The Alpha Who Couldn't Resist Her

Chapter Two: Temporary

He avoided her for two days. She counted, though she'd denied it if asked.

On the third, a pack kid she didn't recognize found her in the kitchens, eyes down, and told her the Alpha wanted her in his study. Belle set her potato knife on the cutting board — the chore was hers by choice, because idle hands made the stone in her chest heavier — and dried her palms on her apron, buying two extra seconds she didn't really need.

The study smelled like cedar and old paper, and underneath that, faintly, like him. She hated noticing. Noticed anyway.

She'd walked past this room a dozen times in eleven days and never once been invited in. It was smaller than she'd pictured, more lived-in — a stack of unopened correspondence on one corner of the desk, a half-drunk cup of something long gone cold near the window. It didn't look like the room of a man who had everything under control, whatever face he wore in front of the pack.

He stood at the window, back to her, hands clasped behind him.

"Sit."

"I'll stand."

That turned him around. Whatever crack she'd seen in the rain two days ago was gone. Sealed. Alpha, full-time, no cracks visible.

"Council arrives in nine days," he said. "Selene Williams will be presented as my intended in front of every Alpha in this territory, including her father, who's bringing four thousand warriors as a goodwill gesture I can't afford to insult"

"Congratulations." Flat. Meant to sting.

"You'll stand beside me as temporary Luna for the ceremony."

She actually laughed — short, disbelieving. "I'm sorry, what?"

"An unclaimed bond weakens a pack's standing. It shows. In the eyes, the voice, a hundred small, tells another Alpha, "He reads before I've opened my mouth. If word gets out, I've got an unclaimed mate wandering my halls while I sign a treaty with someone else. Every Alpha at that table reads it as instability. Instability invites challenge." He said it like a report. The muscle in his jaw said otherwise. "You play the role through the signing. Then it ends. You go back to exactly what you were before I scented you."

"Which is nothing." The stone in her chest had gone hot. "Charity. A debt you're settling so the Ashworth name doesn't look bad in front of the Council."

Something flickered in his jaw. "You'll have status. Protection. A place here is no one questions while you're wearing it. That's more than you had two weeks ago."

"That's not an offer. That's a list of reasons I shouldn't say no."

"Is there a difference?"

"You'd know better than I would. You're the one making it."

For a second, something almost like respect crossed his face — gone as fast as it arrived, folded back under the Alpha mask before she could be sure she hadn't imagined it.

"You didn't ask if I wanted it."

"I'm not asking now." He looked at her fully then, and for one second she saw it — the same pull from the yard, unwelcome, before he shut it back down like a man closing a wound with bare hands. "Understand something so we don't do this twice. This bond doesn't change anything. I don't trust convenient things, Belle. You showed up eleven days after your pack burned to nothing, and no one — not me, not the Council, not you — has explained that in a way that satisfies anybody. A mate who appears at exactly that moment makes me suspicious. Not sentimental."

It shouldn't have hurt this much. She barely knew him. But *convenient* and *suspicious*, in that voice, landed somewhere old and already bruised.

She let none of it show. Two years of practice had made her good at that.

"Fine. Temporary Luna. I'll smile at your fiancée, smile at your Council, disappear the second the performance is over." A beat. "But you don't get to look at me like that again."

"Like what?"

"Like you want to apologize and won't let yourself."

She left before he could answer. Told herself, walking away, that she hadn't noticed he never denied it.

The rest of that day, she spent doing exactly the kind of busywork that let her think without seeming to. Folding linens she'd already folded. Reorganizing a pantry, no one had asked her to touch. Somewhere around the fourth shelf, she realized what she was actually doing: rehearsing. Practising the version of herself who could stand next to Rex Ashworth in front of a room full of Alphas and look like she belonged there, temporarily, without it costing her anything real.

She wasn't sure that version existed yet. She wasn't sure it could exist, not with the bond sitting under her skin like a live wire nobody else could see. But she had nine days to build her, whether she was ready or not, and building things out of nothing was at least a skill she already had. She'd built a life out of nothing once already. She could build a performance.