Page 24 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

I should leave it there. The wolf won’t let me. “Mia’s father,” I begin, watching her closely. “Has he ever tried to take her from you?”

Jessa goes silent. When she answers, it’s almost too low to catch.

“He doesn’t know about Mia.”

That stops me. “Why not?”

She gives me a look I can’t read, an accusatory anger behind her eyes. “I tried to tell him. He decided I was after his money. His people turned me away from the door before I got a word out.”

A prickle crawls up the back of my neck, there and then gone before I can place it. The wolf goes very quiet, straining after something just out of range. I rub my nape, and the feeling slips off.

“Why didn’t you go back?” I ask slowly. “Try again later?”

Her eyes snap to mine, bright with a fury that’s been waiting years for somewhere to go.

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to be pregnant for nine months with no help, no family, no one at all?” Her voice climbs and shakes, but she holds it. “My parents are long gone. There was nobody to get up at three in the morning and rub my swollen ankles, nobody to tie my shoes when I couldn’t reach them anymore. No one drove me in when I had false labor or when my water actually broke and I sat on a curb calling a cab because there wasn’t a single soul to call instead.”

I don’t move. There’s not a word in me.

“I did all of it, every hard hour of it, alone.” She takes a step toward me, eyes blazing. “So if he thinks he gets to stroll in now and take my daughter because they happen to share blood, he’s wrong. Blood doesn’t make him hers. He wasn’t there for the nights she screamed with fever or the ER trips. It was me, every single time, all because he decided a baby was a con.” Her breath saws out of her. “He doesn’t deserve to know she exists.”

The wolf whines at the pain in her voice, and I agree with her, all the way down.

“Maybe you’re right,” I admit.

She blinks, thrown that I didn’t argue.

“What happens if Mia wants to meet him one day?” I ask. I don’t know why I can’t let this go.

Jessa looks toward the window, her anger cooling. “If she ever asks, I know where he is. I’ll let her find him, but not before she’s eighteen or old enough to see a manipulation coming.” Her jaw firms. “I won’t hand her over to be played.”

I look at this woman, worn down by old wounds and still fierce, still pouring everything she’s got into a wiry ten-year-old who plays off her left foot. Whatever life did to her, it never touched how she loves that girl. My admiration for Jessa just keeps growing with each encounter. I’m suddenly reminded of my uncle’s words for me to get a mate so that Bella has a mother.

“Saturday,” I tell her hoarsely. “I’ll bring Bella by at eleven.”

She doesn’t want me there. The reluctance is written all over her, the distance she keeps putting up and I keep crossing.

“Fine,” she says.

She gathers her bag and walks out of the office. I trail them out as far as the front steps, hands in my pockets, and I watch her buckle Mia into the back of a loaner sedan the rental place must’ve sent over while the dead Ford rots on the connector. I stay until the taillights clear the gate.

Then I find Bella inside, hanging off the office assistant’s desk, and crouch to her level.

“Bell.” I tug one loose braid. “I secured your playdate.”

She gasps, eyes going huge. “With Mia? At her house?”

“Saturday.”

She throws herself at me. I catch her, laughing into her hair. For once, the wolf and I want exactly the same thing.

The week crawls. I tell myself it doesn’t. There’s a school to run, donor folders breeding on my desk, a junior squad to drill, and not one of those things slows the clock down to the misery it becomes between Monday and Saturday. Jessa drops Mia at the gate each morning and won’t meet my eye, peeling off before I can do more than lift a hand. Each afternoon she’s parked across the street, engine running, ready to spirit the kid away the instant the bell sounds.

It changes nothing. Mia and Bella have fused at the hip. They sit together, eat together, plot together, and twice I find them with their heads bent over a phone Bella’s not supposed to have at school, giggling about something neither will repeat. My niece hasn’t come this alive since she was small enough to ride my shoulders. That alone would be reason enough to keep this family close.

It isn’t the only reason, and I’ve stopped pretending it is.

She’s not married. The paperwork said so, her bare hand says so, and the more I turn it over, the more a low, patient heat builds in me. I’ve spent ten years giving women nothing but the leftovers, the easy ones who wanted as little of me as I wanted of them. Jessa wants none of me on purpose, which is something I’ve never once had to work for, and the wolf finds the challenge delicious. I decide to stop being polite about it.