Todos os capítulos de THE ALPHA’S QUIET TEMPTATION : Capítulo 81 - Capítulo 90

LIORA’S POVThe first thing Darren said was nothing.He stood in the entrance of the tent and looked at Lucas holding me and took in the full picture of it with the particular stillness of a man who was deciding something before he spoke. Then his eyes moved to my face, to the dried blood at my temple, and back to Lucas.“I’ll take her,” he said.Lucas did not move immediately. “She needs to get to the physician first.”“I’m aware of what she needs.”“The cut should be looked at tonight.”“I said I’ll take her.” Darren stepped fully into the tent and the shift in the air was immediate, the way it always was when two people who were performing civility toward each other were both aware that the civility was performative. “Thank you for your involvement this evening. It’s noted.”“My involvement kept her from being hanged.”“And it’s noted,” Darren repeated. His voice had not changed in volume or temperature. It did not need to. He extended his arms toward me with the calm expectation o

LIORA’S POVHe kept not looking at me.That was the thing. Not the crowd’s whispers, which had softened somewhat as the morning stretched on and the game preparations gave people something else to focus on. Not Myra’s continued stiffness, which I had filed away to address later. Not the persistent dull ache at my temple or the awareness of eyes that followed me whenever I moved.It was the not looking.Because Lucas was not simply failing to seek me out across the arena. He was actively, specifically, with what felt like considerable intention, looking at everything except the general area where I was standing. He looked at the game master. He looked at the rope boundaries. He looked at Byron. He engaged in a conversation with two noblemen to his left with the attentive ease of a man who had nowhere else to be and nothing else on his mind.Twenty feet away I could have been a post in the ground.I watched him do it and I tried to feel nothing about it and I was not very successful.Th

LIORA’S POVThe dinner was loud in the way celebrations were loud, not joyfully but insistently, everyone performing their enjoyment with the slightly elevated energy of people who understood that the occasion required it.I sat with my hands in my lap and watched it happen.Darren was across the long table, Elora beside him, her shoulder angled toward him in the particular way of someone who had decided proximity was its own argument. She laughed at something and touched his arm and he did not move away, which was its own kind of information. He had glanced at me twice since the dinner began. Once when I sat down, once when the first course arrived. Both times his expression had been pleasant and unreadable and both times he had looked away before I could respond to it.The argument from this afternoon had not been addressed. It sat between us across the table like a third place setting, present and unacknowledged.Seraphina was several seats down, her husband beside her, engaged in

LUCAS’S POVMy wolf had been awake since the river.Present, underneath everything, tracking her with a low and constant attention that I had been managing for the past hour by focusing on other things. The stones. The water. The words I had not intended to say to her and had said anyway, drawn out by the quality of her listening.She was still in my hand.Her face, I meant. My palm against her jaw, her skin warm, her eyes very still. She had stopped breathing and I was aware of exactly how close we were and exactly what my wolf was doing with that information and I was also aware that I needed to say something that was not what I was currently thinking.“You’re very brave,” I said. “For someone who keeps ending up in trouble.”She blinked. The stillness broke into something less suspended.“I don’t go looking for it,” she said.“I know.” I lowered my hand. “That’s what makes it worse.” I looked at her properly, the way I had been avoiding doing at close range for reasons that were be

LIORA’S POVI heard them before I saw them.Voices, more than one, carrying the particular pitch of people who were looking for something and had not yet found it. I slowed as I came around the last row of tents and the gathering outside my tent came into view, a cluster of people in the lamplight, some with torches, heads turning and speaking to each other with the agitated energy of a search that had not yet resolved.I stopped.Then I looked down at myself. Soaking wet. Hair plastered to the sides of my face. No shoes. Carrying my shoes, actually, having retrieved them from the bank before leaving, which meant I was holding them rather than wearing them like a person who had simply been for a walk.I had approximately three seconds before someone looked in my direction.The three seconds elapsed.“There she is.” A voice from the edge of the group, and then all of it was reorganizing toward me, torches and faces and the particular energy of people whose worry was converting rapidly