Page 33 of The Alpha and the Baker
“Not a problem, not a problem at all. But I think I’ve made Chris wait long enough. Thanks again for the keys. I probably wouldn’t have realized I was missing them until I tried to drive my personal car.”
“We wouldn’t have wanted that,” I said.
I wasn’tsadto see him go, per se, but I wasn’t thrilled about it either. I walked him to the door, then locked it again for the twenty minutes or so I had until opening.
Now that I was alone in my shop, it kind of felt emptier than ever.
Huh.
Castiel
Out of the Mouths of Babes and Wolves
I should have askedher out.
That was what I told myself as I walked into my cabin after we’d packed away the groceries in the communal storage area where people could go and grab at their leisure. I had a bag of greens myself, but I left them on my kitchen counter so I could flop down on the couch and turn on my TV.
I wasn’t the biggest television watcher, but I enjoyed certain YouTubers. Some mythology buffs, some deep-divers who did iceberg videos on fantasy shows, some survivalists, some homesteaders, some animal channels, and slime reviewers.
That last one had thrown me for a loop. I had zero desire to actually touch the stuff, but for some reason watching it when I was particularly agitated or anxious always helped me settle and feel a bit more in my body. Chris said it was something calledASMR,but I didn’t want to look into the reasoning behind it lest I ruin the magic. Insomnia was a fairly common issue for shifters given the constant fight between our human natures of being diurnal and our wolf selves being crepuscular, and I didn’t want to sabotage a reliable way to settle down.
“CanI survive three nights alone out in the Alaskan wilderness?”
I listenedwith half an ear to the video I’d picked to play, but my mind was most certainly on other things. Namely, the strange and perhaps even exciting bundle of emotions building in my chest.
I was attracted to Felicia—there was no denying that. Besides, I was a red-blooded man. Even though I was insanely busy as an alpha, I still noticed when a beautiful woman entered my orbit. I never had any desire to do something about it, but I noticed it.
But with Felicia, I wanted to do something about it, which was pretty wild to me. The last—and only—serious relationship I’d had was with my high school sweetheart, Layla. Chris, Bethany, Layla, and I had grown up together and formed our own little friend group, so it had been natural that we ended up together. In all honesty, the whole thing was so easy.
Or it was, until high school ended and we had to make it work while she went off to college and I began to fully step into my alpha duties. Before, we could ignore that country life had never really been for her and that she’d always had greater dreams. It had been hard to let her go, but our breakup in her sophomore year was amicable. Well, as amicable as a broken heart could be. There was no bad blood between us, and I’d even attended her wedding to a very beautiful witch who was a part of the Velka coven in NYC. The two of them lived in the city, which struck me as particularly uncomfortable for a wolf, but she seemed happy enough, and that was what was important.
“By puttingthe hot coals under this raised frame, it can keep me warm all night.”
It wasn’t likeI’d been celibate since her. Back in my twenties, I’d had a short relationship with another wolf shifter who moved to our area. Mara was a strong, independent wolf I’d really admired. Again, no messy breakup there. Neither of us had had the time to get serious, and she’d ended up moving to Scotland to claim some ancestral land and married into a huge wolf pack there.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, it seemed.
And I’d always been okay with that. Unlike some alphas, I never felt like I needed a mate to properly lead my pack. It wasn’t like our numbers were hurting. Some packs were dwindling so much because of various modern reasons that there was pressure to procreate, and I was beyond happy that we weren’t in the same boat. No, our biggest worry was not pissing off the fairies any more than Barris had.
Still, even if I didn’t have the overwhelming pressure to breed, as I got older, the idea of not coming home to an empty den was kind of appealing.
My mind was getting too full again, so I stopped the survival video and hunted for a slime one. Maybe a nice nap was in order.
“Can you take me on a run?”
I paused mid-chew and looked at Arietty. She’d stopped eating long enough to ask me a question. Just as we’d thought, her appetite followed her mother’s example, and she’d been eating pretty much non-stop since she woke up. It would taper off naturally once her body got used to the changes.
“You sure you’re up for taking your wolf form again?” I asked after I swallowed. “You only just got out of it after sunset yesterday, right?”
“I think I’ll be ready by tonight,” Arietty said resolutely. “Could some of the other new shifters come too? None of us can keep up with adults who go day-running, and our parents won’t let us go out on our own at night.”
And for good reason. While all the kids in our pack were solidly Good Kids™, being newly transformed really inhibited their logical side. It wasn’t unusual for their wolf to take over. Granted, Arietty had been perfectly well-behaved during the reunion—she’d even cuddled with Felicia a bit—but that was when she had full supervision.
I hadn’t planned on spending my night with a bunch of preteens, but I wanted to be an alpha they knew they could come to, and I didn’t really have a reason to say no. So, I didn’t. Instead, I looked at her parents.
“Is that all right with you?”
Chris nodded. “Sure. We’ve taken her out of school for the week, so there’s no curfew.”
