All Chapters of THE ALPHA'S CURVY LUNA: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I told myself it was nothing.Woke up the next morning, lay there for about thirty seconds staring at the ceiling, then said it out loud to the empty room. Nothing happened. You saw a man look at you and you read into it because you are tired and alone and not used to being somewhere that does not actively resent your presence. That is all it was. Reading into things.I got up. Washed my face. Went downstairs before most of the house was moving.Early mornings had always been mine. The one part of the day that belonged to me before anyone else could get their hands on it. I had done it for years in my stepmother's house, slipping downstairs in the quiet and having an hour to just exist without managing anyone's reaction to my existence.Here it felt the same. The kitchen was empty except for the low sound of something on the stove and the light coming in grey and clean through the windows and I stood in the middle of it for a moment and just breathed.Sola arrived ten minutes after me

A week in and my body had stopped listening to me.My mind was holding up its end. Staying on task, keeping things where they belonged, running the household and attending the Monday meetings and walking past him in corridors without making it anything more than two people walking past each other in a corridor. My mind was doing everything right.My body had other ideas and it was not shy about them.It started with the way I heard him now. His footsteps were different from everyone else's in that house and I had learned them without trying to, that particular weight and pace, and I would be in the middle of something completely unrelated and something in me would lift and orient before I had made any conscious decision to do it.Like I had been tuned to a frequency I had not chosen and could not retune.The Monday meeting had been the real problem.Forty minutes across a desk from him while he listened to everything I said with his full attention and looked at me with those dark eyes

I changed three times.First dress went back because it was trying too hard, second one was too plain and plain on my body in a full room stops being plain real fast. Third was dark green, fitted at the waist. Fitted everywhere if I was being honest.I had bought it on a brave day two years ago and had never found anywhere worth the attention it would pull.Tonight I put it on and left the room before I could argue myself out of it.He was coming out of the study when I reached the bottom of the stairs.He looked up.Stopped.Not for long, a second maybe less. But his eyes moved over me in that way he had, that slow deliberate way that started at my face and did not rush and did not pretend it was anything other than what it was, and I stood at the bottom of those stairs and I let it happen.My body had stopped taking sensible instructions somewhere around day four of living in his house and I had given up fighting it.He looked back at my face.Something in his jaw had shifted."Read

I got there three minutes early.Sat down. Clipboard on the desk. Notes arranged. All the professional furniture of a work meeting firmly in place.He walked in and sat across from me and all of it meant nothing.Something was different about him this morning. Not loud different. The quiet kind. Like a decision had finished making itself overnight and he had stopped arguing with it. He sat down and looked at me and did not reach for any papers and did not pretend he was about to.I started talking.Supply order confirmed for Wednesday. Kitchen dietary list submitted. East corridor lighting handled by Rhen. I went through every item on my list with my eyes on the paper and my voice steady and the whole time that warmth that had been living under my skin for five weeks was worse than usual. Lower. Heavier.More honest about what it was."That is everything," I said.Silence.I looked up.He was watching me. Elbows on the desk. That open look he had stopped covering since the gathering.

He was already awake when I opened my eyes.Lying on his back. Looking at the ceiling. That stillness on him that was not peaceful but working, the kind that meant something was being turned over and examined and he had been at it a while.The fire was dead. Cold grey light pushed through the curtain gap and lay across the floor in a thin strip.I watched him for a moment before he knew I was watching and I thought about last night and about Sola saying older than you think and about the way his eyes had found me across that study desk on the first night like something in him had been expecting me.I sat up."Tell me," I said.He turned his head. Looked at me. Then he sat up too and put his elbows on his knees and his hands hung loose in front of him and he looked at them a moment.Then he started talking.Four years ago he had been Alpha for eight years and had never bonded to anyone. The pack elders were not hostile about it. Just quietly concerned the way packs get when something e