Either way, I didn’t care. I was grateful to get away from Haenvale, the whispers and the shadow of the dingo in the woods.
One
Sully
Thescreendoorslammedbehind me as I shoved it closed. I raced for the gate, aware she was hot on my heels.
“Sullivan Hart! Just where do you think you’re going?” she screeched, sounding much more like a bird shifter than a quokka.
My footsteps paused, my fingers on the latch. I didn’t turn around. The heat of her gaze burned hotter than the May sun on my back. “Out. Away. Not here.” My words were short, clipped with my frustration.
Why did it have to be like this with her? She knew how stressful it was being back here after everything. Why did she have to lay this on me, too?
Mom sighed. I could guess she was wringing her hands, her face a mask of disappointment. An all too common look for her since that night.
“Sweetheart, we need to talk about this—“
“You promised me the summer!” I protested, hearing how petulant I sounded. It was my turn to let out a sigh as I whipped around to face her, where, shock, she was indeed wringing her hands. Dad would tan my ass verbally, of course, for being rude to Mom, even though he would understand how I was feeling. They both would, but Mom was too caught up in this frenzy to get me mated off.
Her cheeks were flushed with shame. I noticed a few new gray hairs and a couple of stress lines on her forehead. I felt a pang of guilt for causing her to worry. Then firmed my spine. I wasn’t the one in the wrong here.
“Sully, you’re still free to choose.” Her tone was carefully level, giving me the impression I really wasn’t able to choose a mate of my own. To be fair, they were hardly lining the block.
“Really?” I felt my eyebrows about hit my hairline with how high they lifted in challenge.
“Of course. We had a deal, after all.” She was acting like she hadn’t broken that deal all damn day!
“So what was this afternoon all about?”
Mom gave yet another sigh. Maybe she needed to see a doctor if breathing was sucha problem for her. “It’s just that Orson has heard a lot about you, and his family…”
All I’d heard all afternoon was about how wonderful Orson was. I was frankly sick of it. Orson this, Orson that. Blah, boring. That’s what she sounded like. It made him less appealing than a wet sock.
“Look, I’ve barely been back a week and already I’m being asked to meet these guys you’ve been picking out for me. What happened to giving me time to decompress from college, ease back into things here before you start matchmaking?” I wandered closer, so I wasn’t blasting our business over the neighborhood. I was pretty sure half the street was listening in.
Near to her, I could see Mom’s irritation and a tinge of shame. We had the same cornflower blue eyes. Regret clouded her expression. She knew she was breaking the carefully negotiated bargain we’d come to with Dad as referee. It was part of the agreement we’d come to for them to get me home for the summer. I wasn’t going to return without rules in place.
Matchmaking was such an important part of quokka culture where the omega parent would be in charge of finding a good match for their omega child. Neither my brother nor sisterwere omegas, so Mom’s only opportunity to create a match was with me.
“Orson is very well connected, Sully. You could have a good life as his omega,” she finally said in a quiet voice. “His family understands that what happened years ago was just a drunken night gone bad. They remember the follies of youth, as they put it.”
Ignoring the last part since I was sick of the constant mentions of my misadventure in the woods, I focused on the second part. Ah, a “good life as his omega,” as if that wasn’t code for life as a kept husband. Days likely spent barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, or dressed nicely for dinners with his business friends. A trophy, not a person. Not a life where I would be allowed my own hopes and ambitions, a job, a life outside of where my alpha left me.
My face must have shown all my thoughts. Either that, or Mom had actually listened to me yelling earlier for a change.
“You’ve got him all wrong, Sully. It wouldn’t be anything like you’re imagining.”
Despite the show we were putting on for the neighbors, we did, in fact, love each other. No really, I loved both my parents. Respected the hell out of them for raising us and running asuccessful business. In this though, my mom was wrong. I knew exactly who and what Orson was. I was pretty sure she knew it too.
I was young, sort of pretty now that I’d lost the weight, and came from a good family. They could overlook my former “hysteria” for the good genes I would carry. My options were limited. Mom had latched onto the Blaines as the cream of a bad bunch, or whatever the idiom was.
“You’re telling me he wouldn’t want me to have little alpha babies almost as soon as we are mated?”
Mom winced. “Well, I know he’s family oriented.”
I was about to run out of my limited patience. “Babies, Mom. He wants me so he can have babies, because I’m only twenty-two and not past my prime like a lot of these alphaholes think. And clearly, he wants them as soon as possible, since instead of getting to know me like a normal person, he arranges a marriage like it’s a fucking business deal!”
Yeah, I was aware I was shouting in my mom’s face by the end of my tirade. Ashamed of myself, I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “Sorry,all this mating talk’s got me heated. I’ll be back later. We can discuss it with Dad.”
