CHAPTER THREE – TRISTAN
“Otley James!” I thunder as I throw open the door to my alpha’s latest property acquisition.
It’s a Queen Anne mansion on the edge of Willow Lake, and has all the turrets, spindles, and fish scale shingles you can pack into one oversized house.
It’s beautiful in a tortured gothic way, but it’s about as far from Otley’s taste as you can get, which is why this move smelled fishy from the start.
“You’re a dead man,” I huff as I pound up the sweeping staircase. “D.E.A.D. as a week-old flounder!”
“Excuse me?” Otley appears at the top of the stairs, a silky brow arched in inquiry.
He’s wearing a three-piece suit, like always, and even if I wasn’t a couple of steps below him, his six-foot-three frame would still tower over me.
At first glance, he’s just another elegant, wealthy businessman with his wire-rimmed glasses and thousand-dollar oxfords, but it doesn’t take a photographer’s eye to see the dominant alpha swimming below the surface.
Like a shark.
A sneaky, no-good, secret-keeping shark!
“Excuse you!” I snap, pushing past him and heading into the study.
There’s a massive marble fireplace – thankfully, unlit – and the kind of heavy mahogany furniture that’s no doubt been polishing elitist butts since the dawn of time.
“Get me a whiskey,” I tell him as I flop onto the leather sofa.
“This is going to be a hard liquor interrogation.”
Otley looms over me, a flicker of amusement in his steel-gray eyes. “Can I kiss you before you apply the thumbscrews?”
“No.” I squirm on the chair, deliberately turning my face away from his plush, enticing lips. “I’m sweaty. And pissed!”
“I can see that,” he murmurs as he walks over and pours us both a generous slug of whiskey from his fancy decanter.
It might only be ten in the morning, but he knows better than to question my drinking habits when I’m in a mood.
“You didn’t find any suitable locations? ” he asks as he hands me the glass.
“Oh no,” I purr, downing the fiery liquor in a throat-searing gulp. Holy shit, he buys the best booze. “The exact opposite, in fact.” I place the tumbler on the coffee table and sit back, crossing my legs and narrowing my eyes. Otley, of course, watches every movement like his life depends on it.
If only you knew, buddy.
“After driving around for an hour, I found a little slice of heaven out near Highway 6. It was perfect in every way. They have sunflowers the size of dinner plates and jams straight from the berry bushes, and you can even bring a picnic to enjoy on the riverbank. It’s so delicious, I salivated all over myself, while filling an entire SD card with shots. ”
“Sounds like a successful morning.”
I smile up at Otley, wondering if he can see the dangerous glint in my eye.
“Oh, but that’s not the best part. The farm is run by a beautiful omega with a kind streak a mile wide.
She looks at her flowers like they’re her babies, which maybe explains why she’s worn down to the fucking bone.
I was pretty much ready to hand her a blank check just so she could take a day off and put her feet up.
” Otley just stares at me, and I scoot to the edge of my seat, my voice dropping to a deeper octave.
“In fact, I was thinking all kinds of protective things until GI Joe rode up on a motorbike, and I watched them suck their perfect faces off.”
I don’t add that I’d scurried back to my rental car and spied on them through my telescopic lens like one of her sunflower stalkers.
Otley glances away from me for the first time, his gaze drifting to the big bay window with its pretty view of the lake. “Sounds... like an adventure.”
“Oh, it was.” I purr, my nails digging so deep into my knee, I’ll be buffing the indents out of my skin for a week. “Especially when their son whipped off his motorcycle helmet and he was wearing Ellis’ goddamn face!”
Otley’s eyes flicker at my furious roar, but he just frowns down into his glass of whiskey. “Motorcycle? That doesn’t sound like something a child should be doing.”
“There was only one bump!” I hiss, because while I don’t condone risky driving practices, it was clear the alpha would lie down on the highway before he’d let any harm come to the kid.
“But right now, I'd be more worried about your freaking safety!” I leap to my feet, vibrating with a sickening mix of outrage and disappointment. “Admit it, Otley. You. KNEW!”
“I did.”
Even though I’ve been chewing on this fact since I left the farm, the betrayal still feels like a kick to the chest. “And this house...?”
“I bought it because they’re here.” He nods down at the lake. “The realtor told me this is one of her favorite places.”
“How convenient.” I stare at him, not sure whether to scream or cry. “She's the omega who smelled like roses and tomorrows.”
Otley jerks, a few drops of whiskey splashing on his wrist. We both watch as it soaks into his pristine shirt cuff. “That's how Ellis described her.”
“But during that heat you spent with her nearly a decade ago, she got pregnant. Why didn’t Ellis tell me that?”
Otley places the glass on the sideboard and blots his sleeve with a napkin before he murmurs, “Because he doesn’t know.”
I want to flop back on the couch and howl into a cushion, but I know that expression on his face, and the unfeeling bastard is clearly bleeding on the inside.
Stepping around the coffee table, I tug on his damp sleeve, waiting until his gray eyes settle on mine before I whisper, “What the fuck, Otley?”
“I only just found out myself.” His scent is sharp with anger as he lifts a hand to stroke my blotchy cheek. “It was in Crest’s papers. A file marked June Bloom, with a copy of the competition contract, the hotel receipts, and this.”
He pulls something from his pocket. As I take the folded piece of card, I find it’s a little creased but still warm from his body. Opening it, my heart gives a heavy thump. “Oh my God. It’s a fucking postcard from the Shire.”
“From Rosie’s Blooms, actually.”
I click my tongue at him as I read the girlish handwriting on the back.
“It’s addressed to Crest and stamped... eight years ago.
” I take a slow, deep breath, sympathy and disappointment warring inside me.
“She tried to find you, Otley.” In fact, she wrote that there was something important she needed to tell them, practically begging Crest to pass on the message.
Did she know Crest was Ellis’ uncle, or was he the only contact she had from her trip to LA?
“Why didn’t she just write you herself?”
A flash of regret softens his hard gray eyes. “There wasn’t a lot of talking at the beginning. We only exchanged the basic details, and we never got as far as surnames or addresses.”
Because they were thrown into rut by their scent match going into heat.
I’ve been the lucky recipient of my alphas’ focus when their blood is up, but I can only imagine how intense it was when their hormones were screaming at them to claim their omega.
“We chatted a little more during the dips,” he goes on, still staring at the postcard, “but I stupidly said we were UCLA students, and Ellis wasn’t there at the time to correct me. My guess is she tried to contact us through the college registrar and discovered it was a dead end.”
I stare at him, dumbstruck that my careful, deliberate alpha was so careless. “Why, Ot?”
He shrugs, but I know he’s upset by the way his jaw throbs. He doesn’t have many tells, but he despises making mistakes, and this one is a doozie. “I was concerned that Ellis was already talking about claiming bites and baby bumps. I wanted to maintain… a little distance.”
“Fuck!” I can just picture it. Ellis glowing with scent match euphoria and Otley being a suspicious ass, his paranoia insisting it was all too good to be true. I storm away from him, my anger surging back to the surface. “You fucked up! So big, Otley.”
When I glance back at him, he gives the slightest nod of agreement.
“We were on our way to grab breakfast when Crest called and said that we needed to check on Ellis’ mom.
Catherine was having bad days even back then, and by the time we returned to the hotel, Lily was gone.
Crest gave us a note that said she’d caught an earlier flight home.
Ellis wanted to go straight to the airport to make sure she was okay, but Crest said she didn’t want any further contact and insisted on her privacy.
All we knew was that she was living on a farm somewhere in Idaho.
” His mouth tightens into a disappointed line.
“We tried to find her, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Do you still have the note?” He nods again, because Otley has the filing habits of a master librarian. “And does her handwriting look anything like this?”
I hold up the postcard and predictably, he shakes his head. “It’s pretty clear Crest wrote it himself.”
Of course, he did. Nathan Crest was a major sleazeball, trying to weasel his way into every corner of Ellis’ life right up until the moment he dropped dead of a heart attack six weeks ago.
Since Ellis and his mom were his only living relatives, Otley took on the responsibility of going through his papers, which is no doubt when he discovered the coverup.
“But you remember what the note said.”
“Word for word. Ellis kept it in his wallet for the longest time…” He clears his throat. “She said that spending her heat with us was a mistake. She had an alpha at home, and we didn’t fit into that life. She wanted to pretend it never happened.”
“You mean Crest wanted to pretend it never happened!”
Because how could he make Ellis into the most bankable heartthrob on the planet if he was tied down to an omega who was popping out his babies?