The Alpha Who Loved Me in Secret

In Daylight

The hearing room had not changed enough.

The windows were still tall. The chairs were still arranged so that people waiting to be questioned could not forget which side of the table held authority. Someone had polished the wood where I had slid the unsigned requisition across it two days earlier.

I noticed that before I noticed anything else.

Then Mara touched my elbow, and I followed her inside.

Adrian was already there.

He stood at the end of the table rather than sitting in the central chair. Three assessors occupied the places nearest the window. Iona Fen sat beside them with a fresh register open in front of her.

Venn greeted Mercer courteously. He asked Mara about her knee. When his attention reached me, it paused for a fraction longer than it had at the first hearing.

“Miss Hart. I understand you've had a difficult visit.”

“Yes,” I said. “I'm hoping for a more useful morning.”

“Of course.”

He indicated my chair as though we were all trying to accomplish the same thing.

Perhaps, in this room, he would behave as though we were. I could work with that.

Adrian looked at me once before the presiding assessor called us to order.

I held his gaze.

He had asked last night how much of our connection he could mention. We had agreed on the facts. I had imagined that would make hearing them easier.

It didn't.

“Before the evidence is considered,” he said, “I need to correct an answer I gave at the previous hearing.”

The movement of papers stopped.

“Miss Hart recognized me. I told her we had never met. That statement was untrue. I knew her, and she had every reason to expect me to acknowledge it.”

Heat rose into my face.

He did not look away from the table, did not ask me with his eyes to help him finish.

“My answer was my choice. It was not the result of confusion on Miss Hart's part. I apologize to her, and I ask that the correction be entered in the record.”

Iona wrote steadily.

Venn folded his hands.

“May we ask the nature of the prior acquaintance?”

“It is personal,” Adrian said. “I have disclosed it to the panel. For that reason, and because offices under my authority handled the disputed records, I will not take part in deciding the claim.”

The presiding assessor inclined her head. “That is recorded. We will consider the documentary evidence independently.”

Venn looked toward me again.

I had expected triumph, or shame, or a simple release from the memory of standing alone.

Instead I felt exposed and oddly steady. Everyone in the room now knew he had lied. Everyone knew I hadn't been imagining the recognition.

He had placed the fault where it belonged.

That mattered more than making the moment pleasant.

The forged receipt was examined first.

Mara presented our unsigned office copy, the court's signed version, and the health form from which my signature had been lifted. Iona confirmed that the tiny ink defect appeared identically in both signatures.

The assessor asked where I had been on the date of receipt.

“At the compulsory pack health inspection between nine and noon.”

“Could you have signed afterward?”

“The delivery is recorded at ten fourteen. The health team marked my departure at eleven thirty-eight. And I use my initials and employee number on stores receipts.”

I placed three genuine examples on the table.

Venn examined them without touching the originals.

“It may be a clerical reconstruction,” he said. “A missing signature supplied from an existing record after verbal confirmation.”

“Whose verbal confirmation?” the assessor asked.

“That would need to be established.”

“Then it is not established now.”

“No.”

He sat back, still courteous.

For a moment I wanted him to look more troubled. I reminded myself that visible discomfort was not evidence and calmness was not innocence.

We moved to the duplicated transport charge. Mara explained the sequence more clearly than I could have, without once calling anyone an imaginative mathematician. I admired her restraint.

The questions were exacting. Which goods had arrived? Which payments had been received? Could we support the claim about the road closure with something other than memory?

We could.

For the first time, the work felt like work rather than an appeal to be believed.

Halfway through, the assessor asked Adrian whether his office had permitted unsigned schedules to be used for emergency advances.

“Yes,” he said.

“And debt calculations?”

“The instruction required later reconciliation. I did not set an adequate deadline for it.”

“Was reconciliation completed here?”

“No.”

I looked at him then.

He was giving the room reasons to question his administration, in a voice he usually used to direct it. It was a quieter kind of courage than breaking down a door, and perhaps harder for him.

Venn asked for time to review the full chain of approvals.

The panel granted it. They also suspended the transfer of Briar Glen's woods, stopped additional penalties on the disputed sum, and ordered the original delivery evidence produced before the claim could proceed.

We had not won the whole case.

No one would be signing away the eastern woods that morning.

Beside me, Mercer let out a breath so slowly I wondered how long he'd been holding it.

Outside the chamber, Mara hugged me.

It was a brisk, one-armed embrace because she still had the folders clamped against her ribs. I held her hard enough that she complained about a corner digging into her coat.

Mercer touched my shoulder.

“You did well.”

“We did.”

“Yes,” he said. “We did.”

Then a clerk hurried over with forms requiring his attention, and the court began turning our small victory into more paperwork.

Adrian remained near the chamber doors. He had not come straight to me, and I understood why. This morning belonged to the evidence and to Briar Glen. I would have resented him making it a display of his generosity.

I walked to him myself.

“Thank you for correcting the record.”

“You shouldn't have needed to ask.”

“No. But you did it.”

His eyes searched my face.

“How was it for you?”

“Uncomfortable.”

He winced slightly.

“And better,” I added.

A few people passed behind us. I didn't lower my voice simply because they might hear it.

“I'd like that walk.”

He looked surprised for a moment. Then he smiled.

“Now?”

“If you have time.”

He took out his phone and sent a message.

“I have time.”

The orchard was smaller than I expected, enclosed by old brick walls with pear trees trained along the sunniest side.

I stopped in front of them and looked at Adrian.

“This must be difficult for you.”

“I endure it for the apples.”

A guard remained near the gate. Devlin had checked the paths himself, then told us he would prefer not to be surprised by either of us deciding to climb anything.

We promised nothing ambitious.

The grass was damp. Fallen leaves stuck to the edges of my shoes, and the air smelled of fruit beginning to soften on the ground. For the first time since arriving in Highmere, I could hear birds without traffic or voices covering them.

My wolf stirred with the simple pleasure of being outside.

Adrian noticed me breathe more deeply.

“Better?”

“Yes.”

He didn't offer a remedy beyond walking beside me.

We followed the wall in silence for a while. There was no need to decide where to go; the path would bring us back to the same gate. After two days of questions with consequences, I found that almost luxurious.

“Do you ever wish you could give it up?” I asked.

“The office?”

“Yes.”

He considered before answering.

“Sometimes I wish I could put it down for an evening without worrying who would pick it up.”

“That isn't quite the same.”

“No. I wanted to do the work. I still do.” He looked toward the bare branches above us. “I didn't expect wanting it to be one of the ways I could fail at it.”

I understood more of that than I wanted to. I had made myself indispensable in an office that needed more people, then complained quietly when no one learned how to do without me.

“I say yes to things I resent later,” I admitted. “Then I tell myself no one appreciates me, when half the time I never told them it was too much.”

He glanced at me.

“Including with me?”

I thought about the unanswered questions in the kitchen. How easily I'd let him change the subject because I was afraid asking more would make him disappear.

“Yes.”

His expression tightened.

“That doesn't make what I did your fault.”

“I know. It does mean I have something to do differently, too.”

We stopped beside a bench beneath one of the apple trees.

“Then what do you want to ask?” he said.

The question ought to have been easy after everything I had already asked him.

I looked at the leaves between our shoes.

“Whether you still want this when it becomes inconvenient in daylight.”

He didn't answer immediately. I was learning the difference between a pause intended to hide something and one used to give me words he could stand behind.

“Yes,” he said. “But you shouldn't have to live on the answer. You'll need to see it.”

I nodded.

He reached for my hand, and I let him.

We walked another circuit of the orchard. He told me where he used to hide as a boy when lessons ran late. I told him I had once been caught reading a romance novel inside a payroll manual during a training session.

“Was it useful?”

“More than the training.”

He laughed, and the sound warmed the cold air around us.

At the gate, he brushed a leaf from my hair. His fingers lingered for a moment beside my cheek.

I turned into his hand and kissed his palm.

It was a small thing. It changed the way he looked at me for the rest of the afternoon.

We spent the hours that followed in separate rooms.

He dealt with the panel's orders. I helped Mara send the news to Briar Glen and explain to the yard manager that a suspension was good news, even if it did not mean we had suddenly become rich.

I phoned my mother again. This time I told her there was someone I wanted to tell her about when I came home.

“Is he kind?” she asked.

The question made me pause.

“He can be,” I said. “He's learning to be honest sooner.”

My mother was silent long enough that I knew she had heard the warning inside the answer.

“Make certain those lessons aren't all at your expense.”

“I will.”

I meant it.

By evening, I was tired in a more ordinary way. My work was finished for the day. My arm hurt less. No one had knocked on my door pretending to bring soup.

Elin and I had also practiced keeping my attention in the waking room as I drifted off. This time, when I felt the familiar kitchen beginning to form, I turned away from it deliberately. I slept for twenty minutes and dreamed of nothing I remembered. Elin wouldn't call that a guarantee. I didn't need her to. It was one more thing I could choose.

Adrian came after supper, carrying a book from the small shelf in the conservatory.

“You mentioned this yesterday,” he said.

It was a novel I had complained about never finding time to finish. He had put a scrap of paper at the chapter I remembered reaching.

“You're encouraging me to ignore the accounts.”

“For a measured interval.”

I let him in.

For a while we sat on the sofa, the book between us. I read a paragraph aloud because it was particularly ridiculous. He disputed my interpretation. I told him he was defending the hero because the man was stubborn and badly informed.

“A personal attack,” he said.

“A literary observation.”

He leaned closer to look at the page. His shoulder touched mine.

I stopped reading.

He turned his head, and the expression on his face told me he had been as aware of the small distance between us as I had.

I put the book on the table.

When I kissed him, there was none of the uncertainty of our first waking attempt. I knew the roughness of his jaw now, the warmth of his hand as it settled against my back. I knew he would let me draw away.

For once, I didn't want to.

He kissed me slowly, letting the evening change around us without rushing to name it. I moved closer, and his arm tightened around me. The room was quiet except for the fire and the occasional movement of a guard beyond the outer door.

I drew back enough to look at him.

“Stay tonight.”

His face became very still.

“Are you certain?”

I nodded. “I want you here when I wake.”

He rested his forehead against mine, and I felt the breath he let out.

“All right.”

The simple answer made me smile. After so many things left unspoken, I had expected the moment to require more words.

It didn't.

I told the warden he would be staying, because I no longer wanted to hide a choice I was making freely. He sent a message to Devlin, then put his phone aside.

When we were alone again, I took his hand.

At the bedroom doorway, he paused to kiss me. There was a tenderness in it that made my throat tighten, and an unmistakable desire he was no longer trying to disguise.

I touched his face.

“No disappearing before breakfast.”

His mouth curved against my palm.

“I wouldn't dare.”

I led him inside and closed the door.

For once, neither of us was waiting for sleep to bring us together.