Chapter 6 — She chose him

Austin read the message twice.

Then a third time.

The words stayed the same.

Hallie had agreed to marry Grant.

For several seconds, Austin simply stared at the page.

It had to be wrong.

Cedar Draw was real enough. Hallie had gone there. He had already been forced to accept that much, even if every instinct in him still rejected the idea of her sleeping, eating, working, existing somewhere outside Bellamy Creek.

But marriage?

No.

She had known Grant for days.

Austin set the paper down and stood.

The mate bond remained exactly where it had always been.

Alive.

He could feel the quiet pull of it beneath his skin, a certainty older than argument. Hallie was his mate. Rejection had hurt it. Distance had stretched it. Neither had erased what she was to him.

That should have made the report impossible.

Instead it made it worse.

Austin crossed the room once, then turned back.

She was angry.

That was the explanation.

Angry enough to leave. Angry enough to choose the one place people at Bellamy Creek spoke about with lowered voices. Angry enough to stand beside Grant just to prove Austin no longer had the right to expect anything from her.

The thought should have reassured him.

It almost did.

Hallie had never been impulsive. Even when she was furious, she thought before she moved. She noticed consequences other people missed. She had been trained for years to understand how a choice would be read by a pack before she made it.

Austin stopped.

That was the problem.

If Hallie had agreed to marriage, she would know exactly what it meant.

He picked up the message again.

A recognized marriage.

This was neither a flirtation nor an affair, and not some dramatic attempt to make him jealous.

A status.

His throat tightened.

He had rejected her because Bellamy Creek needed more than love from its Alpha.

The decision had been brutal, but it had been rational. Another Alpha’s daughter brought alliance, support, security. Hallie was already Bellamy Creek. She could give him herself, her loyalty, her training, everything they had once expected to build together.

She could not give the pack another territory.

Austin had told himself she would understand eventually.

He had never expected immediate forgiveness.

He had never expected her to smile while he formalized a political betrothal with another woman.

But understand.

Hallie understood duty.

She understood better than almost anyone what it meant to put a pack ahead of private desire.

He had expected anger.

He had expected distance.

He had even expected her to refuse to speak to him for a while.

He had not expected her to create a life in which his decision no longer sat at the center.

The bond pulled again.

Austin pressed a hand flat against the desk.

She was still there.

Somewhere beyond Bellamy Creek, Hallie existed at the other end of that connection.

His mate.

The same woman who had looked at him and accepted his rejection without begging him to reconsider.

At the time, her calm had felt like shock.

Now he remembered the way she had picked up her jacket.

The way she had said she was leaving.

Not threatening to leave.

Leaving.

Austin exhaled sharply.

He had mistaken the absence of a fight for uncertainty.

That realization landed harder than the news itself.

If Hallie married Grant, other packs would not see her as a rejected mate waiting for her Alpha to reverse course.

They would see Grant’s wife.

The bond would still exist.

But it would no longer be the only fact anyone could point to.

Austin hated the thought with a force that made him step away from the desk.

He had chosen the political betrothal.

That had been his right as Alpha.

Hallie was making a choice of her own.

That should have been equally simple.

It was not.

Because rejecting her had meant giving up the future he had expected.

Losing her meant watching her build another one.

With someone else.

Grant.

Austin had met enough men like him to know reputation became distorted at a distance. Cedar Draw called itself a community. Other packs called it rogue territory. Grant was older, harder, and entirely outside the structure Hallie had been raised to understand.

There was no reason she should want him.

Unless wanting him was not the point.

Unless choosing him was.

Austin looked down at the message once more.

The word marriage seemed larger than everything around it.

He could wait.

He could tell himself Hallie would calm down.

He could assume she would remember what the bond meant and return before anything became permanent.

That was what he had been doing since she left.

Assuming the connection between them would eventually pull her back into the life he had already decided she would occupy.

His stomach turned.

What if she did not come back?

The question had not felt real until now.

Austin moved before he could talk himself out of it.

He left the room, crossed the hall, and gave the necessary orders for his absence without explaining more than he had to.

He was still Alpha of Bellamy Creek.

He still had obligations.

But he could fulfill them and go.

By the time he reached the road out of the territory, the late light had begun to fade.

Cedar Draw lay ahead.

Hallie lay ahead.

His mate.

A woman he had rejected.

A woman who had taken his rejection and built a future that no longer waited on him.

Austin tightened his grip on the wheel.

Only then did he understand the difference between letting Hallie go and Hallie choosing to belong somewhere else.

He drove toward Cedar Draw.