Fated to the Protective Alpha (Blackridge Pack #1)

1. Chapter 1

Two days of treaty meetings behind them, nothing to show for it. They’d been on the road five hours when Jace pulled into Jenny’s lot.

Theo was hunched over next month’s patrol schedule in the passenger seat. In the back, Rhys and Declan went quiet, worn down by two days of talk that hadn’t moved a single line.

Jenny’s Diner sat where the highway gave up on Braxton, where the road thinned to two lanes and the town stopped pretending to be one. A quarter to seven, and only four or five places still had their lights on. Jenny’s was the best of them, and it wasn’t close.

His gaze ran the lot out of habit as he climbed out. Keller’s sedan up front. A work pickup he knew.

Three trucks he could name by the logos on the doors. A beat-up blue sedan in the far corner, plates too far off to read.

Then the cold hit him, and underneath that, something else.

Montana cold wasn’t the kind of thing you argued with. But there was a thread running through it that didn’t belong, there and gone before he could close his hand around it. It set the animal in his chest pacing.

He drew a slow breath through his nose and got nothing he could use. Diesel off the road. Grease from the vent. Sharp pine off the treeline.

His wolf was up now. Wouldn’t settle.

Theo came around the hood and stopped a pace behind his shoulder. “Alpha?”

“Wolf’s doing something.” Jace kept his eyes on the diner. “Hold on.”

Theo went still and watchful beside him. Rhys and Declan came out of the back, saw the two of them standing out there doing nothing, and said nothing themselves. The pack-link came up, quiet, waiting on him.

Jace took another breath. Caught the thread again, lower, sharper, closer to the door. Then nothing. Then a piece of it again.

He walked. The hair on the back of his neck lifted. He was a step behind whatever this was, and being a step behind anything was not something Jace was built to carry well. The other three fell in behind him without a word, all of them scanning for the thing he couldn’t name yet.

He pulled the door open. Stepped inside.

That was when it hit him.

Not a thread anymore. The whole of it, all at once, straight into his chest like something swung at him. Woven down through the grease and the coffee and the sweet warm something out of the oven was a scent he had never once in his life pulled into his lungs.

Wild honey. Woodsmoke.

And under that, older, something darker, the particular weight of a thing a person buries deep and prays stays buried. Fear. Old fear, gone to root.

Jace's eyes found her before his thoughts caught up to what they were doing.

A woman on the far side of the pass-through, half-turned, saying something back over her shoulder to the kitchen. Light hair tied off her face. A face built out of sharp angles. Hazel eyes.

Mine!

His wolf put the word through him like a current. Not a question. Not a hope. A thing already decided, somewhere below the reach of anything Jace could argue with.

She turned. Didn’t see him. Wrong angle, and he was half in the dark of the doorway.

She set her plates on the rail, called something back to the kitchen, started down the counter toward the register. Her scent moved across the room with her, and his eyes went with it like they’d been tied on. Something in his chest caught, and turned, and locked, and did not come loose.

Alpha? Theo, into his head, careful, already close behind him. Careful.

Jace didn’t answer. Couldn’t find the part of himself that would have. For a held second there was no diner, no pack, no winter at his back. Only her, crossing a worn floor with a coffee pot, not knowing the floor of his whole life had just shifted under her feet.

Theo stepped half around him. Looked past his shoulder into the room. Looked back at Jace’s face, at his shoulders, at the breath that went slow without Jace deciding it should. Theo could read him better than anyone living.

Oh, Theo sent, very quiet. The quiet of a man who’d just understood.

A beat, then Rhys, who’d run the math. Oh.

Declan, a step behind the others as he sometimes was. Ohhh.

The link didn’t move a moment. Then Theo again, and the careful was gone out of it now, replaced with something closer to urgency.

Alpha. You have to move. Take the booth. Alpha.

It cost him more than letting go of anything should. But Jace made his hand come off the door.

The corner booth by the window was open, the dinner rush already thinned to nothing. Theo slid in first, against the wall. Jace took the aisle the way he always did, so he’d have the door. Except tonight the door wasn’t where his eyes wanted to be.

She was across the floor now, pouring for a two-top by the window. Hal Keller sat at it, saying something low, and she laughed. Soft, small, and it surprised her on the way out, like she’d lost the habit of it. Jace felt that land somewhere under his ribs.

Alpha. Declan, not asking.

I know.

She’s human. Declan sent, still pushing. Human women think staring men are creepy.

Jace turned his head to the window. It didn’t help. He found her again in the fogged reflection and tracked her there instead. Pass to counter to two-top to kitchen and back. His body sat still. Everything under it was climbing the walls, straining toward a woman who didn’t know he existed.

She came through the kitchen door with two plates of fries for Hal’s table. Crossing back, she passed booth four. A small boy, a coloring page spread out, a broken crayon held up at her like evidence of something gone deeply wrong in the world.

“Maren.” Jenny, from the pass. “Order up.”

Maren. He had her name now, and his wolf took it and would not give it back.

She didn’t look toward the kitchen. She put a hand on the edge of booth four and went down. Crouched, level with the kid, all of her attention on him.

The kitchen bell rang. She lifted one hand toward Jenny without turning. One minute.

The boy was mid-story, voice going up and down the way a five-year-old’s did when the story was working, something about his crayon being too short, his cousin’s being longer. The bell rang again. She didn’t move off him.

Jace watched her hold that crouch for a broken crayon and a kid she likely didn’t know from any other kid. Watched her reach into her apron and come out with a fresh pack of crayons and set it by his hand.

The boy made an excited sound that wasn’t a word yet. She high-fived him, small palm to her palm, stood, and was already moving. Order off the pass, plates to a booth, two coffees topped off on the way back.

And every part of it cost her something.

He could see it. The straightness of her back was holding something up, not standing easy.

Whatever she’d buried that he’d caught at the door, she carried it across that floor with the coffee pot.

Balanced, hidden, every shift of her shoulders the work of a person keeping a room comfortable while she was the one afraid.

He’d faced down hostile alphas without losing the line of his own breathing. Sitting ten feet from her and doing nothing was the hardest thing his body had been asked to do in years.

Then she turned toward the corner booth, and he forgot how breathing went at all.

You’ll have to order food. Theo, thoughtful as ever.

I’ll handle it, Declan sent, already stepping in.

She came up with her pad out, not quite looking at any of them. Looking at the air near them, the way you looked at a table that hadn’t spoken yet. His wolf growled, wanting her eyes only on him. Jace turned it into a quick cough.

“What can I get you tonight?” Tired, soft at the edges. The voice of a woman a long way from the end of her shift.

“Four cheeseburgers,” Declan said. “Four fries. Extra pickle on two. Whatever pie’s fresh. Four.”

“Apple’s fresh. Peach is a day old.”

“Apple.”

She wrote it down. Then she looked up, the first time since she’d reached the booth, and went down the line. Theo. Declan. Rhys. Jace.

Her eyes held his.

Her eyes widened a fraction. Then she pulled them away.

And nothing else crossed her face. No spark, no snag, no flicker she let stay. Just a tired, even, faraway look at a customer who hadn’t earned a thought yet. The brief widening and the speed of her looking away went into him like a splinter and stayed.

“Anything else?”

“Thanks,” Jace got out. Barely.

The corner of her mouth moved. Not a smile. Something smaller and more guarded than a smile, something she could take back if she had to. Maren nodded, turned, was gone toward the kitchen.

The booth stayed quiet behind her. Nobody looked at Jace. Theo poured coffee into his cup without being asked.

Then the link opened and all three came at once.

Flowers. Dinner. Mark her. Done. Declan, fast and certain.

She’s human, Theo laid it out. She doesn’t know wolves are real. You can’t come at her like a mate. You have to court her. Slowly. Very slowly.

You’ll have to court her, Rhys agreed. By her clock, not yours or any pack timeline. Might be a long time. She’s on the run from something.

A growl came up out of Jace before he’d cleared it.

Look at how she works the room, Rhys went on, steady.

Every time that bell over the door rings, she checks it first. Not scared enough to show.

Just careful. And she was good with that kid.

The kind of good a person learns young, making everyone around them comfortable while they’re the one who’s afraid.

She doesn’t trust easy, Jace. She can’t. Give her the time.

Jace curled his fingers once under the table.

Slow, he sent back, and every letter of it cost. Courting. At her pace. However long that takes.

Confirmed, Theo sent.

Got it, said Declan.

Rhys just nodded and went back to his placemat.

She brought the food a while later. Four burgers stacked with fries, four slices of apple pie balanced up her forearm.

The carry caught him for a second, because it was like every waitress he’d ever watched cross this floor, and it was also her, and those were not the same thing anymore and never would be again.