Read Online Mating the Alpha by Ivy Sinclair - Free Book Online Page B

day. She probably thought I had told her a fine tale to start the process of getting into her pants. In her pants was exactly where I wanted to be, but that wasn’t what I had lied about.
    “I lied about not trying to communicate with you in the last ten years,” I said. “I did try. Three times.”
    Her mouth fell open. “You did?”
    I felt a strange sense of loneliness waft over me then.  I nodded and looked away from her. “The first time was about three weeks after I left. Markus was out of town on a business trip, and so I decided to find a way around his orders. I had been expressly forbidden from calling you, and that was the kind of thing that he would have found out about anyway because he told your father about what happened, or at least a part of it.”
    “My father was part of it?”
    I snorted. “Of course, he was. He couldn’t wait to see my backside. I was never the kind of influence he wanted around you. I’m surprised he didn’t throw a party the day that I left town.”
    “I didn’t see you,” Maren said. “If you came back, I didn’t see you.”
    “You wouldn’t have seen me unless I wanted you to,” I said. “I thought for sure after what happened you’d be as miserable as I was. I wanted to see you so badly and tell you how I felt about what happened between us and what it meant to me. I wanted to ask you to wait for me, which I realize now was selfish and stupid on my part.”
    Maren sat up a little straighter in the tub. “I was miserable. I felt completely lost and alone.”
    “I couldn’t come back to Greyelf without permission, so I had to wait for you to leave town and go somewhere else. Remember you used to work at that store in the mall over in Huntersville? I waited in the parking lot all day for your shift to be over, and for you to walk out to your car. When I saw you, you looked the furthest thing from miserable,” I said quietly. “I watched you talking on the phone to someone. You were laughing and twirling your hair around your fingers as you walked. You must have changed to go out afterward because you were wearing a shirt of yours that I thought was the prettiest one you had. I know I told you that at least a couple of times. I followed you to the bowling alley down the street. You met Kevin Milton there in the parking lot.”
    Maren shook her head. “You have got to be kidding me. My one and only date with Kevin Milton was the night that you came back to see me. I can’t even believe it. My dad set that whole thing up. Since he forced me to go, I did my best to make it tolerable.”
    “I left before I had to watch anything else,” I said. “But that wasn’t the first time. A couple of years later, Bea let it slip where you had gone to school. I wasn’t allowed to ask anything about you, but apparently you had written something that your dad put in the paper.”
    “It was a story about a new club that formed on campus for shifters,” Maren said with another rueful shake of her head. “I barely dated in college, so you can’t tell me that you came to see me, and I was on a date again.”
    “No, not that time,” I said. My heart beat against my chest painfully. It hurt to think about the images of Maren from that time. I had wanted so desperately to approach her and talk to her. I had berated myself the entire drive to her school’s campus, but that hadn’t stopped me from waiting for her in the quad. “I told myself that I was going to talk to you that time no matter what. It took me all day long to talk myself into it, but I was determined to go through with it.”
    “So what happened?” Maren moved so that she was closer to me. The bubbles still covered all the intimate areas of her body, but they were starting to diminish at a rapid pace. I cleared my throat and glanced in the other direction. This confession was hard enough the way it was.
    “I saw you walking with your nose stuck in a book. You looked so much older than the girl I