“Why choose me, then?” I whispered.It wasn’t fair that Nathan suddenly decided to choose me to take the fall for wanting to pull out of his wedding at the last moment. Unless he had real feelings for me, it felt totally unwarranted.Any honest man would have ended the wedding privately without causing a huge scene; he could have talked to his fiancee when he found her kissing her bodyguard, but instead he decided to drag me into it.And in a strange way, I didn’t want to shatter the illusion that maybe Nathan chose me out of all of the other pretty girls in the church because he may have actually had secret feelings for me after all these years.But, much to my dismay, Nathan simply shrugged at my question. I felt sickened by his blase attitude about the entire situation. “Everyone else around here knows each other well,” he said. “Since you’ve been gone for ten years, you’re the only one around here who’s untestable.”Nathan was right; only fated mates knew who their fated mate was.
When I first saw Olivia standing at the bottom of the steps in her aunt’s old villa, once the shock of it all wore off, I couldn’t help but be utterly enamored by her appearance.Damn… She was still as beautiful as I remembered her. Even more, now, even with her messy bedhead and dark circles under her eyes from sleeping. She oozed with life, much unlike the pale and demure Layla.Even though my fiancee was beautiful, my heart trembled when I saw Olivia again.Only, she was pregnant.I could tell thanks to my Alpha abilities. I could sense the little life that was starting to grow inside of her belly. She must have had a husband or a partner at home waiting for her.In an unexpected way, finding out that she was pregnant left me feeling thunderstruck. Even though I was preparing for my own wedding and shouldn’t have cared whether Olivia had found someone else or not, I couldn’t deny how I felt.Ten years had passed and I thought that I would never see Olivia again, but now she was rig
Before Nathan could say anything else, I ran out of the room. I couldn’t be there anymore; I couldn’t believe that this day had turned so sour so quickly. Not only did Nathan destroy my reputation in a matter of minutes as he lied and told everyone that we were fated mates in order to get himself out of a marriage, but he also revealed that I was… pregnant?The Alpha of a pack could sense all of the members in the pack. Even if the members were unborn, the Alpha could still sense them. Traditionally, women in a pack would go to the Alpha if they thought they were pregnant, and some packs made a ritual out of it. And although it was too early in the pregnancy for me to even know myself, if Nathan could sense it then I was pretty certain that he was right.I still needed to check, though. For all I knew, this was all some sort of sick prank; maybe they wanted to torture me a little instead of really having me come back to the pack, which would explain the reason why everything seemed to
“Guess what it is?” Nathan smirked slightly as he held the little cardboard box out to me. “I promise you won’t want to pass it up.”I looked up at Nathan a bit skeptically. He just smiled back at me and shook the box a little. Finally, I took it with a sigh and opened it up.And when I did, my eyes went wide.“This is…” I picked the sweet chocolate muffin out of the box and looked at it. I hadn’t had one of these muffins from the bakery in our town for so long, but I instantly recognized the signature powdered sugar topping and the oversized chocolate chips poking out of the top.“It’s from Jerry’s,” Nathan said with a grin. “Well… Just Jerry, now.”“What do you mean?” I asked, cocking my head. The little bakery in our town was known as “Jerry’s”, and it was named after the little old man who ran it all by himself.Nathan shrugged. “The bakery closed down quite a long time ago,” he replied, sounding somewhat wistful.I felt a bit sad at this. That bakery was one of our favorite place
I stood in front of the apartment that Ryan and I used to share.“Well?” Nathan asked. “Are you gonna go in and confront this jerk or should I?”I shook my head and swallowed. “It’s okay. I’ll go.”With my heart in my throat, I walked up the front steps to the building and rang the doorbell. I waited for a couple of minutes, but there was no answer. I decided to ring it again… And again…“Olivia? Is that you?” a familiar female voice called. I looked over to see my elderly neighbor, Susan, standing in her doorway with a puzzled expression on her face. “What are you doing here?”“I’m looking for Ryan,” I said. “I need to… talk to him. Have you seen him?”Susan gave me an even more puzzled expression. “Dear, he moved out. I thought you two broke up. Did he not tell you?”I shook my head. “No, he didn’t.”“Well… What did you need to talk to him about?” she asked.I didn’t want to tell her the truth, so I just shook my head again and made up a lie as I made my way back down the steps towa
“Fine,” I said quietly. “But I have conditions, too.”Nathan looked at me for a moment with a raised eyebrow. “Okay…” he said. “What are your conditions?”“Well…” I sighed and walked over to the table, and sat down. Nathan looked at me for a moment with his arms folded across his chest before he finally sat down across from me.“If it’s going to be for a year,” I continued, “and we have to uphold this fake relationship situation for the entire time, then I want to make something clear: we are not going to be in any sort of relationship other than friendship behind the scenes.”Nathan nodded slowly. “Go on…”“Rule one: all dates, public occasions, facing the media, Alpha Council visits, and family visits will be faked. Rule two: at home, I don’t want there to be anything else going on between us. I don’t want to do anything to destroy our friendship.”“Well, that’s fair,” Nathan said. “But what if either of us wants to look for a romantic partner?”I shook my head vigorously. “I think
“I thought for sure that you would never forgive me.”My eyes widened a bit. I knew what Nathan was talking about: the day that my dad and I got evicted.It was more than ten years ago, but I still remembered the pain and the humiliation like it was just yesterday…“Olivia. Wake up.”I was sleeping in my bed in the little house that my dad and I called home. I remembered that I was supposed to go to school in the morning.“Five more minutes,” I grumbled, rolling over.My dad shook my shoulder again, this time more violently. “Liv, you have to wake up,” he said. “We have to go. Hurry up and get dressed.”I frowned and slowly sat up. My dad was standing over me with a worried expression on his face, and when I glanced over at the clock, I saw that it was only one o’clock in the morning. I had only been asleep for a few hours.Yawning, I rubbed my eyes. “Dad, what’s going on?” I asked, feeling myself get more nervous as he threw a pair of pants and a sweater down on my bed for me. “Where
My eyes widened. Nathan stared down at the ground and shook his head.“I can’t help you with that, Olivia,” he said quietly.I felt my heart sink. “Why not?” I urged. “I know that my dad would never have done anything to betray our pack. I need to know the truth about what happened.”Nathan slowly looked up at me with a dark expression on his face that I couldn’t quite read, which was only enhanced by the darkness of the room around us. “Gamma Kamran is dead,” he replied in a sad tone of voice. “What’s the point anymore?”“What’s the point?” I couldn’t help but scoff at my childhood friend’s choice of words. “I deserve to know why we were evicted. It’s not fair.”“I know it’s important to you, but I think that right now you should just be grateful that you’ve been allowed back,” Nathan replied.I watched in a state of shock as my childhood friend turned and walked over to the kitchen door. It felt as though he didn’t even want to be around me. Ever since I tried to hug him earlier, hi