Page 5 of Knot In My Plans
His words were cutting, but I still couldn’t understand why. I shook my head. “What is wrong about that? He didn’t want to be alone for life.”
Rage vibrated through Anders’s body. I could feel the tension inside the car. It wasn’t my dad’s fault that Anders wanted to stay. I looked at him, really looked at him. Yes, he was gorgeous, but the lines on the corners of his eyes didn’t lie. He was about my father’s age. That meant he stayed, and he was still single after all this time. Alone.
“I know you don’t understand, but I’m telling you the situation is more nuanced. People don’t just leave their pack. A pack is bonded first. He was one of us, our brother, and he left. There’s a lot of resentment when it comes to Karl.”
The words in defense of my father were threatening to come out, but I swallowed them back again. Sometimes traditions are wrong. If being bonded with your pack brothers meant you had to live in misery for the rest of your lives, I’m proud my father walked away. I didn’t say that to Anders, of course. Instead, I nodded and looked away from him for the remainder of the drive.
Chapter Four
Per
The buttercream melted on my tongue, and I hummed happily. The cupcakes were resting on the rack, already cooled off and waiting. I wasn’t the best at decorating, but I could make something work. The most important thing is the taste, right?Yes, I told myself. They were delicious, and the kids were going to love them.
Every year, I baked something for the bake sale at school. My students came to expect it now, so I couldn’t disappoint them. What started as an impulse to help the other teachers had now become something somewhat therapeutic. Baking made sense. It was chemistry, and I was a chemistry teacher, so it was just right that I mastered the craft.
The front door opened, and I heard steps coming into the house, but my eyes were focused on my task. I took a cupcake from the rack and brought it right to my nose. The delicious vanilla smell embraced me at once. I might have a sweet tooth. Right when I lowered my masterpiece, I whiffed something else in the air.
“What’s that?”
It was nothing like the baked goods in front of me. No vanilla and sugar but it was just as sweet. My eyes narrowed, and I looked around as if a pastry was hiding from me, waiting to scare me off. I took a lungful, and the cinnamon scent hit me right away, no denying. I looked down at my cupcakes, ready to accuse them of being secretly cinnamon, when Anders came through the door with a girl right after him.
A cinnamon-smelling girl. Nutmeg and other spices too.
I considered myself a sophisticated man, but still, I looked from her to Anders, my mouth opening and closing in confusion.
“Is that an omega?” I spat at once.
Her eyebrows went up, and her mouth closed in a flat line. Before the words were even out of my mouth, I winced, knowing it wasn’t the right reaction, but dammit, it had been a long time since I scented an omega who wasn’t my own mother.
“That?” she said with an accent I couldn’t pinpoint.
Anders breathed out. He looked tired, more tired than before, that was for sure. “This is Isadora. Isadora, that’s Per. My pack member.”
Isadora didn’t care to rush and shake my hand. Instead, her eyebrows arched, and she took me in with a challenge. How the hell did Anders find an omega? All the questions were coming to me so fast that I could barely take the time to put them into words. My head shook, and probably my whole body with it, and Anders sighed again.
“Take a seat, Per.”
I moved from the counter, leaving my baking for later, but I couldn’t miss the way she looked at the cupcakes. Forgetting everything, I smiled at her. “Do you want to try one?”
Her eyes darted from the cupcakes to me, and she narrowed them. “Are you a baker?”
I shook my head. “Teacher.”
She didn’t take the cupcakes, which offended me a little. I wasn’t a baker, but I was getting really good at it. She just had to try to see it. Her loss. I said nothing and moved to the kitchen table where Anders waited for us, wearing that worried expression on his face as if he was tasked to carry the world on his shoulders.
He was not. There was nothing for him to carry. He was just sour like that.
“Isadora is Karl’s kid.”
My ass wasn’t even down in the chair when he threw that bomb on me. A name that was until now forbidden in our house, but suddenly his daughter was our guest?
“I tracked her down after our call with Noah.”
I nodded as if I understood, even if I didn’t. We agreed to talk about it. This wasn’t talking about it. This was doing it.
“There are many packs still out there…our community—”
I raised my hand, stopping his speech before they were completely off his mouth. “I’m not arguing why you brought her here. But the fact you did it behind our backs.” And then a thought occurred to me. “Does Sven know?”
