“Yeah,” he said—a little more hoarsely than he’d expected. “Let’s do it.”
6
Why did I take him into my bedroom?
Lydia forced herself to answer her own question:
Because I didn’t want to bite him in front of my grandmother, for starters. And because I’m going to marry him—and go to bed with him—if this works out, so we might as well start getting comfortable with each other.
All of that was true, but leading Case back into her bedroom still made her feel like a teenage girl whose heart was pounding with the feeling of getting away with something. What made it especially funny was that her teenage years had definitely not been that adventurous—and they had certainly never involved anyone who drew her in as thoroughly as Case did.
Her heart pounded even harder as she shut the door behind them.
This was it.
Case must have been even more nervous than she was, but it didn’t show. He was looking around her room, like they’d only come in here so she could show him around. There was a small, soft smile on his face, and for a second, Lydia imagined what it would be like to press her lips to the Cupid’s bow of his mouth.
If everything goes according to plan, I’ll know, she thought, and she shivered with a kind of hot-cold anticipation.
“What are you thinking?” Lydia said.
He jerked his head towards the door. “That out there didn’t look much like it belonged to you, but this does. I like it.”
Lydia looked around her bedroom, trying to see it through his eyes. Her old, scratched pine furniture, warm and worn; most of it handmade by her dad from local trees. He’d been a lumberjack, like a lot of the Mountainview men had been when she’d been growing up. Now that she thought about it, that hadprobably contributed to her fondness for plaid flannel. The idea made her smile.
She had never poured much conscious effort into making this room hers, but she could see what Case meant about it being different from the den. Her grandmother had never had much love for color, mostly sticking to neutrals and earth tones, but Lydia had a green-and-blue quilt on her bed, vintage band posters on her wall, and a tiny jewelry tree hung with turquoise and amber. Ruth guarded her privacy fiercely and kept the common spaces of the house free from any signs of who she really was, but Lydia’s bookshelves groaned with old and new favorites. Case could stand in front of those shelves and probably figure out plenty about her tastes and dreams ... and that was before he even got around to looking at her favorites piled up on the lower shelf of her nightstand.
She didn’t know how much of it he’d taken in already, but whatever he’d seen there, he seemed to like.
And he seemed to like seeing more of her, period.
It felt like it had been years since anyone had really looked at her the way Case did. She was a known quantity around Mountainview, not one that invited curiosity. People wondered how she would save them from Reeve, but they didn’t wonder about what her favorite books were.
Alphas, Ruth had said, were like tap water. People cared that they were good and that they worked, but aside from that, they didn’t devote much thought to them.
You’ll be respected as a necessity, she had told Lydia once.But being loved is too much to hope for. You’ll get that from your mate, if you’re lucky, but not from your pack.
She had still gotten a lot from her pack over the years, even so. It was a kind of family, one that had often been more open with her than her own grandmother had. Mountainview’s people had cleaned her scraped knees when she was a kid. They’dbraided her hair and told her silly jokes. Now was the time for her to return the favor and take care of them, that was all. She understood that.
But maybe Ruth was right. Maybe that wasn’t quite love, or at least not the kind of love anybody daydreamed about.
Could Case ever come to love her? Was that too much to hope for?
Probably. If the change took, she would be getting more than her fair share of luck as far as he was concerned. It was greedy to hope for more.
“I’m glad you like it,” Lydia said, the words stilted and way too late. “I’d like to see your place sometime.”
“It’s just an RV right now.”
There was something guarded about his voice, like he expected her to sneer at this.
She couldn’t imagine anything further from her real reaction.
“Right, that makes sense. You said you move around a lot. I always liked the idea of living on the road.” She sat down on the edge of her bed. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Mountainview. I don’t feel stuck here—not most of the time, anyway. But I’ve never gotten to roam like that. There’s so much I haven’t seen. And I was always next in line to be alpha, even before my parents died. Ruth chose me for it, and they basically let her adopt me—they were great, but they weren’t really the parenting kind. I grew up knowing that I wanted to be like Ruth, not like them. So there was always this—”
She waved her hand, not sure exactly how to put it.
Case sat down beside her.
