Page 48 of The Alpha’s Unclaimed Mate

“Her birth certificate?”

“It says Derek. He’s the stepfather, a friend who put his name down to keep her respectable. He didn’t father that girl.” I meet his eyes. “Jessa let it slip once. The real one is somebody else, somebody she calls a deadbeat.”

Adrian studies me for a long moment. “You’re not a deadbeat.” Then, gentler, “Though I’ll grant you, back then, maybe you were halfway there. You ran through women.”

“I didn’t.” Heat moves up my throat. “I had a couple of girlfriends, sure, but that was before the matches, and I was careful every time.”

“What if she drugged you?” Adrian doesn’t blink. “What if Jessa put something in your drink and took you to bed?”

I stare at him. “Then what? She has my kid and stays silent for ten years? That’s nonsense. If she drugged me, slept with me, and bore my daughter, she’d have come to me with her hand out.”

“What if she did try?”

My mouth opens. Nothing comes. I think of Jessa in my kitchen, jaw set, telling me she reached out to the father once and his people shut the door in her face. The memory stays put, too heavy for me to move.

I shake my head. “Jessa’s not the type to drug a man.”

“It was a theory.” Adrian lifts a shoulder. “Maybe you were just drunk past sense.”

“I don’t know.” That’s the truth of it, and I hate saying it. “My wolf likes them. Both of them.”

Adrian grins, the bastard. “Maybe she’s your mate.”

“She’s not.” The denial is immediate. “A fated bond doesn’t whisper. It slams into you all at once. I’d have known the first second she got in my car.”

I lost my brother and his bonded mate in one night. What it did to the wolf he left behind taught me never to hand anyone that much power over me.

“So what do you want to do?” He spreads his hands. “Easiest road is a blood draw. Shifter blood reads different from human under the right eyes. A lab can’t tell you she’s yours, but it can tell you she isn’t fully human. That’s the only thing you need.”

“It is,” I agree. And still I hesitate.

A test hands me an answer I can’t give back. If she’s mine, ten years were stolen from me, and I’ll have to decide whether I can forgive Jessa for it. Say she isn’t, and I lose the picture I’ve been building without permission, the one where I keep them both. Neither ending leaves me where I’m standing now.

He catches the pause. “What’s the holdup? What exactly have you got that’s twisted you up this much?”

“Mia’s allergic to the same flowers I am.” I count it off. “She has a birthmark in the same place I do, matched to mine. The kid won’t touch a carrot.”

Adrian blinks. “She hates carrots. That’s a pillar of your case.”

“Did you miss the birthmark?”

“The birthmark, fine, that’s strange.” He holds up a hand. “But half the world swells up around a lily, and every child on earth hates a vegetable. You might be chasing something that isn’t there.”

“There’s one more.” I hold his eyes. “Last week I put a bandage on a bite on her shin. By the time we reached her mother’s door, the skin was clean, no welt, no scab, nothing.”

He sobers. “How long?”

“Under an hour.”

He has no quick answer because he knows what closes a wound that fast, same as I do, and none of it is human.

“There’s something here,” I insist before he can talk himself back out of it. “Why else would Jessa hover over that girl every time I’m within ten feet of her? She doesn’t want me knowing something.”

He has no answer for that. After a beat, he offers, “You want me on it?”

“No. You’ve got dead kids in the ground somewhere and a syndicate to outsmart.” I shake my head. “I’ll handle my own end of this.”

After he’s gone, I walk to the trash and look down at the lilies bent across the rim. This morning I asked Bella to single those out for Mia. I told myself it was harmless, that I only wanted to watch and be sure. The guilt of making that child sick sits heavy in me because I doubted she’d react at all. She did, the welts climbing her arms within the hour. Being right only made it worse.