Sitting on my porch, drinking my beer and watching the sunset, I run through my encounter with Alicia in my mind.
I’m glad she’s back in pack territory. Even though she rejected me all those years ago, I’ve honestly never really gotten over Alicia. I’ve always had wild fantasies about her, daydreams of a life in which things went the way they were supposed to and we ended up together.
I liked her when we were teenagers too. I used to sit around girl-watching with the other guys my age, and she was always the one to grab my attention. She was so sexy in her crop top and cut-off shorts, her long blonde hair blowing in the wind. The alpha’s youngest daughter. I wanted her then, and when her father approached me about our mating ceremony, I was over the moon. I said yes immediately.
But I guess no one asked Alicia.
I remember standing in the middle of the clearing at the heart of our pack’s territory and waiting for her to come out. I remember the sound of arguing. She and her stepmother, Deidre, were always at each other’s throats about something. I always thought Deidre was jealous of her husband’s daughters—concerned that he loved them more than her, and that they took attention away from her own son with him.
Whatever the case may have been, by the time Alicia emerged from the lodge where the girls were getting ready to be mated, she looked disheveled and unhappy. She was overly made up, a look I didn’t think she would ever have chosen for herself. Alicia had always been clean-faced. Her hair was curled, something it didn’t do naturally, and the dress she was wearing... Well, it wasn’t lust that made me want to rip it off her.
I tried to convey sympathy with my eyes. I knew she must have hated being dolled up like this.
But her jaw was set, and she wouldn’t even look at me.