Page 29 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

I glance back at him. “What have you been giving her?”

“The usual stuff.” He hesitates. “We had steak this afternoon. She only got some of it down.”

I turn fully around to stare at him. “She has a bad reaction, can’t keep anything down, and you fed her a steak?”

“It’s good steak. It’s protein.”

“She needs broth. Soup. Something light and warm that won’t sit heavy.” I pinch the bridge of my nose. “What else can you even cook?”

“I do a good steak.” He pauses. “I manage eggs when I have to.”

I gesture at Bella, at the whole impossible house. “How has this child survived ten years in your care?”

He scratches the back of his head and has the grace to look sheepish. “Sheer luck, mostly.”

I huff and turn back to the girls. “How about I make you two some soup and sandwiches? Get something gentle into you?”

“Mom makes the best sandwiches in the entire world,” Mia announces with total authority.

Bella’s eyes brighten for the first time since I walked in. “Yes, please.”

Downstairs, I trail Marcus through rooms that keep opening into bigger rooms, and the scale of the place starts to grate on me. One family lives here. Two people, a man and a little girl, rattle around inside square footage that could house twenty. The furniture looks like nobody’s allowed to sit on it. Gold glints from the picture frames, the fixtures, a row of ornaments along a shelf that each probably tally up to more than I make in a month.

“Who designed this place?” I can’t quite scrub the edge out of it.

“I did.” He says it without apology, leading me toward the back. “At the top of my career. My girlfriend at the time was an interior designer, so she had opinions.”

“Of course she was.” I don’t bother softening it.

He shoots me a look, half amused, half wounded. “What? You don’t like it?”

“I have no opinion.” I roll my eyes at the gaudy design.

We pass under an arch into a kitchen the size of my living room, and my eyes catch on a gilt vase by the window, tall as a child and holding nothing at all.

“You hate it,” he accuses, watching my face. “You’ve got nothing but opinions.”

“I have no opinion,” I repeat and set my jaw.

He laughs under his breath. “For what it’s worth, I’m not attached to most of it. When Bella’s grown, she’ll want to tear it all out and redo it her way. I’ll let her.”

The casual love in that catches me off guard, so the question’s out before I’ve thought it through. “Bella? Isn’t redecorating a house something a wife would want to do? Yours, someday?”

“No wife.” He pulls a cutting board down and sets it on the counter for me. “I’m not looking to give Bella a stepmother.”

I tug open the enormous fridge and start hunting through it. “No?”

“Most of the women who come around me want the name or the bank account.” He says it without a scrap of self-pity. “I won’t bring someone like that into Bella’s life and let her get attached only for them to walk the moment the shine wears off. She’s been left enough.”

I straighten up with an onion in my hand, and the picture I’ve held of him for ten years cracks a little wider. “That’s not the worst instinct,” I admit. “Half the time you have no idea who you’re really standing beside until it’s too late.”

My voice comes out rougher than I want it to. I clear my throat and turn back to the vegetables.

He leans a hip on the counter. “You’re sighing like a woman who got her heart stepped on.”

“I’ve never had much luck in love.” I keep my eyes on the onion, the knife, anything but him. “I seem to collect deadbeats. It’s a gift.”

“There’s a story in that.”