Page 26 of Mating of Convenience
I’d almost forgotten about that part, and judging by the way Nathan’s eyes darted to me, he’d forgotten about it too. Great. I didn’t know how to feel about this. I wanted Nathan to kiss me, but I did not want him to kiss me out of obligation. He was over me after all. What if he didn’t even—
My thought process was cut short when Nathan leaned in and pressed his lips to mine and I opened my mouth to him on autopilot. As I did, his scent entered my nose and a thousand and one memories of kisses just like this swept over me and threatened to drown me.
I wanted nothing more than to hold on to him.
Remembering what it felt like to kiss Nathan was one thing. Experiencing it again was another. And it made denying my feelings a lot harder.
When Nathan broke away from me, I stared at him in a daze. He smiled. Just as he’d done the very first time we’d kissed in the shade of the chestnut trees in front of our dormitories.
“Guess we’re married now, huh?”
I only nodded.
I was in more trouble than I had bargained for, wasn’t I?
14
Raphael
Marriage certificate in hand and ring on finger--holy shit, I was really, legally married--I knocked on my grandma’s door the very next day. It was time to cash in on the promise she’d made me. I tried telling her about my marriage as soon as she let me into the house, but she insisted that we move to the sitting room first. She hadn’t spent this much money on a nice set of arm chairs to be standing around in a hallway, or so she said. Honestly, I didn’t carewherewe had our conversation as long as I got the money I needed to clear my family’s debt.
“What is it that you wanted to talk to me about?” the old hag asked as soon as my butt touched the leather of one of the chairs in her precious sitting room.
So she was curious after all, huh?
I held my marriage certificate out to her. “I did what you wanted. Now you’ll let me have access to my inheritance, right?”
Forehead creasing, she took the paper from me and studied it carefully. At one point, she even held it up against the light.
“It’s real,” I assured her. “Hot off the press too. Be careful, the ink might not be dry yet. We only got married yesterday.”
She put the document aside on a low table next to her before focusing on me again. “You got married yesterday and I wasn’t invited. Is that any way to treat your grandmother?”
Seriously? Was she really going to argue with me about how you should treat your relatives? I opened my mouth to put her in her place, but then I remembered that I still wanted something from her. This wasn’t about me or my pride. This was about my brother and my sister. Swallowing down my anger, I came up with a different response. “We didn’t invite anyone. We eloped. Just couldn’t wait any longer, you know? Once I proposed to Nathan--“
“You were the one who proposed?” My grandma cut me off. “That’s not very omega-like of you.”
I did my best to bite back the groan that desperately wanted to escape my mouth. “Omegas are allowed to propose to people, you know?” I said, even though I knew my grandma was an old-school alpha who would never understand.
“I don’t like the thought that you ended up with an alpha who wouldn’t even propose to you. It doesn’t bode well for your marriage. I’m only looking out for your well-being, Rafe.”
Looking out for me... Jesus Christ was she ever making it hard for me to stay polite. “You don’t have to worry about me or the state of my marriage,” I tried to assure her. “Nathan and I have been friends forever.”
“Friends?”
Well, maybe that was not the word I should have used. “We were friends before we started dating,” I clarified.
“And now you’re more than friends?” For some reason, she seemed doubtful. There had to be a way for me to convince her, though. And then, it came to me. In a flash of inspiration, I pulled my phone out of my pocket and searched through the gallery of pictures I’d saved on it. I’d had this phone for a couple of years. I’d had it when I was dating Nathan too--and for some stupid sentimental reason I could never really get myself to delete the pictures we took together--or the pictures friends had snapped and sent to me. There was one of us kissing in front of the Ferris wheel at the spring fair two years ago. I found it and showed it to my grandmother.
“This is him,” I said, pointing at Nathan.
She squinted her eyes at my phone. “The scrawny kid? Is that an alpha?”
“Yes, he is, and he’s not scrawny!” My annoyance wasn’t even fake. After all, the reason I left Nathan was not the way he looked. “He’s a very handsome young alpha. He’s kind too, and smart.”
My grandmother looked at me for a moment longer. “That’s an old picture, though. Your arms are bare in it. Don’t you have anything more recent?”
Shoot.“Uh... Nathan takes all the pictures these days. I can send you some later, though.” I just had to talk to Nathan and pose for a couple of photographs. No big deal, right? Even if that meant I had to kiss him again... “Can we talk about what really matters now?”
