O CEO Implacável e O Nosso Contrato

The slippers were the first thing I saw when I came through the front door.

Grey, women's, too small for me, set neatly beside the shoe rack with water still beading on the toes.

I reached to unbutton my coat and stopped with my hand at the collar. The hall smelled of jasmine, and nobody in my house wore jasmine.

"Mrs. Delaney?"

She came in from the kitchen wiping her hands, and she stopped a step short of me. Her eyes went to the wall behind my shoulder.

"Luna."

"Does the Alpha have company?"

"I—" She started to answer, then didn't.

Bare feet came across the floorboards behind her, unhurried, someone who wasn't listening for anyone.

Rosalie walked into the living room with her hair down and damp at the ends, a towel over one shoulder, drying it as she came.

She was wearing my pajamas. Cream silk with pearl buttons, the pair I kept in the third drawer of our bedroom dresser.

Those pajamas lived in the third drawer of the dresser in the room I shared with my husband. Not the guest wing. Not the laundry.

Rosalie stopped when she saw me. Her hand went to her sleeve.

I looked at the cuff. Then at her collar, where the silk had been folded under to fit her. Then at her face.

Neither of us said anything.

Less than an hour earlier I’d been smiling at every red light on the drive home.

I’d called Mrs. Delaney twice on the drive home, making sure everything was exactly as I’d left it.

White roses, not pink.

The lamb already in the oven.

The wine uncorked and breathing.

My anniversary gift waiting beside Darius’s chair.

And tucked safely inside my handbag, wrapped in tissue, the little plastic stick with two pink lines.

Five years married, and for the first time I was going to tell my husband we were having a child.

Darius came down in a grey shirt, shrugging into his jacket as he descended, a towel bunched in one hand and his feet still bare.

"You're back early," he said. "Rosalie got caught in the rain on the ridge road. She was soaked through, so I brought her here. Her clothes are on the rail."

He hung the towel over the back of a chair.

"I told Mrs. Delaney to find her something dry."

He said it the way he'd have told me the roof needed repairing.

Gideon had been his Gamma. Eight months ago he put himself in front of a blade meant for Darius, and I still have a husband because of it, so I paid for the funeral and I sat with his widow every evening for a week.

I'd never argue with that part. But the week turned into her groceries, and then a car in her name, and then evenings I stopped asking about, because every time I asked where the line was, Darius said Gideon's name and that was the end of it.

Rosalie pulled at the cuff.

"I'm so sorry, Luna. I didn't mean for this to look like anything." She glanced at Darius. "I'll change back. My things are nearly dry."

She was out of the room before I could answer.

I waited until the stairs went quiet.

"Is there anything else you want to tell me?"

"Are you seriously angry about pajamas?"

"They came out of our bedroom, Darius. Somebody went into our room, opened my drawer and handed my clothes to another woman, and nobody thought I needed a phone call."

My coat was still dripping onto the floor. I hadn't taken it off. "It isn't the clothes. Do you even remember what today—"

"She was standing in the rain." He said it over me, flat. "Why is it that every single time I help that woman, you assume the worst?"

"I didn't say—"

"Her husband is dead because he got in front of me." He held my eyes. "She has no one. I'm the Alpha. She's my Gamma's widow. That's the whole of it."

I stood there and gave him room to remember the date.

He looked at his watch instead.

Rosalie came back down in her own dress, thin blue cotton, the cuffs and hem still dark with water. She folded her arms around herself and sneezed into her wrist.

Darius was already pulling off his jacket.

He put it round her shoulders and drew the collar closed at her throat.

"You've only just come out of your heat," he said. "You've got no business catching cold on top of it."

Black wool with a dark green lining. I'd had it made for him in the city for our second anniversary, and I picked the green because his mother always said it suited him.

Then the rest of what he'd said caught up with me.

He knew where she was in her cycle.

Rosalie pulled it tighter. He adjusted the jacket across her shoulders.

Then the smell of them reached me together, his scent gone soft through her jasmine, and my stomach turned over so fast I had to put my hand on the back of the couch. My fingers found the pocket of my bag. The shape of the test through the leather.

"Thank you." Rosalie looked up at him. "I don't know what I'd have done this year without you. I really don't."

She turned to me and smiled.

"You must feel so safe, Luna. Married to a man like him." She smoothed the jacket down her arm. “Especially when you’ve had to manage without a wolf of your own.”

I let it sit for a second.

"I've done fine without one so far," I said. "You'd know. I sat in your kitchen every night for a week."

Her smile didn't move. Darius reached past me for his keys.

"I should go," Rosalie said. "I've caused enough trouble for one night." She stopped at the door. "It's only — the house is so far out. I keep thinking there's someone behind me on the lane."

"I'll take you."

"You have guards for that," I said. "Call the gate. Somebody down there can drive her."

"It's ten minutes." He was already stepping into his boots. "It'll be faster if I go."

I caught his sleeve.

"Come straight back. I have something to tell you and it can't wait."

He took my hand off his sleeve, squeezed it once, and let go.

"I won't be long."

He didn't ask what it was.

I stood in the doorway and watched him hold the umbrella over her the whole way to the car, and she walked under it in my jacket.

The candles were lit at seven.

Mrs. Delaney brought the lamb through, and the rosemary potatoes, and the tart he likes that takes four hours. She set the wine by his glass. The box sat beside his plate with the ribbon I'd tied that morning.

"Shall I keep it warm, Luna?"

"He'll be back soon."

By half eight the wax had run down onto the tablecloth. The fat on the lamb had gone white. Two of the girls kept finding reasons to come through the dining room, and when the younger one looked at me the second time, I sent them all to bed.

My phone stayed dark.

At ten to nine I rang him.

It rang four times.

"Hello?"

Rosalie.

"He left it on the counter," she said. "I thought it might be something important."

I didn't answer.

"He walked me in and I got frightened again — the lights on the lane were out, I couldn't stop shaking. He said he'd stay till I settled. He's been so patient with me."

“Put him on.”

“Of course. One second.” Before I could answer, Rosalie added in a falsely final tone, “All right, Luna. I’ll let you get to your evening.”

Something clicked against a hard surface.

She had set the phone down, but the line remained open.

I could hear rain against her windows.

“Who was that?” Darius asked from somewhere across the room.

“Your wife.”

Nothing for a moment.

"I should go."

"Before you do." Her voice moved with him. "The gathering. At the bar, tonight."

"Rosalie."

"You haven't been in three years. The border boys notice, you know they do. Gideon never missed one."

“It’s almost nine.”

"It's meant to be about unity, that's the whole point of it." A chair scraped. "And it's right out on the border road. I couldn't walk in there by myself."

I stood with my hand on the back of his chair and listened to him not answer. It went on long enough that I thought he'd said no.

"Fine," he said. "Get your coat."

The line went dead.

Neither of them had said my name.

The message came four minutes later.

Something urgent's come up. I won't be home tonight. Have your dinner. Don't wait for me.

I read it twice.

I looked at the lamb with its skin gone dull, and the unopened box with the ribbon still crisp, and the two candles burnt down into their own wax.

Then I put my hand in my bag and closed it around the test.

Nothing urgent had come up. There was no council, no rogue sighting, no border alarm — there was a bar and a woman who was frightened of the dark.

I wasn't telling my husband about his child in a text message.

I took my keys off the hook by the door and went out into the rain to find him.