Page 41 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

Mia blinks at me, lost, then catches my meaning and dissolves into giggles. “No, silly! She says you can’t trust them, that men are no good.”

I keep my face easy, though what she’s said unsettles me. No kid her age should be walking around sure that half the world’s out to hurt her. Whatever’s behind it—and I’m starting to think it runs deeper than a deadbeat ex—Jessa’s got no business drilling it into her girl.

Mia bends to dig at her shin, scowling. “Something bit me.”

“Let’s see.” I set my hot dog down on its wrapper. “Put it up here. Stick your leg out.”

She hauls her leg across my knee and shoves the denim up. Above her ankle, a red welt swells, angry where her nails have been at it. “A mosquito got you, by the look of it. We’ll get it cleaned so it doesn’t turn nasty.”

I reach to tug the cuff back down for her. As I do, she cranes around toward whatever Bella’s pointing at across the green, and the loose neck of her shirt slides off one shoulder, baring the top of her back.

There, high on her left shoulder where it meets her spine, sits a small dark mark, no bigger than a thumbprint, one edge of it notched clean through.

Everything in me goes still. “Mia, what’s that?”

Mia twists her neck to follow my stare, then shrugs the collar back up, bored already. “Oh, that’s just my birthmark. I’ve had it forever.”

She’s already swinging her leg down off my knee, the bite forgotten, the mark forgotten, every part of her straining back toward the roundabout where Bella’s waving her over.

“Bella, wait up!” She hops off the bench at a dead run. “You said we’d do the spinny one!”

Then she’s gone, ponytail streaming behind her, sprinting across the grass to her best friend without a single glance back at me, frozen on the bench with the ground gone out from under me.

I’ve seen that mark before, in the mirror, whenever I’ve turned around. An identical dark curl with the same notch broken through one edge, the brand every wolf of Steele blood is born marked with.

Why does Jessa’s daughter have the same birthmark?

Chapter Nine

Jessa

I’ve reconciled the same three figures four times, and they keep coming out wrong because my head is twenty minutes across town at a public park.

Marc has my daughter. Bella’s there too, which ought to settle me. It doesn’t.

I close the spreadsheet, then open it again so I don’t lose the morning’s work. My hands aren’t quite steady on the trackpad. We’ve been in his town ten days, and already I’ve let him drive my kid to a park, sit at my breakfast table, and blow on my knuckles without once asking if he could. Every time I push us apart, he strolls back through the gap.

Some traitor cell in my body lights up whenever he walks into a room, and I hate it.

Worse than the wanting is the calm. When he’s close, the noise in my head shuts off, my shoulders come down, and I breathe easily for the first time all day. Nothing about a man should do that to me, least of all him.

I admired him once, back when he was a name on a jersey. That was before. Before he showed me the rest of him.

I could survive the lust and desire. The fear is the problem. If he ever works out whose daughter Mia is, the warmth goes cold. I’ve watched what men do when they decide they’ve been robbed.

He doesn’t remember me, though. Ten years and a string of women sit between us. I was a few hours of a night he can’t reconstruct, the one mercy I’ve got left, and I should leave it untouched.

My phone says half past two, an hour since they left. Somewhere across town, Marc is crouched in the wood chips, patient with two girls who adore him, and the picture refuses to frighten me, which is the whole problem.

A knock pulls me out of it before I spiral any further.

Rachel stands on the mat with an empty measuring cup in both hands and an apology already on her face. “Sorry to bug you. Do you have any sugar I could steal? I ran out, and the store’s a hike with three kids.”

“Course.” I step back to let her in, then catch the hitch in her step. She’s favoring her right leg, putting it down carefully and lifting it quickly. “Hey. Are you limping?”

“It’s nothing. I tripped on the stairs.” She says it too fast, the cup turning in her hands.

I look at her face, then back at the leg. “Did you trip, Rachel, or did somebody do something?”