Page 32 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

“You’re a strange man, Callum Vance. I don’t know what to make of you.”

A bead of sweat is coming down the side of her face from the temple. It reaches her jaw. I reach out with my finger and catch it before putting it in my mouth. It’s salt, and it’s her.

Her breath catches, and she stammers, “W-What are you doing?”

I don’t get the chance to say anything before she adds, “I’m just here to be Luca’s mother, okay?” The words topple out of her. “I’m not trying to—I would not presume to—”

She doesn’t finish her sentence, and she doesn’t have to. I’ve just been rejected before I’ve even done anything.

“I should go back. Luca must be waiting for me.” She scrambles away from me and is through the door, out of sight. Her water bottle is still on the ground.

I pick it up, take the cap off, and drink from the side her mouth was on. Finishing it, I head downstairs myself.

Rejected. I was rejected.

I didn’t even do anything to earn it, but I still got rejected.

Only this woman would have the nerve…

❦ ❦ ❦

Chaos is inevitable in this household, as I learn three days later, on the cusp of the weekend. When I come down to breakfast, I see the kitchen staff standing outside, peering into the kitchen.

Normally, I don’t deal with this, but I know that there’s a chance this involves a human woman and my son.

“What’s going on?”

The nearest one to me looks over uncomfortably. “The hu—” She stops the word in her mouth and starts again. “Miss Reyes and the young master are cooking inside. They’ve been at it since five this morning.”

The door is propped open, so I go through it. There’s music playing off a phone on the windowsill at a volume that reaches the passage. My son is sitting on the counter in his pajamas with a mixing bowl in his lap, whisking with both hands and most of his shoulders.

Ariela is at the stove with her back to me, pouring batter into a pan, working her hips to whatever the song is.

I reach across and turn the music off. “What’s going on?”

“We’re having a happy Friday breakfast,” Luca declares.

“Happy Friday?” I look between the two as if one of them will suddenly start making sense.

Ariela turns around. Her chin goes up half an inch, exactly as it did on the roof, then comes down, and she gives me the face she gives everybody.

“It’s a way to cheer Luca up. If one of us has a bad day or week, we have a happy breakfast on Fridays. We make pancakes and dance.” I keep looking at her, so she shrugs. “You never told me I couldn’t make breakfast and dance.”

Nobody dances in this household. I don’t know how to tell her that. She goes past me to the windowsill, close enough that her shoulder drags across my chest, and the music is turned back on. Our eyes meet, and she swallows, quickly looking away.

“Do you want breakfast?” Luca asks.

“My breakfast will be made after the kitchen’s been cleaned up.”

“So you don’t want pancakes?”

In three days, he hasn’t called me anything at all, not Callum, not anything else. He talks to me, he answers me, and every sentence starts with the verb.

“Mom.” He leans off the counter toward her. “He doesn’t want anything. Can I have his chair?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Then she drops her voice, whispering, “You know, you should call him Dad.”