with him. I wish I grew up the way he did—charmed in a little town, with a family that loved him. With parents who wanted nothing but to see him succeed.

From the moment I first met him in college, I’d known it was doomed. He had a different pack’s scent all over him, and even if he didn’t, my father was the only person with a say in who I would marry.

The options varied between different packs in Southern California and Northern Mexico, but either way, I was to be blood-bonded to an alpha with the express purpose of furthering my father’s political gain.

Of course, he wouldn’t tell anybody else that—the concept was so outdated and horrendous that others in the pack and even other alphas might balk at the idea and might try to intervene. It wasn’t something my father made public, but he made it very well-known to me.

I met Bigby in an intro chemistry class at Stanford, and the attraction to him was immediate. He was, of course, the biggest guy in the room, trying to squeeze past me and my friends to the end of the row. The second we locked eyes, I knew it was over for me. I’d squeezed my legs together, and his eyes had skipped down my body to the place where my thighs were visible below the hem of my dress.

He went on to charm and enchant everyone throughout the rest of the class, helping people who were called on and didn’t know the answer. He even organized a study group for everyone. I went to the study group, and after that, Bigby and I were spending every waking moment with one another.

My heart skips when I remember one late night at the library, how he’d said he had something to show me, then took me to a closet on the top floor and fucked me so good I forgot my name. Afterward, he’d smoothed out my shirt and took me back to our study table, grabbing me a snack from the vending machine.

I had never been interested in the dumb jock—but that’s not who Bigby was. He was the genius jock. He was the don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover guy. Though he commanded any space with his physical presence, I cracked up whenever another guy assumed Bigby was an idiot because he was tall and broad.

Being tall and broad wasn’t so bad in bed, either.

Now, I shake away those thoughts and continue moving down the shelf, running my finger along the frames. Not a speck of dust. If I know Bigby, he has a cleaning chart, a schedule somewhere for himself, which means he dusts these twice a week, perfectly on schedule every time.

In college, he would clean my apartment for me when I had tests or wasn’t feeling well. My stomach twists—that’s what he was doing the night he vanished. Taking out the trash. I sat on the couch, waiting for him to come back inside, trying to find the right words to tell him about the pregnancy.

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