His Rejected Queen

4

Chapter 4

I slept like the dead.

That was the only way to describe it. The moment my body hit that mattress, that clean, thick, impossibly soft mattress in a room that was three times the size of my old one at Silver Creek, I was gone. No dreams. No replaying of the ceremony. No hearing Cole’s voice in the dark saying those words over and over.

Just black, quiet, merciful nothing.

Until 3am, when my eyes opened for no reason I could name.

I lay still for a moment, staring at the ceiling, trying to locate the thing that had pulled me up out of sleep. The room was dark except for the thin strip of light coming from beneath the door. The house was quiet. No voices, no movement, just the deep settled silence of a large pack in the middle of the night.

I sat up.

The feeling did not go away. That low pull in my chest, like a thread being tugged from the other side of something. My wolf was awake and alert and pointing herself at the door with an attention that made no sense given that I was supposed to be safe here.

I got up.

I was wearing an oversized shirt and shorts that had been left folded on the chair in my room, Black Ridge guest clothes, clean and plain. I padded across the floor and I put my hand on the door handle and I opened the door.

Luca Thorne was standing in the corridor.

Not passing. Not walking by. Standing, one shoulder against the opposite wall, arms crossed, eyes already on the door when it opened as though he had been watching it.

I stared at him.

He looked back at me with an expression that gave away absolutely nothing.

“You were outside my door,” I said.

“I was in the corridor.”

“Outside my door, at 3am, in the dark.”

“I could not sleep.” He said it the way you state weather. Flat, factual, unbothered by the strangeness of it.

I looked at him standing there in a dark shirt and low slung grey pants, hair slightly less composed than it had been hours ago, and I was suddenly very aware that I was in a thin oversized shirt with my bare legs showing and my hair a mess from sleep and that the corridor was very quiet and very narrow and he was very close.

“Is this something you do often?” I asked. “Stand outside guest rooms in the middle of the night?”

“No.”

“Then why this one?”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he pushed off the wall and turned slightly, not leaving, just shifting his weight, and he reached up and pressed one hand against the door frame above my head and looked down at me from that new angle and I forgot what I had just asked him.

He smelled like pine and something darker underneath it, something warm and clean and entirely him, and it reached me in the small space between us and did something to my thinking that I deeply resented.

“Your wolf was unsettled,” he said.

I blinked. “You could feel that.”

“I could feel something.” He said it carefully, like a man handling something he had not identified yet and was not willing to name prematurely. “I wanted to make sure you had not run.”

“You wanted to make sure I had not run,” I repeated slowly.

“You are a guest of this pack. Your safety while on Black Ridge land is my responsibility.”

“So this is purely administrative.”

Something shifted behind his black eyes. “Go back to sleep, Aria.”

“You are standing in my doorway.”

“You opened the door.”

He had a point. I hated that he had a point.

I should have stepped back. I should have said goodnight and closed the door and gotten back into that extraordinarily comfortable bed and gone back to the merciful black nothing of deep sleep. That was the intelligent, sensible thing to do.

Instead I leaned against the door frame and looked up at him and said, “How long were you out there?”

A pause. Not long. But long enough.

“A while,” he said.

The honesty of it caught me off guard. No deflection, no manufactured reason, just a while, quiet and direct, and somehow that two word admission did more damage to my composure than anything else that had happened in this corridor.

“Why?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. In the thin light from somewhere down the hall his scar was visible, silver against his jaw, and his expression was doing something complicated that I did not have enough information about this man to decode.

“I do not know yet,” he said.

Then he pushed off the door frame and stepped back and the warmth of his closeness went with him and I felt the absence of it like a small shock.

“Lock your door,” he said, already moving down the corridor. “Not because you are unsafe. Just do it.”

I watched him walk away, broad shouldered and unhurried, disappearing into the dark end of the hallway without looking back.

I closed my door.

I did not lock it.

I stood with my back against it in the dark of my room and pressed one hand flat against my sternum where the ghost of the broken bond lived and felt something else there now, something entirely new and unwelcome and inconvenient.

My wolf was not unsettled anymore.

She was the opposite of unsettled.

She was the most settled she had been in my entire life, here in a strange pack’s house twelve hours after the worst night of my life, because Luca Thorne had stood outside my door in the dark for a while for reasons he did not know yet.

I got back into bed.

I stared at the ceiling for a long time.

I thought about Cole standing at the front of that ceremony hall, golden and certain, making the choice that had unmade me.

Then I thought about a man with black eyes and a scarred jaw pressing his hand above my door frame and looking down at me like I was something he had not accounted for.

They were nothing alike.

That was the thing that kept circling back to me in the dark, quiet and persistent and slightly terrifying.

Cole had always made me feel small.

Standing in that doorway with Luca Thorne six inches from me, I had not felt small at all.

I had felt like the most important thing in the room.

Sleep did not come back easily after that.

And when it finally did, I dreamed of black eyes and pine and a warmth I had no business wanting from a man I had known for less than a day.

I woke to sunlight and the smell of coffee and the sound of voices below and for three seconds, just three, I forgot everything that had happened.

Then it all came back.

And underneath the grief of it, impossible to ignore, was the memory of a corridor at 3am and two words that had changed the temperature of everything.

A while.

I sat up.

There was a note that had been slid under my door.