Chapter 13
BIANCA
The captain brings us into the public marina between fishing boats and much larger ones.
Weller helps tie us off and Owen climbs onto the dock and checks both directions before reaching for me.
I let him lift me by the waist in a way that’s not entirely brotherly.
The whole dock moves faintly beneath my feet even after the boat settles.
A cute village begins at the end of the dock, a loose collection of buildings gathered around brick paths and patches of grass.
Restaurant patios are already filling for lunch.
Someone is frying seafood nearby, and the smell tangles with sugar from a bakery and the ocean still clinging to my face.
A trio plays outside a pub beneath strands of lights that probably look magical after dark.
Families pull wagons loaded with towels and toys.
A group of women in matching hats wobble past on rental bicycles laughing and holding on to their fruit-topped drinks.
Golf carts roll through the narrow lanes with dogs hanging their heads over the sides, and none of the people who pass look like they give a shit about us.
It’s perfect.
A golf cart slows nearby and Owen moves closer until his arm brushes mine, but the driver only waves us out of the lane and continues toward the marina.
Nobody recognizes us. Nobody calls our names.
Tristan leads us past a small grocery with baskets of produce outside and a hardware store displaying beach chairs, batteries, and hurricane shutters in the window. Weller clocks both without comment. I do too. Food, water, tools... all of the essentials. Charming is nice. Useful is even better.
The ice-cream shop order window catches my eye. I slow beneath the painted sign showing a strawberry cone, and Freddie changes direction so quickly Weller nearly walks into him.
“We need to keep moving,” Weller says.
“But she wants ice cream.” Freddie practically whines.
“I never said that.”
Freddie gives me a look. “You made a face.”
“What kind of face?”
“The one where you pretend you don’t want something in case someone tells you no.”
That is rude, invasive, and unfortunately accurate. Before I can deny it, he’s already at the window ordering strawberry in a waffle cone. Weller studies the people around us, Owen studies the roofline, and Tristan leans against the wall beside me as if he has nowhere else to be.
“He’s going to buy you everything you look at,” Tristan murmurs.
“That sounds expensive.”
Freddie returns and hands me the cone with both dimples showing. The first bite is cold enough to hurt my teeth, sweet and bright against the salt on my lips, and I close my eyes while it melts across my tongue.
When I open them, all four alphas are watching my mouth.
“You people need hobbies.”
“Apparently, it’s keeping our little sister out of trouble,” Tristan says.
“Fat chance of that.”
Weller makes a displeased sound, but his attention drops when a line of pink ice cream slips over my thumb. I lick it away slowly because I am not above making his day more difficult.
Tristan’s attention shifts past my shoulder, and I follow it to a narrow pharmacy wedged between a souvenir shop and a golf-cart rental. His smile disappears so quickly that my fingers tighten around the cone before he touches two fingers to Weller’s arm and crosses the brick path.
Through the front window, I watch him speak to the woman behind the counter. She checks the shelves at her back, disappears through a doorway, then returns shaking her head. I watch as she writes something on the back of a business card and passes it over.
He folds the card once as he comes back and looks at me before Weller, which is answer enough.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing here. She gave me three places on the mainland to try.”
I take another bite before worry can ruin the ice cream.
We continue toward the music. Freddie disappears from my side for less than a minute and returns with a bundle of flowers wrapped in brown paper - daisies, snapdragons, and several wild-looking purple things sticking out at every angle.
“Freddie.” I shift the cone to accept them. “You don’t have to keep buying me things.”
He tries to straighten one of the bent stems. It tips right back. Then he shrugs lightly. “I’ve always wanted to be able to buy you flowers.” His dimples deepen. “And these reminded me of you.”
I tuck them against my chest and kiss his cheek. The contact is quick because we are standing in public, but his hand slides around my waist and keeps me there for one extra breath.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
A sharp, tiny bark sounds behind me, and I turn before I can stop myself.
A dog rescue has set up beside the music with a folding table, a hand-painted adoption sign, and a low pen full of puppies tumbling over one another.
One chews on a rope toy. Another is asleep in the water bowl.
A fluffy little golden retriever has front paws on the wire and one ear folded inside out.
She looks directly at me and loses her mind.
The flowers end up in Tristan’s hands. My ice cream goes to Owen. Then I’m kneeling beside the pen while the puppy scrambles into my arms and covers my chin in wet kisses.
“Oh my God.” I laugh and try to turn my face away, which only gives her access to my ear. “You’re disgusting. I love you.”
Her whole body wiggles. She smells like warm fur, grass, and puppy breath. Her paws are too big for the rest of her, with soft pink pads and tiny claws that catch in the crochet swimsuit. I sit back on my heels and let her climb me while she licks every inch of skin she can reach.
Freddie crouches beside us. The puppy abandons my chin long enough to bite at one of his loose curls, and he laughs so hard he nearly tips into the pen.
“She likes me.”
“She thinks you’re a chew toy.”
Owen kneels on my other side with the melting cone held awkwardly away from his shirt. The puppy tries to launch herself toward it, then changes her mind when he puts a hand against her chest. She licks his knuckles.
“I want her,” I say softly. Almost too soft to hear.
The rescue volunteer smiles from behind the table. “She’s almost four months old. We found her and the rest of her litter after a bad storm, and she’s the last one still waiting to find a home.”
The last one.
Well, fuck.
I gather her closer, pressing my nose into the warm spot between her ears. The puppy wriggles onto her back in my arms and gnaws on my cover-up, completely confident I belong to her now.
“What would she need?” Freddie asks the woman, who quickly starts giving him a rundown of her vet records and basic puppy necessities.
Tristan and Weller have been quiet behind us. I feel Weller before he steps closer, the pause in the pack’s excitement pulling across my skin. He looks at the puppy, then at me, and I already know.
“Bianca.”
“Don’t say it.”
He presses his lips together.
I flip the puppy’s folded ear back into place. She tilts her head and it flops over again immediately. She attacks my thumb, growling with so much confidence that I laugh, and the sound comes out lighter than anything has in a long time.
The alphas tense.
That makes it worse.
Weller crouches until we are eye level, careful not to crowd me.
“She’s a baby. She needs full-time care.
She needs food, a veterinarian, which means paperwork.
We don’t know what tonight looks like yet, let alone next week.
” His gaze flicks toward the people moving around us before returning to mine.
“And if your heat breaks before we find what you need, a puppy cannot be in the middle of that.”
The puppy catches my finger between her tiny teeth. I let her chew while I look at the rescue form clipped to the table, the line asking for an address, another for a phone number...
“Okay.”
Weller’s face tightens. “Darling?—”
“You’re right.” My throat goes tight as I kiss the fur between the puppy’s eyes before she can lick my mouth again, and I plead with myself not to cry as I struggle to make my arms release her inside the pen.
The puppy twists around at once, paws reaching for me as she jumps against the side, and I stand and turn away from her before I do something stupid like grab her and run.
My empty arms feel wrong. Freddie takes my hand in his, tugging me into his warmth, and my throat squeezes.
Owen stares behind me at the pen, while Weller looks at me with the expression of a man who hates himself a little more than he did a few minutes ago.
Tristan hands me my flowers. A small white card disappears between his fingers before he slips it into the pocket of his flamingo shirt.
“What was that?” I ask.
“The rescue’s card.”
“Why?”
His gaze drops briefly to the puppy, who is now attempting to climb the side of the pen after me. “Because Weller is occasionally wrong.”
Weller hears him and narrows his eyes, but Tristan has already turned toward the grocery store.
I let Freddie pull me away. It takes effort not to look back, so naturally I do it three times before the rescue tent disappears behind a cluster of bicycles.
A wine stand sits beneath a striped awning ahead, its bottles packed into silver tubs of ice, and before anyone can steer me toward the grocery store, I have a cold bottle of champagne in my hand.
“We should celebrate our emancipation.”
The words sound too bright and cheery for how I feel, but fake it til you make it, right? I want a drink badly enough to stop thinking about the puppy, and all the ways this tiny glimpse of normalcy could be ripped from us at any moment.
Weller looks past me at the crowd instead of the bottle. “We aren’t safe enough to drink.”
“And if your heat starts—” Freddie begins.
Tristan sighs, takes the champagne out of my hand, and hands cash to the girl tending the stand, who doesn’t bother to card him. He tucks the bottle beneath his arm.