A True Alpha Christmas (6 page)

“What? Mom, no—”

Her mom took her by the shoulders but dropped her voice low. “Mia, you should have told me. Whatever he’s forcing you into, we’ll get it taken care of—”

“Mother!” Mia’s voice screeched.

Lucas sailed around the corner. His wide-eyed gaze flipped between her mother’s thin fingers digging into Mia’s shoulders and Mia’s enraged face. She couldn’t imagine what he was thinking, but he stayed at the edge of the kitchen, watching. Waiting. Letting her take the lead in this… well, it was time for her to set some things straight.

“Mother, Lucas
is
a shifter. But he’s good and kind and decent—he’s nothing like the gang shifters. He’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known. And he’s my… he’s my… mate.” She paused, breath frozen in her chest. Her mother’s hands dropped from Mia’s shoulders, her face increasingly horrified with every word.

“I’m a shifter, too.” It came out a whisper, but it felt like a shout that echoed off the walls.

Her mom blinked once, then twice. Then she seemed to collapse a little, falling back against the refrigerator in a kind of shock that kept her face slack and her eyes searching Mia’s face. Then a slow rolling fury climbed up from her chest, turning her neck and then her cheeks red. She whirled away from Mia and stalked toward Lucas, who stood stock-still and wide-eyed at the edge of the linoleum that marked the kitchen area.

Her mother stopped right at the dividing line and glared up into Lucas’s face.

“Get out of my house.” The words were low but clipped… and so full of hatred that her mother didn’t even sound like herself.

Lucas searched her face for a long moment. Before Mia could decide what she wanted him to do, he dropped his gaze, turned, and marched out of the apartment. Only when the door closed behind Lucas did Mia realize she should have come to his defense. She should have told her mother that she had no right to treat him that way. But then her mother turned to Mia, her face full of leaden pain.

“I always thought… I had my suspicions…” Her mom braced herself against the chipped Formica of the countertop. “Your father. I thought he might have been one of them. And now you’re… Mia, honey, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I would never have…”

Mia’s stomach writhed like it was filled with snakes. “You would never have… what? Had me? If you’d known?”

“No! No, Mia, honey, that’s not what I meant.”

Mia stormed past her mother’s weak protests, tears jumping to her eyes. But before she could reach the door, before she could flee from the idea that her mother wished she had never been born, a hand caught her arm and stopped her. Mia wanted nothing more than to run from this hellhole and never return, but her mother’s grip on her arm was strong… and Mia’s anger wasn’t enough to wrench her free.

“Mia, honey, please look at me.”

Mia dragged her gaze from the scuffed floor and looked into her mother’s pained face. “I can’t help what I am, Mom.”

“No, of course not!” She tried to pull Mia into a hug, but Mia just twisted her face away. “Mia, I love you. I’ve…. I’ve never regretted having you. I only meant that, if I’d known your father was a shifter, I would never have spent that night with him. I wouldn’t have wanted that life for you. I would take it away if I could.”

Mia eased out of her mother’s hold, gently but firmly. “Being a shifter isn’t
bad.
I’m proud of what I am, Mother. It’s powerful and amazing. And so is Lucas. He’s my alpha and my mate… and that
means
something to me. Something you’ll probably never understand. I wish you could, but if you can’t… then you can’t. But there’s nothing wrong with what we have together. In fact, there’s something very, very right about it.”

With that, Mia turned and strode out of her mother’s apartment. Tears battled to break free of her eyes, but she held them back. She didn’t have to go far—Lucas was waiting for her on the street.

“Mia.” His voice was anguished, and he tried to draw her into his arms, but she pushed him away. As much as she loved him—and she meant every word she said to her mom—all of this could have been avoided if he had simply made this right in the human world by marrying her. Maybe it paled in comparison to the magical bond they had, but it meant something to everyone else. It would have reassured her mother… and they could have left it at that. Her mom would never have had to know they were shifters at all.

All her anger, all her tears, surged up and clenched her fists at her side. “Well that went exactly as I expected.” The bitterness in her voice was pointed at him, pouring all her emotion into her words.

“Let me fix this—”

“You can’t fix this, Lucas!” It was too late for that; the damage was done. Mia wiped the tears off her face, and she spun away from him, stalking down the sidewalk. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, she was just blindly moving
away.
Away from her mom. Away from Lucas. Away from this damn neighborhood, her past, her deadbeat shifter father who made all of it happen… she was
so
done with all of it.

“Mia, where are you going?” Lucas caught up to her side in an instant, hovering protectively over her as if the drug dealers were going to gun her down at any moment.

“Away.” It wasn’t fair to blame Lucas, she knew that… but she was suffocating on all the emotion flooding her body. She needed to get away for a while: regroup, calm down, get a cool head before she did anything rash. And she couldn’t do that with Lucas’s hulking form by her side.

“Mia, wait.” He had one hand on her arm.

She almost wrenched free in a pique of anger, but then she saw he had the other hand in the air, hailing a taxi lumbering down the road toward them. She let him hover and keep her safe while the taxi pulled to a stop. He opened the door for her and gave his apartment address to the cabbie.

“No,” Mia said to the startled cabbie. “Take me to the University of Washington.”

Lucas frowned at her, but she just held up a hand to keep him from getting into the cab after her. “I just… I need to be alone for a while, Lucas.”

She reached for the door, and he barely stepped back in time before she pulled it closed. She left him on the sidewalk as the cab trundled away.

“You know, I’m your friend, not your personal secretary.” Jupiter’s voice drifted past the music pumping through Mia’s earbuds, barely resolving into words, but Mia got the gist: her best friend was sick of running interference between Mia and her mate.

Mia yanked out the earbuds and dialed down the blues music still thumping through them. “Just tell him I’m sick, and he should stop annoying you.”

“I am
so
not lying to a six foot three hunk of shifter muscle.” Jeeter tossed Mia’s phone and it landed next to her in the puff of blankets heaped around her.

Mia had spent most of the last twenty-four hours curled up on her old dorm bed, stewing, listening to music, sleeping, and generally trying to tune out the world and make it disappear.

So far, no luck.

She picked up the phone and glanced at the texts—there were over a hundred messages now, most from Lucas, some from Lev. Which was just Lucas’s attempt to get her to answer through his brother. It worked in a strange sort of way: when Lev started texting, Jupiter, in a fit of overly-dramatic frustration, grabbed Mia’s phone and stabbed at it, trying to turn it off. She inadvertently answered the text, but it was gibberish. Then she sent another saying they shouldn’t be alarmed, that Mia was alive and just being ornery. Then Jeeter started a whole conversation with Lev. After that, she just answered the texts as they came in.

Mia ignored them all.

She held out the phone to Jupiter. “Tell them I’ll be better and back to work on Monday.” Jupiter just gave her a dirty look. It was only Saturday night—that gave Mia another whole twenty-four hours before she would have to deal with the fact that her mate and her mother were polar opposites and both wanted her to live solely in their worlds. When the truth was she didn’t belong completely in either one.

Mia shrugged, tossed the phone to the foot of her bed, and plugged the earbuds back in. Jupiter marched across the room and yanked them back out.

“Hey!” Mia said. “Eardrums. I might need them in the future.”

“You need to get dressed.” Jupiter loomed over Mia’s little nest in the bed. Only then did Mia realize her roommate had already put on her outfit for the Tree Lighting party.

Mia snarled. “I’m perfectly dressed for tonight.” She had on flannel cat pajamas she had borrowed from Jupiter. Very stylish. But they were warm and all she would need for another evening of solitude in her dorm bed. “But if you’re going home with Colin tonight,
please
go to his place. That is
not
something I want to see.” The last thing she needed was a reminder of the alpha she turned down… the one she was sure would have married her in a heartbeat. Which would have been very convenient—the only problem being that she didn’t love Colin. She loved Lucas. And that thought just made her shoulders droop.

Jupiter had gone back to ignoring her, which was just as well. Mia was a mopey mess.

She had thought getting some space from Lucas would help clear her head, but her inner wolf had spent the whole time whining. And it was just getting worse. The moon was full tonight—which didn’t mean her wolf was coming out or anything like that; those were just fairy tales—but the lunar cycles
did
seem to stir around the magic in her blood, now that she was mated. And tonight, her longing to be connected with her alpha was running stronger than usual.

Or maybe she just missed him.

She really did need to pull it together. There was no way she could face the packs of SparkTech in this state. She’d skip the party, stay in her cocoon a little longer, and then eventually, sometime tomorrow, drag her sorry butt back to Lucas and his fancy downtown apartment. And deal with the fallout then.

Jupiter was digging around in her closet, which was strange since she was already dressed. Mia would have thought the Tree Lighting party was actually a costume party given the lumberjack outfit Jeeter was decked out in, but she said something about everyone dressing for the weather, and the tree being buried in the Olympic forest. Mia didn’t put it all together until Jeeter withdrew from the closet armed with a second pair of jeans and a midnight-black fuzzy sweater.

She tossed the clothes at Mia. “Get dressed.”

Mia just stared at the clothes then peered up at Jupiter. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. Not going to the party.”

Jupiter stalked over and crossed her arms. “I don’t care. You’re getting dressed, regardless. Because Colin’s going to be here any minute, and I am
not
letting him see you in this miserable state. He’ll get way too much satisfaction from that.”

Mia’s wolf growled, and Mia nearly did, too. But her roommate was right. She would fix things with Lucas… eventually. They were just having a fight, not breaking up. Not that she could break up with her mate, anyway. Even if she wanted to—which she didn’t—they were mated for life. It was a magical bond stronger than any ring or ceremony or quarrel about mothers and potential mothers-in-law. And Mia didn’t want Colin to think she was miserable being with Lucas. Or would have been better off with Colin instead. Because neither of those was true.

“All right.” Mia sighed and worked her way out of her nest of blankets. “I’ll get dressed. But as soon as you guys leave, I’m going back to the cocoon.”

Jupiter threw up her hands. “Whatever.”

Mia struggled into the jeans and threw on the sweater. Not a moment too soon, as a double knock at the door signaled Colin’s arrival. Mia ran a quick brush through her hair, then Jeeter opened the door. Filling the doorframe with his broad shoulders, Colin was a hunk of shifter muscle all his own. His rugged cable sweater stretched across his chest, and Mia could see her roommate melt a little as Colin fixed those blazing green eyes on her. If he thought her lumberjack shirt and dainty boots were unappealing, it certainly didn’t show in the red hot gaze he was raking over Jeeter’s body. He leaned down, dropped a kiss on her cheek, and whispered something in her ear that made Jeeter giggle.

Giggle.
Her roomie didn’t giggle unless she’d had one too many drinks at a dorm party. But Mia could attest to the power of an alpha to bring out that response. And while Colin was officially a beta, he was obviously all-alpha with Jeeter. He didn’t even seem to notice Mia until he leaned back to ask if Jeeter was ready to go. She pulled Colin into the room, coming back to her bed to snag her coat.

“Mia.” Colin’s voice had a little uptick of surprise. He flashed a look to Jeeter then back to her. “Are you coming with us?” He almost sounded disappointed. Maybe there was more to the whole Colin-Jeeter thing than Mia had thought possible.

“No, I’m… under the weather,” Mia said.

“Oh, come on,” Jupiter said. “This is a big deal for the pack, right, Colin?”

He nodded, but his gaze was all for Mia. Not in the hot, intense way he had looked at her before—back when he was still vying for her to be his mate—but in a concerned way. Like he was worried about her. Which only stirred up pangs of guilt in her chest: if Colin was concerned, Lucas must be going out of his mind with worry. She really should have answered some of his texts.