Alpha's Regret: The Seventh Time was Forever

Chapter 237 – She’s right. You’re really impossible.

Over at the hotel, Voren had already showered and dressed himself in one of the clothes Seraphine had purchased for him the night before.

Sleep had come in its usual limited quantity, two hours, maybe three, if he was being generous with himself. That was normal, for a man who’d spent years with a wolf like Bloodfang. He’d made his peace with it a long time ago, or at least he’d gotten good at pretending he had.

This time, it was just that his sleep deprivation was not Bloodfang, but the fact that he kept awake to make sure Seraphine was safe in her hotel room.

He was standing was just about to step into the hallway when he heard her door pull open, and he stepped out of his own room at the same moment and stopped.

She looked like she’d somehow walked backward through time overnight. He couldn’t explain it any more precisely than that. There was something easier about her this morning, something that had come loose from wherever it had been held tight, and it knocked him completely sideways. Voren had no good response to it to what exactly made Seraphine look so much younger overnight.

’Tell her she looks beautiful,’ Bloodfang said, filling the back of his mind the way he always did when he’d been waiting for exactly this kind of opening but his human knew better.

’No. She’ll read the wrong meaning into it.’

’It doesn’t matter,’ Bloodfang argued. ’Tell her.’

’No,’ Voren refused, and put real weight behind it.

Seraphine’s brows came together slightly as she looked at him. "Having trouble with your wolf?" A beat of silence stretched between them because it was the same with her wolf, and she could not tolerate it any longer. "That reminds me. Can you tell him to stop messing around with mine?"

pulled himself together and offered her a small, measured smile. "Good morning. I slept well, thanks

deeply unimpressed with all of this. ’You really are

human to say something more tangible and not just divert her attention like her words did

caught the internal back-and-forth, but she’d caught the dodge just fine. "Don’t put this on me. I never asked you to protect me, so you can’t

offer. The fact was, he never let a woman take the wheel when he was in the car. It was just in

once, keeping his face easy. "That outfit’s nice, but it’s not going

left it sitting there, the indirect ask, the quiet expectation that

going

lab, not after I

shade darker. The anger moved into them slowly and

had that particular edge she reached for when she was about two exchanges away from shutting the

right, but who’s going to back that up for you?" Voren asked, folding his

into the space before she could fill it. "Look, to keep anyone from reading something into it that has no business being there, just do it out in the open. Two hours, that’s it. You’re in, you’re out, you’ve got the rest of your day back. What do

the city anyway. And there was Daisy, the rogues, the unanswered questions, all the things she needed to look at

said, the word landing flat. "I’ll go

than he’d meant it to be. He’d genuinely expected that to take

back out, he looked at her and gave her a single small