The Alpha’s $12 Million Bride

Wedding Prep

“Your father wants white roses.”

“No.”

Eliza's pen moved across the page.

“You got it.”

I looked up from the cluster of fabric swatches spread across the kitchen island.

“That's it?”

“That's what?”

“You're not going to try to convince me?”

Eliza glanced over the top of the paper.

“Do you want white roses?”

“No.”

“Then we aren't having white roses.”

Another line scratched across the page.

I liked the sound of that.

“Are there any flowers that you do want?”

I thought for a second. “Wildflowers. Mixed with thistles, and wild basil, and daisies, and whatever else is native to the territory.”

Eliza smiled, taking notes.

I knew wildflowers would make my father angry. He’d think they were cheap or tacky, but I’d always loved them. I smiled back at Eliza.

For the last two days, Eliza and I had been undoing a wedding neither of us had planned.

Or, more accurately, undoing the wedding my father had apparently started planning before anyone bothered to tell the bride and groom they were getting married.

His preferences had arrived the morning after I did, neatly organized in a cream leather folio because my father didn't send an email when embossed paper could make the same information feel like a decree.

Eliza had opened it, read the first page, looked at me, and asked one question.

“His or yours?”

“Mine.”

She'd smiled.

We'd been destroying things ever since.

“String quartet.”

“Keep it.”

Eliza paused.

“Really?”

“I like strings.”

“Good.”

She made a different mark beside that one.

I'd learned the language of Eliza's pen remarkably fast.

A line meant dead.

A circle meant maybe.

A check meant I'd accidentally admitted to liking something and would therefore be seeing it again.

“Your father wants a seven-course dinner.”

I sighed, rubbing my temples. “Why?”

“Perhaps he's worried everyone will become hungry again between courses.”

I smiled.

“No.”

Scratch.

“His crest on the menus.”

“No.”

“Napkins.”

“No.”

“Dance floor.”

I looked up.

Eliza's mouth was already beginning to curve.

“My father wants the Valcourt crest on the dance floor?”

“Projected.”

Of course he f*****g did.

“Kill it.”

“Done.”

Somewhere between the wildflowers and the nixxed family crest, I'd started caring.

Not about napkins.

I refused to become a person who cared about napkins.

But I didn't want to walk into a wedding my father had decreed and marry a man my father had chosen while surrounded by flowers my father liked beneath a f*****g projection of my father's crest.

He'd already chosen enough.

By noon, my father's wedding had begun disappearing.

Eliza kept handing me things.

Linen samples. Menus. Photographs. Pieces of ribbon. A cake fork with three different bites balanced precariously across it.

Somewhere along the way, a woman named Mari pinned the waist of my dress while I ate lemon cake over her shoulder and Eliza read ceremony options from the other side of the room.

“Your father wants the traditional Valcourt procession.”

“No.”

A pin pricked my hip.

“Ow.”

“Stop moving,” Mari said around a mouthful of pins.

“I'm being attacked from multiple directions.”

“Then stand still for this one.”

Eliza crossed another line through the page.

“No procession.”

“Thank you.”

“He also requested—”

“Do I want to know?”

She considered that.

“Probably not.”

“Great.”

“I'll handle it.”

And she did.

Eliza handled everything.

Over the next two days, I watched her move through the pack house with the calm certainty of someone who had spent decades learning every hinge and heartbeat inside it.

She knew which bedroom had the best morning light and which oven ran ten degrees hot. She knew who could repair a torn hem, who had an allergy to walnuts, who was supposed to pick up the musicians, and which seventeen-year-old wolf had apparently been banned from driving anything containing wedding cake.

People came looking for Roman.

Half the time, they found Eliza instead.

Somehow, that seemed to work.

House Steward, he'd called her.

The title felt increasingly insufficient.

Eliza wasn't simply managing the house.

She seemed an integral piece of the foundation.

And the house itself had become almost unrecognizable from the quiet place I'd walked into two days earlier.

Garment bags migrated between rooms. Flowers drank from galvanized buckets beneath the kitchen windows. Boxes appeared against walls and disappeared before I learned what was inside them. Someone was always carrying glassware somewhere.

The air changed by the hour.

Coffee in the morning.

Sawed cedar from the ceremony structure by noon.

Buttercream and greenery by evening.

At night, the whole place smelled faintly of extinguished candles and whatever had been cooked for the small army apparently required to construct a wedding in seventy-two hours.

And people.

So many people.

I met Roman's Beta with one hand in a box of rocks, and the other holding the biggest chocolate chip cookie I’d ever seen.

I met Dr. Kira Hale while holding two forks, squinting at a label, and chewing a mouthful of wedding dinner samples.

I met cousins, guards, cooks, wolves who lived in the house, wolves who didn't, and at least three people whose names disappeared from my brain before they'd finished shaking my hand.

Some welcomed me easily.

Others watched.

Not rudely.

Carefully.

I knew that look.

I was a Valcourt standing in the Anders pack house three days after our families had gone from neighboring powers to a marriage alliance nobody had seen coming.

I'd have watched me too.

What I wasn't used to was everything they didn't do.

Nobody lowered their eyes when I walked into a room.

Conversations didn't thin into silence around me.

Nobody seemed particularly concerned about whether I was impressed.

And when Roman appeared, the house didn't rearrange itself around him.

People made room.

They listened.

But they kept laughing.

Kept eating.

Kept arguing over who had stolen whose coffee.

I noticed that too.

I noticed Roman less.

Or maybe I noticed him more because I barely saw him.

He existed mostly in pieces.

A dark shirt disappearing through the kitchen while someone held six ribbons against my hair.

His voice somewhere downstairs while Mari stood on her knees with pins between her teeth.

The shape of him through the glass as he crossed the grounds with two men I hadn't met yet.

Once, I looked up from a table covered in place cards and found him standing in the doorway.

He didn't interrupt.

He just looked at me.

Green eyes.

That almost-smile.

Something warm brushed beneath my ribs.

Then Eliza dropped another folder in front of me.

“Cake.”

Roman disappeared.

I looked at the folder.

“I hate cake.”

“You ate four pieces yesterday.”

“I hate decisions about cake.”

“Much more believable.”

By the evening before the wedding, my brain felt packed with cotton and my skin didn't quite fit.

I'd been measured, pinned, brushed, curled, photographed, introduced, consulted, fed things from tiny spoons, and asked enough questions that talking at all had begun to feel unreasonable.

Six garment bags hung from my arms before I escaped the room where another seamstress had asked whether I preferred my veil to fall at my fingertips or three inches below them.

I had said I preferred not to have fingertips.

Nobody laughed.

Tough room.

I turned the corner too quickly.

And walked directly into Roman.

My hands came up on instinct.

His chest solid beneath my palms.

Warm.

Then warmer.

Heat bloomed across my skin so quickly it nearly stole the next breath from my lungs.

It wasn't the blunt warmth of another body.

It moved.

Through the centers of my palms. Around my wrists. A slow, bright spill beneath my skin, like standing beside a kiln after the door had been cracked and feeling the first ribbon of impossible heat find you.

Roman caught my upper arms.

The sensation flared.

For one strange second, the house went soft around the edges.

The voices downstairs receded.

Even the tightness I'd been carrying between my shoulders seemed to forget itself.

Roman's eyes met mine.

Gold moved through the green.

I stepped back.

His hands left me immediately.

Cold air rushed into the places they'd been.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

His gaze stayed on me.

I knew that look too.

“Don't.”

“I haven't done anything.”

“You're thinking.”

“Usually.”

“Do it somewhere else.”

“Seph.”

“Roman.”

“What do you need?”

I closed my eyes.

Of course.

One more question.

“I need everyone to stop asking me what I need.”

Silence.

“Okay.”

That was all.

No second question slipped in behind the first.

He simply stayed where he was.

The house carried on around us. A burst of laughter rose from downstairs. Somewhere farther down the hall, a door opened and closed. Glass touched glass in the kitchen below.

Roman didn't add anything to it.

And somehow, in the small pocket of quiet he left between us, I could hear myself again.

I exhaled.

“I forgot my shampoo.”

His eyebrows pulled together.

“What?”

“And my face wash. Toothpaste. The charger for my tablet. My good boots. Half the things I use every day, apparently.”

“You've been here for two days.”

“Thank you. I'd lost track.”

“Seph.”

I looked at him.

There was no amusement in his face now.

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Because I can buy shampoo.”

“I know you can.”

The answer came without hesitation.

Not I'll buy it for you.

Not someone can take care of that.

Just I know.

Something in my chest loosened another fraction.

Roman reached into his pocket.

Keys settled into his palm.

“What else?”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting what you need.”

“Roman.”

“Make me a list.”

“You're getting married tomorrow.”

His mouth twitched.

“So I've been told.”

“You have an entire territory full of people who could run errands for you.”

“I do.”

“And you're going yourself.”

“Yes.”

I stared at him.

“Why?”

For a moment, he looked genuinely confused by the question.

Then his expression softened.

“Because you need things, Seph.”