“Your villa?” Nathan’s voice sounded disbelieving. “This isn’t your villa. This is my wedding house.”“What?” I scoffed. “You have to be joking.” Surely Nathan was just playing a joke on me. My aunt left me the deed to the house with my name on it, and her gardener, Clint, never mentioned any of this. Maybe Nathan was in charge of the renovations, and it was supposed to be a surprise.But the more that I thought about it, I was only reminded of how he had mentioned his fiancee’s needs when he was talking to the builders.“Isn’t it obvious?” Nathan asked. “This is my wedding house. I paid a high price for the most beautiful villa in town.”This all felt unreal. My aunt’s villa was my childhood playground. My aunt and I didn’t have the closest relationship, but I spent a lot of my time here growing up. I knew this house and its surrounding property like the back of my hand. In fact, I had spent a lot of time as a kid talking to Nathan about how I would change this place if I owned it my
On the day of the wedding, I got dressed up and arrived at the church where the ceremony was held.Really, I was wearing a cheap dress with the tags still on it so I could return it after the wedding. Even though my aunt left me the villa, I still didn’t have much money to my name after being evicted from my pack for a decade, and so I didn’t exactly have the luxury of buying fancy new dresses for nice occasions.For this very reason, I felt as though I was sticking out like a sore thumb as I walked up the front steps to the church.Inside, I immediately realized that the church was full of people who I knew from my childhood. A lot of my childhood friends from grade school were in attendance. While many of them looked in my direction, no one said anything to me.In fact, I felt like an outcast; and that was only solidified when Nathan’s father, Colin, turned around in his seat and shot me a dirty glare.Colin was the previous Alpha of the pack. After he joined forces with the pack el
Nathan placed his hand on my belly and smiled up at me while the rest of the wedding guests watched us with shocked faces. “Olivia, I promise that I will take care of you… And our baby,” he said.The bride’s face was as white as a sheet. The entire church, which was just murmuring angrily over the scene before them, now fell so utterly silent that the sound of Layla’s white lily bouquet falling to the floor echoed throughout the walls.All I could hear, however, was my own heart beating too fast inside my chest as I wondered what the hell was happening today. Not only did Nathan refuse to marry his bride, Layla, but he also claimed that he would take care of me! And our… baby?! We hadn’t seen each other in a decade. This couldn’t be possible; it had to be a joke, or a bad dream, or a nasty prank…“What is all of this, Nathan?!” Colin, Nathan’s father, shouted. His loud, domineering voice boomed throughout the dead silent church and was the only thing to finally drown out the overwhelm
Layla gracefully put the tiara on my head, announced the end of her engagement to Nathan, and walked out with her father and several other people, who I assumed were all from her pack, in tow. The church was silent for several long, painful moments, and all I could do was stand there in Nathan’s spell.After those moments were up, Nathan’s father stormed up to him and shouted, jabbing his finger into the center of Nathan’s chest angrily.“You are a disgrace!” Colin shouted, causing the rest of the wedding guests to gasp again. “You are a disgrace to the entire pack! Do you realize the weight behind your actions today, or are you too thick in the head to fathom what you’ve just done? After everything I’ve done for you, too… All you do is destroy our pack’s credibility over… Over some hussy!”The wedding guests gasped again. By now, women were leaving with their children and were pulling their gaping husbands along with them, and the church was rapidly emptying.“I’m sorry, father,” Nat
“Why choose me, then?” I whispered.It wasn’t fair that Nathan suddenly decided to choose me to take the fall for wanting to pull out of his wedding at the last moment. Unless he had real feelings for me, it felt totally unwarranted.Any honest man would have ended the wedding privately without causing a huge scene; he could have talked to his fiancee when he found her kissing her bodyguard, but instead he decided to drag me into it.And in a strange way, I didn’t want to shatter the illusion that maybe Nathan chose me out of all of the other pretty girls in the church because he may have actually had secret feelings for me after all these years.But, much to my dismay, Nathan simply shrugged at my question. I felt sickened by his blase attitude about the entire situation. “Everyone else around here knows each other well,” he said. “Since you’ve been gone for ten years, you’re the only one around here who’s untestable.”Nathan was right; only fated mates knew who their fated mate was.
When I first saw Olivia standing at the bottom of the steps in her aunt’s old villa, once the shock of it all wore off, I couldn’t help but be utterly enamored by her appearance.Damn… She was still as beautiful as I remembered her. Even more, now, even with her messy bedhead and dark circles under her eyes from sleeping. She oozed with life, much unlike the pale and demure Layla.Even though my fiancee was beautiful, my heart trembled when I saw Olivia again.Only, she was pregnant.I could tell thanks to my Alpha abilities. I could sense the little life that was starting to grow inside of her belly. She must have had a husband or a partner at home waiting for her.In an unexpected way, finding out that she was pregnant left me feeling thunderstruck. Even though I was preparing for my own wedding and shouldn’t have cared whether Olivia had found someone else or not, I couldn’t deny how I felt.Ten years had passed and I thought that I would never see Olivia again, but now she was rig
Before Nathan could say anything else, I ran out of the room. I couldn’t be there anymore; I couldn’t believe that this day had turned so sour so quickly. Not only did Nathan destroy my reputation in a matter of minutes as he lied and told everyone that we were fated mates in order to get himself out of a marriage, but he also revealed that I was… pregnant?The Alpha of a pack could sense all of the members in the pack. Even if the members were unborn, the Alpha could still sense them. Traditionally, women in a pack would go to the Alpha if they thought they were pregnant, and some packs made a ritual out of it. And although it was too early in the pregnancy for me to even know myself, if Nathan could sense it then I was pretty certain that he was right.I still needed to check, though. For all I knew, this was all some sort of sick prank; maybe they wanted to torture me a little instead of really having me come back to the pack, which would explain the reason why everything seemed to
“Guess what it is?” Nathan smirked slightly as he held the little cardboard box out to me. “I promise you won’t want to pass it up.”I looked up at Nathan a bit skeptically. He just smiled back at me and shook the box a little. Finally, I took it with a sigh and opened it up.And when I did, my eyes went wide.“This is…” I picked the sweet chocolate muffin out of the box and looked at it. I hadn’t had one of these muffins from the bakery in our town for so long, but I instantly recognized the signature powdered sugar topping and the oversized chocolate chips poking out of the top.“It’s from Jerry’s,” Nathan said with a grin. “Well… Just Jerry, now.”“What do you mean?” I asked, cocking my head. The little bakery in our town was known as “Jerry’s”, and it was named after the little old man who ran it all by himself.Nathan shrugged. “The bakery closed down quite a long time ago,” he replied, sounding somewhat wistful.I felt a bit sad at this. That bakery was one of our favorite place