Accidental Alpha

by Laurel Curtis

  “No soup for you!” Danny mocked in the Soup Nazi’s voice from Seinfeld.

  “Wade, however, has offered to make us something of his choosing,” I continued seamlessly.

  “Boom!” Danny inserted again, gesturing shrapnel with his fingers, and then explained directly to his woman, “That’s the sound of your dreams exploding. Nary a loaf of meat exists in Wade’s cooking arsenal.” Sotto voce, he added, “Actually, I’m not sure that much of anything exists in Wade’s cooking arsenal. It’s more like a safe. A little, compact, handgun safe.”

  Haley smiled, but somehow managed to suppress a giggle. Though maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the disgruntled grumbles coming from behind me. Expletives and sneers alike, Wade ran Danny through the ringer and back again, and he did it all at a volume barely louder than a dog whistle.

  “Come on,” I encouraged, herding the animals in the direction of the kitchen and patting Wade gently on the back compassionately.

  Danny and Haley really were perfect for each other. And that made them hell on us.

  “Hunt’s coming, right?” Haley asked, linking her arm with Danny’s and skipping her way down the hall in front of me.

  “Yes. I called him this afternoon, and he has the night off.”

  Danny chimed in, something he was really good at, asking, “From work or trolling?”

  Haley laughed and muttered, “Bleh, puking now,” at the same time.

  As unpleasant a thought as it was, I also knew it was true. Shrugging my shoulders and succumbing to what was bound to be a night of inappropriate topics, I answered honestly.

  “Both.”

  Danny’s rich laughter bounced off the walls, zinging and ricocheting between our bodies and landing as a smile on Wade’s now visible face. “Somebody knows her son,” Danny added between chortles, unable to leave his running mental commentary unsaid.

  His face looked young, the only wrinkles being ones made in laughter. Health and happiness didn’t ooze out of his skin, but instead, existed within it, plumping it up and making it vibrate.

  To me, Danny had always been carefree. But for Wade, he’d witnessed years of misery and heartbreak in the young boy he raised as his own. His beautiful brown eyes glowed amber with the knowledge and satisfaction that Danny had made it to the other side. That no matter the fact that a weight would always exist in Danny’s life, he no longer bore the mass of it on his tired shoulders.

  For a parent, it was the pinnacle milestone. The moment of realization that everything had turned out alright. Happiness had found his “son,” taken up residence within his person, and for the first time in twenty-five years, he could take a full, lung-expanding breath.

  Two fingers floated up to my face to fight the sting when it hit my nose, but I knew I had to get it together quickly. Not one person would understand what I was thinking, and that probably included Wade. Even though I could see the evidence written all over his face, a confession wouldn’t be quite as obvious. Men just didn’t think the same way women did.

  “Hello?” we heard along with the gentle squeak of the front door hinges.

  Speak of the troll. There he was.

  “Hunt!” Haley called out exuberantly, her recent disgust all but forgotten and replaced with the excitement she always felt at his arrival.

  Thankfully they’d grown close with age, the battles of their childhood mostly a thing of the past. I’d told them constantly it would happen, but young siblings can never clearly see their way out of the finger-poking, toy-massacring, hair-pulling cloud of childhood torture.

  Hunter came into the kitchen at a jog, picking Haley up in a tight hug and spinning her around. You’d think they hadn’t seen each other in months.

  “Hey, Sis,” he murmured with a smile as he set her down, reaching around her to shake Danny’s hand.

  Rather than release his hand he pulled forward again, catching Danny off balance and sending him careening into the back of Haley unceremoniously. Her shrieks sounded immediately, but I was focused on the reason he’d done it as I watched him make his way toward me quickly. A few stutter steps backward had me hitting counter, but I ran out of real estate to outrun him, and before I knew it, I was settled with my arms around his shoulders, my feet off the ground, and he had me spinning too.

  “Stop!” I screamed, knowing a couple of spins in my son’s arms would be the equivalent of riding Space Mountain for someone with my level of motion sickness.

  “Oh come on, Mama,” Hunter pleaded as he spun. “Ride the wave!”

  “Screw the waves,” I cried. “I don’t like the motion of the ocean!”

  Laughter erupted all around me, but I was starkly aware of the lack of effort to actually assist me.

  At least, that was the case until I felt two warm hands clasp onto my hips and pull. All of a sudden, I wasn’t spinning, and instead, the back of my body was melded to the front of Wade’s.

  “You were looking pretty green,” he whispered in my ear before stepping away and leaving me swaying.

  The unsteady transition to holding my own weight made the emptiness his quick disappearance left behind all the more palpable. But when I finally fought off the nausea enough to raise my eyes, I understood why.

  All eyes were on me. Then they weren’t.

  Three heads bounced back and forth . . . back and forth . . . between Wade and I, and calling the feeling awkward wouldn’t have even begun to cover it.

  “What?” I questioned before thinking better of it. If I’d had all of my wits about me, I would have realized that I didn’t want to hear any answer that the three of them could think up.

  “Oh, nothing,” Hunter dismissed, lulling me into a false sense of security. I nodded and expelled a huge breath just in time to start sucking all of the air in the room back in again.

  “Just reacting to the fact that ole Wade here just worked your body like he owns it.”

  “What?!”

  “Excuse me?!” Wade and I sputtered at the same time, floundering like a couple of beached fish.

  “I was just pulling her off of you before she puked!” Wade spat out quickly, casting a nervous glance between both of my kids and me. I would have thought his hands would have been raised in surrender, but they weren’t, instead crossed across his chest with his feet set wide in a show of male dominance.

  It only took that long and a couple of sly smiles from my kids for me to get my reaction back under control.

  Fucking instigators.

  Every single one of them.

  Holding up a hand to get his attention, I worked quickly to do damage control so that they didn’t run the poor guy off. “Don’t worry, Wade. Our kids are just being assholes again. You did nothing wrong.”

  Turning to my son, I dialed up the maternal heat. “In fact, my dearest son, you’re the one who has something to answer for, spinning me around like that when you know I just have to look both ways too quickly to get queasy.”

  He played the part of a contrite son pretty well, but his burgeoning smile and too smooth exterior belied his words. “Sorry, Mama. You were just too cute to resist.”

  “Yeah, well,” I chastened. “Try harder next time.”

  His eyebrows waggled, and I could have sworn I saw his shame running right out the back patio door. Once it cleared the threshold, he had none left.

  Danny and Haley giggled and gossiped in the background, so I spun around and pinned them with a glare for good measure.

  I wasn’t sure when my kids started running my life, no longer threatened by the authority the raise of one of my eyebrows held, but it had obviously happened a while ago.

  When none of their faces complied with my wishes, I started doling out threats. “Keep it up, and I’m going to kick you all outside until dinner is ready like I used to when you were kids.”

  “You know what, Mom,” Danny offered with a smirk, pulling Haley along behind him, “That’s not a bad idea.”

  The corners of Hunter’s mouth curved upward
as he followed the other two trouble makers down the hallway to the mudroom refrigerator and popped the top on three cold beers.

  As soon as he’d handed them out, all three tipped their bottles in simultaneous solute—so perfectly timed it was as though they’d rehearsed it—and stepped out onto the patio off the back door.

  Sadly, I felt relief.

  Now that the “kids” were gone, I realized that Wade hadn’t said a word since things had gone south.

  Hopefully he was holding up to the stress of the three of them okay. At least with only one of them you could plan and stage a healthy counterattack. This many tended to surround you on all sides.

  “Sorry about that,” I murmured, turning to face him and finding him doing the beginning of food prep on the center island.

  His hands froze—a good idea being that he was wielding a large knife—and his eyes met mine. A small chuckle bubbled out of his throat and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “You’re kidding, right?” he asked, surprising me.

  Blinking my confusion, the ends of my hair tickled my collarbone from shaking my head back and forth. “Kidding? No. Why would I be kidding?”

  Re-centering his grip on the knife, he went back to chopping but spoke frankly as he did. “If you think that’s got me upset, you’ve underestimated me. There’s not one thing they could have said to me that would have stopped me from stepping in to help you when I did.”

  “Thanks,” I whispered softly, feeling all squishy and warm like a true-bred female.

  His hands stopped again so that his eyes could hold mine, and a smirk softened the blow of his words. “I’m not squeamish with blood, but one vomit from you would have quickly turned into two. I was really only thinking of my stomach.”

  A wink pulled at the apple of his cheek briefly, exposing a few extra good-looking wrinkles at the bend of his dark lashes.

  Sun had obviously aged his skin, but it had done it in all the right ways, turning peach into gold and foregoing any kind of marring brown spots.

  Still. I was feeling a lot firmer and colder, if you know what I mean.

  Men.

  “What are you making?” I asked as he tossed the result of his onion chopping into a skillet with already diced celery and butter.

  “Spicy, crispy chicken breaded with cornflake crumbs, rice casserole, green beans, and corn.”

  “Wow,” I muttered, pursing my lips and hitching one cheek upwards in surprise.

  I mean, obviously this was the second night he’d made something for me, but I couldn’t get it through my head that he was a man . . . and he was cooking. Don’t get me wrong, I knew men had the ability to cook—I’d heard of such phantom creatures from friends of mine—but I’d never witnessed it personally.

  Nick hadn’t had time to develop such valuable skills before he passed away. We were both just babies—early twenty-something kids trying to make it on our own. I’d imagine if he’d been given enough time—and been nagged enough by his loving wife—he would have picked up some skills in the kitchen. All other men had been happy to have me wait on them, and unfortunately, unwise to the better facets of life, I was happy to do it.

  Plus, Danny had hinted strongly that cooking wasn’t part of Wade’s forte. I didn’t know what to believe.

  “Trust me, this is basic food. It’s not too hard, and the recipes are nowhere near exact. I can be off by about a quart and the food will still survive.”

  A smile pulled my previously pursed lips off of my teeth.

  “Cooking and honesty. I have to tell you, in my experience with men, this is unprecedented.”

  He waggled his eyebrows and stirred the now aromatic celery and onions. It might have been one of the best smells I’d ever encountered. “Ah, see. Us smart ones have figured out that women have soft spots for both of those traits.”

  My smile deepened.

  “We don’t tell the others though. Then we’d have to share the women.”

  “Could you at least tell the women? If we know there are ones like you out there, we might not settle for the others,” I joked, leaning my elbows into the counter to get a closer whiff.

  Whether I was smelling him or the food, I wasn’t really sure.

  “Hey, don’t look at me,” he defended, raising his hands in a complimenting gesture. “We tell a few of you. You’re the ones who don’t share.”

  I had to laugh at that. It was selfish, but entirely unsurprising that women would want to keep this to themselves. They’d hook their star to said elusive man as tight as they could for as long as they could. Spreading the secret would only create a backstabber.

  “Who have you told other than me?”

  An aura of discomfort thickened the air. Obviously, I’d hit some sort of nerve land mine.

  After several attempts to clear his throat, he finally unclogged hung-up words. “Just Melly.”

  I, of course, had no idea who Melly was or when she’d happened. What I did know, with just two words, was how much she meant to him.

  “Melly?”

  “Melissa.” He paused again, wiped imaginary sweat off of his brow with the back of his hand. “My, um, first wife.” Laughter rumbled from his chest, fresh and self-deprecating. “My only wife.”

  “Oh,” I managed, unsure how to move forward. As much as I didn’t want it to be, sometimes, conversation is just unavoidably awkward. What do you say after that? It was evident that he still very much held affection for this Melissa, but I had absolutely no back story. I’d never heard anything about her, and therefore, had no reference as to what I should be doing.

  Consoling him on his recent loss?

  Avoiding the topic all-together?

  Calling her a bitch for not knowing a good thing when she had it?

  I really didn’t have the answer. So I just stayed silent, watching him rub the chicken in olive oil before dropping it into a cornflake crumb filled ziplock bag and rubbing my fingers into my palms almost incessantly. He was going to have to be the one to make our conversation flow again.

  It took a few minutes, but finally, he broke. “Ah, Jesus. I can feel you staring at me.”

  “Who? Me?” I avoided, glancing behind me for imaginary people.

  “Yeah, good try.”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure what he wanted from me. It wasn’t like I was beating down his door with questions and expecting answers. I was just sitting there. I couldn’t be much more innocent.

  “Alright, alright,” he snapped as though I’d been demanding to hear about her for the last fifteen minutes.

  Talk about a sore spot.

  “Melly . . . Melissa was my wife, God, twenty-five years ago.” His head tipped up to the ceiling. “I can’t believe it’s been that long.”

  He shook his head and worked his tongue on the inside of his bottom lip. Rolled both lips inside his mouth and back out again, and then bit into the bottom one. “She’s the only woman I’ve ever told anything important, and I only had a few years to do it. As soon as I met her, I knew I wanted to marry her. She was fun and full of life, and I knew she’d be the kind of person I wouldn’t mind having around for the next eighty years.”

  My jaw clenched tight as I forced a few sharp nods. Every word seemed too familiar. His pain was so acute, so fresh, and so like mine, I felt like I was transported back decades in an instant. Hopeful, happy, and expectant for a lifetime with my husband.

  “Instead,” he chuckled without humor, “I let her make me happy for the rest of hers without doing nearly enough to return the fucking favor.”

  My nails fought the urge to tear through the skin of my arm at the raw anguish and regret that coated his words.

  Twenty-five years and he still hurt.

  The almighty power of love, carving a hole so deep no other emotion stood a chance.

  Once again, I found it most difficult to escape the pull of silence. But I didn’t succumb, rather, saying all of the things that I didn’t know if I should say.

  “Wade,” I called, just
hoping to get his eyes to meet mine. When they did, I queried softly, “Did you love her?”

  Shock washed into the tightening of his jaw seamlessly. “More than I knew was possible.”

  I nodded my authority. “Then she knew. And she probably wouldn’t have changed a thing.”

  The table filled in at the ringing of the metaphorical dinner bell, and Wade used my floral oven mitts to set hot food at the center of the kitchen table.

  Something about it made me smile, lifting the weight of our earlier conversation off of my shoulders. When he noticed my focus, it did the same for the tension in his face.

  Several folders stood strategically between my legs under the table, ready and waiting to make me nervous again. I knew I’d have to come up with some type of tale, weaving my carefully crafted words into a story that the peanut gallery would buy. A reason to drop every one of their responsibilities and plans to go on an impromptu trip with their mother.

  If I knew this crowd, and their inclination for suspicion, it was going to take some fancy fast talking.

  Laughter rippled from Haley to Danny to Hunter and back again as they made joke after joke, pausing only to shovel food into their waiting mouths. They briefly thanked Wade for the contribution—as they’d been raised by me—but they sure as hell didn’t dawdle on the subject. A simple ‘thanks’ would have to do.

  “I can’t believe you’re reading all this romance shit now,” Hunter teased Danny, shaking his head in manly dismay. “I honestly don’t understand it.”

  Danny was, of course, completely unrepentant, the deep dimples at each corner of his mouth seemingly a permanent fixture. “That’s because you haven’t read it, dude. Trust me on this one.”

  Hunter’s eyes were wary, but interested. I laughed at the smirk Haley was sporting as she nodded.

  “It’s like an owner’s manual,” she offered. “Points out all the moving parts and maintenance for owning your very own woman. When it’s best to do a tune-up and how to change the oil, so to speak.”

  Danny smirked and rested his hand carefully on the back of Haley’s chair. His eyes, however, went beseechingly to his male comrade. “Women’s engines can get complicated . . .”