Chapter four

STAY

Ryan’s POV

ONE WEEK LATER

The bar was quieter than I preferred, but that was the reason I had chosen it.

No wolves here. No subordinates watching my face for something they could report back to the estate. Just low lighting, the smell of aged whiskey, and Dorian sitting across from me with the particular expression he used when he had something to say and had not decided yet whether to say it.

I let him sit with it.

The glass in my hand was still half full. I had been staring at it for twenty minutes.

"The northern pack leaders are requesting a third meeting," Dorian said finally.

"I know."

"And the council wants a response by the end of the week regarding the territory boundaries."

"I know that too."

Dorian was quiet for a moment. He was my aide, my most trusted one, and the only person in my employ who had ever looked me directly in the eye and told me I was wrong about something. That quality was the reason I kept him close.

"You came out tonight," he said carefully, "and it was not for the whiskey."

I looked at him.

"You have been off for a week," he continued, his voice even, like he was reporting weather. "You cancel the morning briefings halfway. You approved a budget amendment without reading the full document, which you have never done in eleven years. And twice this week I walked into the east corridor to find you standing at the window looking at absolutely nothing for extended periods of time."

"I was thinking."

"You think at your desk." Dorian set his glass down. "What is happening?"

The bar murmured quietly around us. Someone at a far table laughed at something.

What was happening.

What was happening was a girl with careful brown eyes and a wolf that had woken up the moment she stepped inside my gates, and I had spent seven days finding increasingly elaborate reasons to be in whichever part of the estate she was currently working in. What was happening was that I had watched her from doorways and hallways and through the glass of my study window, watched her move through her days with a quiet steadiness that had no business affecting me the way it did. What was happening was that I was a forty-two-year-old Alpha King conducting myself like a boy who had never seen a woman before.

She was also my son's former mate.

She was twenty-two years old.

And she had no idea I felt this way.

"The political issues will sort themselves," I said. "They always do."

Dorian studied me for a long moment. Then he picked up his glass again.

"Whatever it is," he said quietly, "it will not sort itself by ignoring it."

I did not answer him.

We stayed another hour before leaving. The ride back to the estate was silent. I told the driver to keep the partition up and I sat in the dark watching the city lights thin out and disappear as we moved farther from town, and by the time the gates of Crescent Estate opened, the familiar weight of the place had settled back around my shoulders.

I went upstairs without seeing anyone.

The private residence was exactly as I had left it. Dark, quiet, ordered. I sat on the edge of the bed, took off my jacket, and stayed there, elbows on my knees, for a while without moving.

I picked up the internal phone.

Mrs. Denver answered on the second ring.

"Send Warren up."

A pause that lasted less than a second.

"Yes, Alpha."

*****

I heard them talking before the sound reached my door.

Two of the housekeeping staff in the corridor below, voices low but not low enough. My hearing had never required effort.

"He asked for her specifically."

"Already? She has been here a week."

"Warren. The new one. Mrs. Denver sent her up herself."

"That is unusual."

"Very."

I did not move from where I sat. It was not unusual. I had sent for specific staff before. The talking would settle when it became clear that nothing extraordinary had occurred.

The knock at the door came quietly.

"Come in."

She opened the door carefully, the way she did everything, like she was accounting for the space before she entered it. She wore the plain uniform of the household staff, her hair pulled back, and she kept her eyes lowered as she crossed the room toward me.

She bowed.

"Alpha."

I watched her.

A week of watching her from acceptable distances had not prepared me for her this close, this quiet, standing three feet away with her hands folded in front of her and a composure that most trained staff twice her age did not manage.

"I returned late," I said. "I need assistance."

"Of course."

She moved with a focused efficiency, helping me out of my dress shirt, reaching past me for the folded cloth she had brought with the water basin. Her hands were gentle. She worked in silence for a while, and I let the silence sit because I had not yet decided what to do with her proximity.

Then she reached across to set the cloth aside, and I caught the faintest trace of her scent, warm and clean and entirely too familiar after seven days of cataloguing it from a distance, and my wolf shifted inside me with the particular alertness he reserved for very few things.

She stepped back and moved to pick up the shirt from the chair.

I caught her hand.

She went completely still.

Not frightened. I had learned to read the difference in her. She was still the way still water was still, with everything moving underneath.

"Stay for a moment," I said.

A few seconds passed.

"Alpha, it would not be appropriate for me to—"

"You recognized me," I said. "The night you walked onto the third floor. You recognized me immediately."

Her chin lifted slightly. She was thinking, choosing her words.

"Yes," she said.

"And I recognized you."

"I know."

"Then why pretend otherwise?" she asked quietly.

I looked at her for a moment. She had asked it the same way she asked Mrs. Denver about the third floor on her first day, not boldly, just honestly, like she genuinely wanted to understand and had decided a direct question was the cleanest route there.

"Why not?" I said.

Her brow pulled together very slightly.

"Pretending costs nothing," I continued, "when the alternative is a conversation that neither of us is ready to have in a hallway at midnight."

Something moved through her expression. Recognition, maybe. Or agreement.

"And are we ready now?" she asked.

"I am not sure. But I find I am less willing to wait."

She looked at the floor briefly. Then back at me.

"You know who I am," she said. "You know where I came from."

"Yes."

"Then you know this is not a simple situation."

"I know it is not simple," I said. "I have thought about nothing else for seven days."

Her lips parted slightly. That surprised her.

"Seven days," she repeated.

"Since the night you walked into my floor looking for water with a headache and stood in my hallway without flinching." I watched her face. "You were not afraid of me. You said you were terrified, and then you looked me directly in the eye and explained yourself like I was someone who deserved the explanation. I have had generals who could not manage that."

She was very quiet.

"I notice things," I continued. "It is difficult not to. The way you think before you speak. The way you moved through this estate from the first day like you were deciding whether it deserved you rather than the other way around."

"That is not—" She stopped. Started again. "I was nervous."

"You were nervous and you carried it beautifully." I held her gaze. "I am not in the habit of saying things I do not mean, Isla."

Her name in my mouth did something to the air between us. I watched her feel it.

Her wolf pressed forward then, visible even to me, that warmth rising beneath the surface of her skin. She pressed her free hand flat against her collarbone without realizing she was doing it, the same gesture I had been watching for seven days.

"We are not of the same world," she said carefully. Her voice was steady, but just barely. "You are the Alpha King. And you are—"

"Older," I said.

"Yes."

"I am aware of my age."

"Then you understand why this—"

I reached up and held her face with both hands. She stopped speaking immediately, her eyes going wide, her breath catching in a way that was completely audible.

I looked at her for one long moment.

Then I pressed my lips to hers. Brief and soft, barely a breath of contact, over before she could decide what to do with it.

I pulled back.

She stared at me. Her eyes were very wide. Something was working behind them, some internal argument I was not privy to.

Her wolf was not arguing. Her wolf had already decided.

I could see the exact moment the argument ended.

She reached up, took my face in both her hands the way I had taken hers, and kissed me.

Not brief. Not tentative. The full, certain press of someone who had made a decision and intended to mean it, and I felt something release inside my chest that had been wound tight for seven days, maybe longer, maybe since before I had words for it.

We fell back into the bed together, and the room went quiet around us.

And somewhere in the estate below, the talking that I had already chosen to ignore continued on.

Let it.