The Alpha’s $12 Million Bride

Noticed

“Because you need things, Seph.”

I shifted, suddenly aware of a dull ache working its way through my fingers.

I flexed them.

Once.

Again.

The ache deepened instead of easing, settling into the small joints before threading through my palms and wrists.

I had hit him pretty hard.

Hard enough that my hands had landed against his ribs. Hard enough to feel his breath expand beneath my palms.

I remembered that part with considerably more clarity than necessary.

The warmth.

The hard curve of muscle over bone. The spaces between his ribs giving slightly with his breath. For one strange second, my hands understood the shape of him before my eyes got to see.

Then he’d gone completely still beneath them.

The tingling had started in my fingertips and spread into my palms, then up my arms, burning across my skin toward my wrists.

It hadn’t hurt.

Not until I stepped away.

Now my fingertips felt colder by the second.

And beneath the cold, something ached.

Deep. Strange. Almost hollow.

I flexed them again.

“I’m coming with you.”

Something shifted in Roman’s expression.

So quickly I would’ve missed it if I hadn’t started noticing how much of him happened in fractions.

His eyes.

A breath held half a second too long.

The smallest movement along his jaw.

____________________________________________________________________________

The store was fun.

Unexpectedly, stupidly fun.

Somewhere between shampoo, toothpaste, a charger and several things I absolutely did not need but bought anyway, Roman Anders stopped feeling like the Alpha I’d been contractually obligated to marry.

For forty-five minutes, he was just a man making me laugh beneath fluorescent lights.

____________________________________________________________________________

The pack house appeared through the trees a little after dark.

At night, it looked softer.

Amber light broke against branches and spilled across the grass, catching the dew in thousands of tiny points.

Fieldstone dissolved into darkness. Timber emerged where the light found it. Somewhere beyond them, moonlight caught the river.

I wanted to draw this.

Not the house exactly.

The pieces of it.

Charcoal, probably. Something soft enough to lose entire sections in shadow.

I was still rearranging the composition when my door opened.

Roman stood beside me.

I hadn’t heard him get out.

His hair had fallen forward, the damp night air curling the ends around his ears.

I liked it better this way.

The realization came too easily.

His sleeves were pushed to his elbows. A pale scar crossed one forearm. Another cut through a knuckle.

His hands were too rough for the Roman Anders I’d imagined.

I wanted to know where the scars came from.

What put the calluses there.

What else he did with those hands…

My eyes snapped upward.

His mouth curved.

Not quite a smile.

How long had he known I was staring?

His eyes caught the light.

Green.

Flashing gold and back.

His lips parted.

Then closed.

A muscle moved once along his jaw as the gold flashed in his eyes again.

His wolf is… fighting with him? Why would his wolf be struggling to come through now?

Something unsaid.

I was beginning to recognize when Roman almost told me something.

He stepped away from the door and held out his hand.

“I want to show you something.”

The ache in my fingers sharpened.

I placed my hand in his.

Roman’s fingers closed around mine.

The ache disappeared.

Warmth flooded my fingertips and circled my wrist.

I nearly sighed, covering it with a cough.

Roman went still.

He was already watching me.

My cheeks burned.

Gold gathered around his pupils.

His thumb moved once.

Stopped.

I curled my fingers around his.

His breath changed.

For one strange second, Roman looked at me as though I’d done something much larger than hold his hand.

Then he tugged me toward the trees.

Roman stayed half a step ahead of me.

His legs were considerably longer than mine, but I didn’t have to work to keep up.

He was matching my stride.

So naturally I almost missed it.

He moved differently out here. Shoulders looser. Breathing easier. His feet finding the ground as if they knew where to land before he did.

He didn’t move through the woods like they belonged to him.

He moved as if he belonged to them.

I studied him.

His shirt strained across his back with every stride. His weight shifted easily over uneven ground, thighs tightening when the path climbed, calves flexing over fallen branches.

I knew bodies. I’d sculpted enough to know the difference between mass and movement. Between muscle built for appearance and a body shaped by use.

Roman looked… useful.

Which was an objectively ridiculous thing to find attractive.

His fingers shifted around mine.

I’d given him my hand without retort.

I could feel something beneath all that control in the careful placement of his fingers, the tightening of his grip whenever the ground changed, followed immediately by release.

I could feel its shape in everything he didn’t do.

The river grew louder.

The trees opened.

And I slowed to a halt.

A long, low building sat beside the water, dark timber and steel tucked into the woods. Industrial windows climbed nearly floor to ceiling; hundreds of little square panes held inside black metal grids, reflecting the moonlight back onto the river to the right.

Roman wasn’t looking at it.

He was looking at me.

His shoulders had gone carefully still.

I knew that posture.

I’d worn it beside sculptures, pretending someone’s face didn’t matter while they looked at something I’d spent months making.

Roman Anders was nervous.

My fingers tightened around his.

His gaze dropped to our hands.

Gold flashed through his eyes.

“What is this?”

“Your wedding present,” he said softly.

____________________________________________________________________________

The first thing I noticed was the floor.

Old concrete.

Not polished smooth or stained fashionably gray.

Paint splattered one section. Rust stained another. Pale arcs marked where something heavy had traveled over and over again.

The cracks had been repaired.

Not erased.

My eyes climbed.

Exposed metal beams crossed overhead, cleaned and reinforced but still scarred. Gouges remained in the timber where tools had bitten years before.

The windows repeated along the wall.

Ten panes across.

Ten high.

Moonlight fractured through them into a hundred tiny shards; some etched with prismatic frost.

My hand slipped from his.

Almost immediately, my fingers ached.

I ignored them.

Welding equipment. Fabrication tables. A kiln. Serious ventilation and new electrical worked carefully into old bones.

“Why?”

Roman had stayed behind me.

“You have your work.”

I turned.

“Your commissions didn’t disappear because your address changed. Neither did your deadlines.”

Something tightened beneath my ribs.

My father treated my work like something I could set down whenever he required me.

Roman spoke as though putting it down had never occurred to him.

“You couldn’t work out of the house,” he said. “Not the way you work.”

“So you renovated an abandoned building?”

“It needed to be saved anyway.”

I almost laughed.

“You could’ve made it look new.”

“I know.”

His gaze found the gouged timber beneath my hand.

“I didn’t think you’d want me to.”

My fingers stopped.

I looked around again.

The ceramics station sat beneath the tallest windows, the wheel angled so light would cross my hands without hitting my eyes.

The sink faced the river spilling over rocks into the lake.

Shelves stood beside it.

Cedar. Handmade. Deep enough for my oversized forms to bone-dry.

My fingers traced the joinery.

“Who made these?”

“Cal and I.”

“Why not buy them?”

“Yours are handmade.”

I looked at him.

Of everything in my warehouse he could’ve noticed—

The finished sculptures.

The kiln.

The equipment.

He’d noticed the f*****g shelves.

Stairs climbed the far wall to a loft between the old beams.

“What’s up there?”

“Your office.”

Of course there was an office.

I climbed.

The studio below had been built for my hands.

This—

Fuck.

Persian-style rugs overlapped across the old floor in faded reds, blues, ochre and rust. Huge cushions were scattered over them, meant to be moved, stacked, sat on...

How the f**k did he know I loved sitting on the floor?

Tapestries spilled from the beams. Edison lights wandered between them in warm, uneven constellations.

Plants were everywhere.

Vines spilled from shelves. Broad leaves crowded the windows. Something enormous occupied one corner and appeared to have plans for territorial expansion.

The furniture looked older than both of us.

A worn leather sofa sat beneath the windows, its arms darkened by years of hands. Mismatched chairs faced it: one faded velvet, one giant ochre wingback big enough for me to curl up in.

Nothing matched.

Everything belonged.

Then I saw the desk.

It was enormous.

Gold hardware dulled to brass. Tiny scratches crossed its surface, the edges rounded by decades of hands.

Somewhere inside the future I’d built for myself, there had always been something like this.

Old enough to have history.

Something I could scar without ruining.

Behind it sat two enormous banks of wooden flat files.

Wide, shallow drawers with worn brass pulls and tiny label holders.

Ink stained one drawer.

They looked like they’d spent a hundred years in a print shop holding lithographs, architectural drawings, or blueprints.

I pulled one open.

A soft wooden scrape.

Restored enough to work perfectly.

I looked at Roman.

He stood at the top of the stairs.

Hands in his pockets.

Watching me.

Again.

“How do you know I sit on the floor?”

His brow furrowed.

“You sit on the floor.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“You did it at your father’s house.”

I tried to remember.

The contract.

At some point I’d abandoned the chair and read against the sofa from the rug.

“You noticed that?”

His expression said the question confused him.

And suddenly I understood.

Of course he had.

I noticed the crease beside his mouth before he smiled.

That frustration and anger made him quieter.

That his green eyes were flecked with gold.

That his dark hair curled in an unruly way at the end of a long day.

That he put his hands in his pockets when he was thinking about reaching out to touch my shoulder, my arm, my hand.

That he shortened his stride for me without making me feel too slow.

I collected pieces of him without realizing it.

Roman did the same thing.

Except he’d been doing it on purpose.

I looked over the railing.

The wheel.

The scarred floor.

The windows.

The river.

Then back at the rugs and plants and impossibly perfect desk.

My apartment sat above my warehouse too.

I’d always liked being able to leave work without really leaving it.

“You used the loft for my office.”

“Your place has one.”

Four words.

Something inside me went painfully soft.

I had spent my entire life noticing.

It had never occurred to me how intimate it might feel to be noticed back.

Tomorrow, I would marry him.

Three hundred forty-nine days after that, I could leave.

That number had been a door since the moment I forced it into the contract.

An exit.

Freedom.

I looked at Roman.

At the words he kept behind his teeth.

At the hands he kept inside his pockets.

At the man standing inside a future I could have imagined for myself.

For the first time, the countdown didn’t feel like something I was gaining.

It felt like something I might lose.

No. Absolutely f*****g not.

I was not falling in love with Roman Anders.

I barely knew him.

But standing there, surrounded by all the quiet evidence that he might already be beginning to know me, I understood something considerably more dangerous.

I realized I could.