Her laugh was a dried-out husk, but he could hear that it had probably sounded a lot like Lydia’s once.
“Don’t waste good manners on me, Case Jackson. I don’t have much use for them anymore.”
“Okay,” Case said—reasonably enough, he thought. “What do you have some use for?”
“Someone who can be a good mate to my granddaughter and a good alpha to my pack.”
“Co-alpha.”
There was that rattling husk of a laugh again. “Co-alpha, that’s right. That was a test.”
Why don’t you worry less about testing me and more about telling Lydia that she’spassedyour tests, time and time again, and giving her a gold star for once? Or telling her she’s graduated from your alpha school and can make her own decisions?
“I want to be both of those things,” Case said. “For whatever that’s worth.”
He meant it. He would do anything for Lydia, and he was starting to think he’d do anything for the pack, too.
They were scared and vulnerable, but he’d already seen enough to make him think they could find their strength fast. They were brave at heart, and they cared about each other.
He had just needed to know they all cared about Lydia, too. And Wendy and Polly had convinced him. Lydia’s people were ready to support her and be happy for her. They just didn’t always seem to think they were allowed to chip in like that.
“I want to do whatever I can,” Case added. He wondered if the pack had tried to say that too.
“Wanting isn’t the same as doing,” Ruth said.
“No,” he agreed.
“You’re a hard person to have an argument with.”
“Probably.”
“Like there’s a core of you somewhere deep inside that no one else can get to, no one else can touch,” Ruth said thoughtfully. Case had never expected her to hit on exactly how he felt about himself, and it was a little jarring. “That’s good. Take care of her.”
She hung up swiftly, without even giving him a chance to say goodbye, let alone pass the phone back to Lydia. Apparently when Ruth was done with a conversation, she wasdone.
“She hung up pretty fast.”
Lydia sighed. “Yeah, she does that. In her ideal world, we’d all still use telegrams, so she could end every conversation with STOP.”
“But she didn’t seem to tell either one of us that the honeymoon was off the table.”
Another sigh. “No, just that I was being frivolous. But she does seem like this morning gave her a good lift. We’re ... I think we’re in the end stages now, even more than we have been for a while, but tonight should be safe. But frivolous, apparently.”
“Maybe a little bit of frivolity is okay sometimes,” Case said. “Maybe it’s even a good thing.”
“I’ve heard that,” Lydia said dryly. “Not from anyone in Mountainview, though.”
Case shrugged. “I’m in Mountainview now.”
Lydia looked down at her rings for a second and then looked up at him, her dark eyes looking deeper and brighter than ever. “Yeah, you are. That’s true. I’m going to take advantage of that ... or at least I will if we can get to this hotel room I’ve been hearing so much about.”
Case smiled. “Say no more.”
*
Lydia clearly knew her hometown like the back of her hand, so Case wasn’t surprised to find that she was right: Mountainview didn’t have a hotel to offer them. It didn’t even have a cut-rate motel or a postage-stamp-sized B&B. He frowned down at his phone screen.
“I think it’s fine if it’s out of town as long as it’s within easy driving distance,” Lydia said.
