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I stroked his chest, understanding the girl’s point of view, but aching for him, for what he’d been through.
“So, I went to therapy after that,” he said, laughing. “I went on another tour, dated another girl, and that didn’t work out either. I wanted to settle down, and she just wanted to go to bars and get drunk all the time. She was younger than me.”
I told him about going on dates, about wearing out the men that I took into my bed, wondering why it was that I spent every sexual encounter lying awake next to them while they slept, feeling an ache inside me that couldn’t be filled.
“We were waiting for this,” he said. “For our pack. For each other. It’s much better knowing you have three other strong alphas to protect you, you know. Very soothing.”
“We’ll all protect each other,” I told him.
“Well,” he said, “it’ll be better once this is settled. Whatever the rift is between the others, they have to see that we’re all meant to be together. We can scent it.”
“We definitely can,” I said. “Yes, that’s what I want. I want you all, and I’m glad you want that, too.”
We agreed that the best thing we could do was to force Sinclair and Devlin to work it out. I told him about this episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I’d seen once, where Buffy and her archnemesis Cordelia were having a feud about Homecoming Queen, and their friends made them take a limousine to the dance together.
“Anyway,” I said, “at that point, they get attacked by a bunch of demons, because the demons think that Cordelia is Faith, who is actually another vampire slayer, even though it’s supposed to be that there’s only one slayer, and—I’m getting off topic.”
“You think we trap them together and they have to talk it out?”
“It’s worth a try,” I said.
But there was no way to trap them together leading up to the ball, which was disappointing to me, because I had hoped to be with everyone after the ball, and to get all my bites.
Maguire was sympathetic that we couldn’t do that, but he said we should use it to make it work.
“How?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “we could say that you want to go to some destination after the ball, so that you can be with all of us and we can all bite you. And we’ll set it up so that it’s supposed to be you, me, and Devlin in one car and Rohan and Sinclair in another. And then we’ll make sure it’s Sinclair and Devlin instead. And then, we can instruct the driver to have ‘car trouble’ halfway there, and not to fix it until Sinclair and Devlin are playing nice.”
I grinned. “That’s perfect.”
“Right, so where should we go?”
“North,” I said. “To Nilthin. Because snow and hot tubs and cuddling in cabins and it’s everything I want.”
He grinned at me. “Whatever princess wants.”
I grinned back. “Yes, yes, more of that, please. I want Sinclair and Devlin to make up.”
“Whatever the omega wants,” he said, leaning in to kiss me.
25
maguire
THE THING ABOUT being an alpha is that when your omega tells you a plan, you want to tell her that you’ll just take care of that for her. And so, you say that.
Then, you’re on the hook for a plan that requires about twenty steps, a very high level of secrecy, and far more moving parts than you even conceived of.
All of this is happening while you’re getting ready for your first royal ball as a guest instead of staff, which is actually a lot more work and planning than you think it’s going to be.
Overall, when the day of the ball came around, I was freaking exhausted.
We were all herded in the bullpen to get ready for the ball, and I sat in a chair and lulled my head back while the staff fussed over me, something I used to swear that I would never do, because I was not a jackass. I used to swear I’d be helpful to the staff because I knew what it was like for them, and I didn’t think that the royals lived particularly stressful lives.
Well.
I was wrong.
