THE ALPHA CEO'S REJECTED MATE

Chapter Four

Dominic

Even in the open air of the parking garage, I couldn't get her out of my lungs.

Honey and Jasmine. It had soaked into my coat. I'd sent the driver home, taken the keys myself, and made it as far as the second level before I sat in the car with my hands on the wheel, not starting it.

I'd memorized everything. That was the problem. The gray blazer. The folder she held against her chest like a shield. The way she'd stood her ground in my elevator, brown eyes furious and wet, and refused to move.

Mate, said Ryker.

My wolf wasn't loud about it. That was worse. He said it quietly, like a man reminding you that you'd left the stove on.

Don't.

Turn around.

No.

Go back.

My jaw clicked shut hard enough to hurt.

He'd never been like this. Not with the elders' political matchmaking. Not with the polite, forgettable women I'd taken to dinner to keep him quiet. He was pacing behind my ribs, and I could feel every step.

We can't, I told him.

Why?

I stared through the windshield at a concrete pillar with a faded 2B on it.

Because I'd been nine years old when I learned how my family's story ended. My birth mother, gone before I turned one. My stepmother, who raised me, who I called Mom, gone when I was nine. My grandmother. My great-grandmother. Four Lunas, three generations, every one dead within a year of the claiming mark. Every one had known the story before she said yes. Every one had said yes anyway.

Because it kills them, I said. I'm not burying another woman, Ryker.

She's our mate.

That's exactly why.

He went quiet. Then, so low I almost missed it: You want her too.

I do not.

Liar.

I didn't have an answer for that, so I turned the key.

The engine filled the car, and it didn't help. I pulled out onto the main road, expecting relief. What I felt instead was that I'd left something I was supposed to protect.

My dash lit up. Margaret.

"Mr. Thorne? Hartwell Capital is in the lobby. You asked me to remind you."

I'd forgotten. A client who'd flown in from Chicago, a meeting I'd been planning for a month.

"Cancel it."

"Sir?"

"Reschedule. Tell him I'm sorry."

A pause. Margaret has been with me eight years, and she had never once heard me say that. "Are you all right?"

"No," I said, and almost laughed. "Clear the afternoon."

I hung up before she could ask anything else.

Go back, said Ryker.

She isn't ours.

The words tasted like nothing. The bond had formed the second I caught her scent. Unclaimed, no mark on her, but it sat in my chest like a hook, and every block I drove put a little more strain on the line.

A text lit up the center screen. Cole.

I glanced at it for half a second, and every muscle in my neck locked.

Gideon is in your office with Dunmore and Whitlock. Also: Harlan Pike just signed an offer for a Sloane Marlowe. PR coordinator. Forty-first floor. Thought you'd want to know before he does.

I read it twice. Sloane. Of course it was something like that. A soft name, with a spine.

Harlan Pike, I thought. Gideon's cousin.

She's not safe, said Ryker, and his voice had changed. No growl in it. Just a flat, sudden fear.

It's an HR hire.

It's Gideon's cousin. Turn around.

Every piece of logic said to keep driving. I'd made a decision. I was the Alpha who kept his head while everything else burned.

But I'd also learned to trust the thing under the logic. And it was shouting.

"Dammit," I said, and hauled the wheel left.

The tires shrieked on the wet road. The car swung across two yellow lines in a hard U-turn and a bus driver leaned on his horn.

Don't get used to this, I told Ryker.

Going to mate, said Ryker, sounding entirely too pleased with himself.

Cole met me at the private elevator on forty-one. He looked at my face and set down his coffee.

"You're gold."

"I know." I pulled my eyes back. "Where is he?"

"Your office. Twenty minutes. They brought a folder."

I walked down the hall and into my own office, where three men sat in my chairs like they'd signed the lease.

Gideon Ashcroft rose with a smile. Fifty-eight, silver at the temples, with a gentle voice that people trusted for the first ten minutes. He'd been my father's Beta once. When my father died, the elders ran Thornewood until I came of age, and Gideon held the reins for eleven years. Nine years after I took the seat back, he and his men still talked to me like a boy who needed reminding who'd kept the lights on.

"Dominic. Good morning. We were hoping for a few minutes."

"You have two."

"The winter solstice is eleven weeks away." He sat. "The elders voted last night. Thornewood needs a Luna by then."

"People are talking, Alpha," Dunmore added, in his dry, reasonable voice. "They say you're avoiding the question."

"Because I am."

"Vivienne," said Gideon, gently, as if I hadn't spoken. "My daughter is strong, loyal, and raised to lead. And, as the council noted, she's capable of withstanding the curse."

I looked at him for a long moment.

"Vivienne isn't a Luna. She's an alliance."

"Every Alpha needs a chosen mate. You can't wait on fate forever." Gideon spread his hands. "Your father waited. God rest him. Look where it got him."

Ryker lunged at the end of his chain.

Not here.

"The council can have my answer after the solstice," I said. "Get out of my office."

He left without a trace of annoyance. That was the thing about Gideon. He never got annoyed. He waited, and he left the folder on my desk like a little gift.

Cole shut the door behind them.

"Walt called up," he said. "Said you told a girl to take the next elevator."

"Walt needs a hobby."

"Dom." Cole was watching me carefully. "That was her."

I didn't answer. I went to the window and put a hand on the glass. Forty-one floors down, the rain was coming in sideways.

"She might not know what it means," Cole said.

"She'll find out."

"You could tell her."

"And say what? I'm your mate, and everyone who loved my family is dead?"

"That's more honest than anything Gideon's going to say."

I had no answer to that either.

Cole slid a folder across the desk. HR's, a signature already inked at the bottom. "Harlan approved her an hour ago. Effective Monday." He paused. "Assigned to the forty-first floor."

I read the name at the top. Marlowe, Sloane.

"Where on the floor?" I asked.

Cole turned the page. He took his time.

"The desk by the plants," he said, biting back a smile. He was enjoying this a bit too much. "About forty feet from your door."