Page 68 of The Alpha Escort Agency
Her dad, her sister … her Alpha.
Yes, her Alpha.
There’s no doubt about it.
All this time, all these years, she’s tried to protect herself. And somehow,somehow, it was futile. Like Sleeping Beauty’s parents attempting to defy fate, she’d been pricked by a spindle anyway. And it hurts, it hurts just as badly as before. To lose someone else she loves from her life. She’s shut herself off from that pain, walked around in numbness, feeling nothing at all. But it’s there, another painful hole in her troubled heart.
A hole she’s made herself. In pushing him away, she thought she’d stop him from ever hurting her. Instead, not having him hurts a hell of a lot more.
Her Alpha.
Maybe she’d always known he was, from the very first moment she’d inhaled his dark chocolate scent and fallen into his caramel eyes.
He is a calming presence in the whirlwind of her life. Solid and strong and unflinching.
She misses talking with him; she misses soaking up the sight of him; she misses being held by him, touched by him, kissed by him, loved by him.
“Alice?”
She starts, lost in her thoughts.
“Are you going to tell me about it?” her mum says.
“I think I’ve made a mistake. A really big stupid mistake.” She crosses the room and curls up next to her mum, letting her mum wrap her arm around her shoulder. “You’re right. I was afraid.”
“It’s never too late to be brave.” Her mum strokes back the damp curls stuck to her cheek, just as she’d do when Alice was a child, and kisses the crown of her head. “Never too late.”
At the end of the night, she enters her room, her old bedroom, redecorated into a guest room. Her old books and teddy bears, her posters and her toys, all gone, only plain bare furniture there now, a muted pale pink.
She walks over to the chair where she’d flung her work clothes yesterday and searches through the pockets. Her heart is in her mouth, and her fingers scrabble about inside the material, finding only empty space. She jams her hand into the other pockets, fingers swimming about, until she finds and scoops them out, cradling them in her hand. Relief floods through her body and she sinks onto the floor, the carpet soft beneath her, and holds the three little ducks to her cheek.
Chapter 21
The surface of the lake glistens in the silver daylight and the grass sparkles with frost, each blade encased in fine crystals. Around him his breath rises in thick clouds, like steam from a kettle, and the bare branches of the tree are painted white.
He lies out flat on the hard frozen ground; the blankets tucked around his shoulders, his woollen hat tugged over his ears, his face buried in a thick scarf. It’s like floating in a dream, in the negative of a photo. The colour drained away, but the world dazzling, so that he squints against the brightness.
Who knows what he’ll see today. Most of the birds flew south to the warmer climate of Africa months ago. Only the hardened natives remain, tucked up in bushes with their feathers fluffed up, struggling to keep warm.
He’s not even sure he’ll be able to lift his camera and take a photo. The usual need he has to capture time, the excitement he feels in bottling the moment, has wilted away. There is no joy in it, not now.
It doesn’t matter, though. He needed some space. It’s always been a medicine to him, a way to breathe when everything has gripped him around the neck and squeezed the air from him. Here it is just him. Stillness. Silence. Peace.
With an effort, he peers through his lens, dipping his chin as low as he can to angle the shot through the crystallised grass and out toward the lake, twisting the lens to adjust the focus, first blurring the vegetation to a smudge of pale green, then focusing so finely he can see the fragile structure of the frost.
Then there’s a movement. From the other side of the lake. He keeps deadly still. Not moving a muscle of his body, only lifting his eyes to gaze across to the water.
A rustle in the trees, a flash of colour. He struggles to make it out, adjusting the lens again, focusing right in on that patch of bush.
For a moment he thinks his eyes must be lying. He raises his head, and peers across without the camera, with his naked eye.
No, his eyes are not deceiving him.
It is her. Alice. In her bright coat, bobble hat and scarf.
She steps out of the undergrowth and comes to the edge of the lake, head turning this way and that.
He stares at her.
