Page 39 of Pin My Alpha
I take another bite, chewing slowly.
“Well?” he asks.
“The presentation is a little desperate.”
“I’ll work on it.”
“And it’s annoyingly good.”
A small smile touches his mouth. “I can live with that.”
My stomach does a low, warm flip that has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with the fact that he looks pleased. It’s infuriating.
We eat. The only sounds are the scrape of forks and the hum of the fridge. I keep waiting for the questions. So what are we? Why did you run? I’ve got answers ready, sharp and dismissive. But he just eats his pasta, his gaze on his own bowl. The silence starts to feel like a tactic. By the time I’m scraping the last of the sauce from my bowl, I’m wound tight enough to snap.
I set my fork down with a sharp clink. “Okay. What do you want?”
Declan looks up, his own fork halfway to his mouth. “Right now?”
“Yes. This is the part where you tell me the real price of dinner.”
His brow furrows. “There isn’t one.”
“Everyone wants something.”
He leans back against the counter. “I want the bar to stay open. I want Tessa to stop threatening to murder our landlord. I want Diego to stop trying to carry three kegs at once because he thinks it impresses people.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Not unless his goal is a hernia.” His gaze settles on me, steady enough that I have to look down at my hands. “And I want you here,” he says. “But I’m not going to make you pay for pasta to get it.”
The words are just there. A fact. My chair scrapes against the floor as I stand up, because sitting is no longer an option. If I stay there, I might say something stupid. Something soft.
“Your apartment is weird,” I announce, moving away from the table.
Declan blinks. “Weird?”
“It’s too normal. You cook. You own matching bowls. There isn’t a single piece of furniture in here that looks like it was designed by a twelve-year-old with a podcast.” I run a hand along the back of his couch. “It’s suspicious.”
“I’ll try to be more of a mess.”
“I’m not saying I disapprove. I’m saying I’m investigating.” I wander into the living room, which is so small the couch almost touches the coffee table. There’s a lamp, a stack of mail. Nothing is trying to prove anything.
Then I see it.
Tucked beside a bookshelf is a battered acoustic guitar. The wood is scratched to hell near the bottom, and one of the tuning pegs is a different color from the others. A milk crate sits next to it, stuffed with vinyl records, their sleeves worn soft at the corners. Above that, a whole shelf of songbooks. Dog-eared, spines cracked, with pencil notes scribbled in the margins.
I pull one out. “You play?”
Behind me, a plate clinks in the sink. “A little,” Declan says, his voice a little tight.
“A little?” I flip through the pages. Chords, lyrics, notes in his handwriting. “This is a whole sad-guy starter pack.”
I turn around. He’s standing at the counter with a dish towel, and he looks almost—Jesus. Sheepish. Declan Byrne, who can throw a drunk alpha out of his bar without raising his voice. Who can pin me to a mattress and murmur things that turn my brain to soup. But ask him about a guitar and he looks like he wants the floor to swallow him whole.
That is unacceptable information to have about a person.
“You played gigs,” I say. It’s not a question.
