“I NEED ANOTHER Oreo,” Kisha chirps, never taking her eyes from the poem she’s working so hard on.

After Alpha and I made love one more time, we rushed to get over here for Poem Day. We were a few minutes late, but Kisha had already taken to bossing the group around and getting them settled. I love that little girl.

“How’s your poem coming along?” I question as I squat beside her.

Her page is filled with Ks both lowercase and uppercase. She also drew a rainbow at the top with her pencil.

“It’s good, Miss Lark. I’m writing a poem about my favorite things,” she tells me as she draws yet another K.

I ruffle her hair before standing.

As I rise, I scan the dirty room. I’d love to have a nice place for these kids. A place with tables and chairs. A place with art boxes filled with crayons and markers. A place with stacks of multicolored paper. I’ll keep saving for these kids. One day, I’ll give them the sanctuary they deserve.

“Anyone else need a cookie?” I question.

Everyone shakes their heads no, so I allow my eyes to skate over to him.

Alpha.

The man with a weird-ass name who thinks his real one is that of my dead husband.

Connor is a common name.

I ignore the sensible side of me and attempt to douse the tiny internal flame of mine with accelerant.

Alpha has too many secrets.

Alpha knows things about you.

Alpha has ulterior motives.

As if he knows I’m thinking about him, his eyes lift to mine and he grins.

Smiles are the devil.

My knees buckle, and I attempt to blame the sudden weakness on my lack of food. He insisted that we have breakfast before Poem Day, but we’d already wasted too much time on each other’s bodies. This morning, when I stepped into their apartment, I had every intention of giving him the what for. I wanted to wring his neck and demand answers. But when I saw the desolate look in his eyes and how lost he appeared to be, I caved.

I wanted to fix him.

Lark doesn’t fix people. Hell, she can’t even fix herself.

“Are you an angel?” he murmurs with a playful grin.

Damn him and that beautiful smile.

I curl my lip in disgust and roll my eyes at him. “No, I am not an angel.”

He chuckles before tacking on his next words. “You look like you fell right from Heaven.”

Under normal circumstances, I would flip off someone who was laying on such a cheesy line, but when Alpha says it, it stirs something inside me. Cheesy lines are how I found my husband. Apparently, cheesy lines are my kryptonite.

After the smile that woke me from the darkness of myself, he speaks. The words that come out are awful and adorable all at once.

“Hey, do you have a Band-Aid?” the beautiful man questions.

My eyes frantically scan his body, which appears to be unharmed. When his blue eyes find mine, they have a mischievous glint to them. I want to put my guard up, but I can’t stop looking at his handsome face. The stupid man has me under his spell.

I don’t provide him with a verbal answer and shake my head no.

With a smile so big that it reaches all the way from where he is on the sidewalk to my position on the porch steps spreading across his features, he says, “Because I just scraped my knee falling for you.”

I blink my eyes several times in shock. Wait. Did he just come on to me?

“Excuse me?” I question. I’m still surprised that the blond-haired man with muscles that barely hide beneath his Marines T-shirt is talking to me. Lark Hutchinson. The girl nobody talks to.

Instead of answering me, he smiles with his eyes trained on me and begins patting himself down. I quirk a brow in question.

“Miss, I seem to have lost my number. Can I have yours?”

Oh.

My.

God.

He really just didn’t.

With an eye roll, I stand and turn away from him to go back inside. If I continue to sit here, I’ll melt into a puddle of goo on the steps. Lark Hutchinson does not melt. Lark Hutchinson doesn’t care about good-looking, cheesy Marines.

“Did you sit in a pile of sugar?” he asks suddenly.

Instinctively, I swipe at my bottom with both hands. Did I sit in something? This is too embarrassing. I need to get away from this man who has just flipped my world upside down with a smile and turn on some Nine Inch Nails or something.

His deep voice is closer when he says his next words. “Because you sure have a sweet ass.”

And this is how a Marine steals the heart of a goth queen.

Oorah.

“Work on your poem,” I order with a huff.

Alpha grins at me but drops his eyes back down to his paper. I’ve been running lines in my head, still unsure if I’m ready to share them with anyone yet. Today, I instructed that they write about whatever they want. I’m a little curious as to what he’s writing about. He’s been hard at work the entire time.

While they write, I think about how poetry became such a big part of my life. In my senior year of high school, I read Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Dream Within a Dream.” The words—“is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream”—reached right into my soul and unlocked something. This man who wrote the poem seemed to have understood something deep inside me that I couldn’t understand myself. After that poem, I became addicted to his work, but also to poetry. I tried my hand at it and found it to be very therapeutic to allow some of the maddening thoughts in my head to escape.

My contemplations are interrupted as the kids begin reading theirs one by one as they finish. I can hardly concentrate on their words because all I can think about is him. Every time I move, every time I glance over at him, his eyes always find me. It’s as if his duty in life is to watch my every move. I can’t say that I’m disappointed. But I find it wildly distracting to continuously be the center of one’s attention.

“Are you okay?” he asks as he stands from his spot on the floor and saunters toward me.

I blink away the daze in my eyes and realize the children are all gone. “I feel a little spaced out,” I murmur and absently look around the room.

“You need food, woman. Let’s get this stuff picked up and get out of here,” he suggests as he gathers the materials.

My eyes follow him and I watch his ass each time he bends over to grab something. His jeans fit his muscular legs well and showcase that firm butt of his. I want to bite it.

A giggle threatens to escape my lips, but I quickly swallow it down. What am I thinking? This sex god before me is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Somehow, I sense that he has motives that, even though they are unknown to me, certainly will affect me. When he brushed off my inquiries, I let him. I fucking let him.

Why?

Why am I bending rules that protect my heart for him? He’s not Connor. I know nothing about him. The man just waltzed into my life and I let him right in. I barely put up a fight. Poor Connor had had to work hard for my love. I’d questioned and suspected everything he did until he wore me down one day. With Alpha, he busted through my front door and my walls were immediately down.

It doesn’t make sense.

“Ready, Twiggy?” he asks as he approaches me.

I stare dumbly at him and open my bag for him to drop the pens and paper into it. His brows furrow with worry.

Goddamn him and his ability to read me.

“What?” I hiss and attempt to force an annoyed look. I can’t manage an annoyed expression, though, because I’m more perplexed than anything. I’m lost inside my head and I can’t figure one fucking thing out.

When his concerned, black eyes meet mine, I frown. Then he leans forward and places a soft kiss on my lips, which once again causes me to go all wobbly. Damn him.

“You aren’t well, Lark. Let’s go to the diner up the street. Hop on. I’m giving you a ride,” he instructs.

I bite my lip and try not to smile. I’ll never admit how much I enjoy his piggyback rides, but I do. I fucking love wrapping my legs around his strong torso. I love inhaling the delicious, manly smell in his hair. I love the way he protectively grips my thighs when he thinks I’m slipping.

“I can walk,” I protest even though I’m already twitching to get my hands on him again.

“Don’t make me throw you over my shoulder, woman,” he growls.

I mutter out an exaggerated, “Fine,” and slide my hands up his back when he turns it toward me. Once I climb on his back, he hands me my bag. I rest my cheek against his shoulder and ignore the many things I should be attempting to figure out like:

What happens at the end of three months?

Who is Alpha with no last name?

What happens when he breaks my heart?

The last should be my biggest concern. My fragile pebble of a black heart is all I have left. He has taken it against my will, but once it’s gone—when he finally leaves me, because he will—what will be left of me?

I can finally get the hell out of this life and go find my family in the next.

Maybe Alpha is just what I need to hurry up that process.

“Al?” I question with my lips against the soft fabric of his T-shirt.

He glides out of the room and down the stairs as if he floats on air. “Yes, Twiggy?”

I sigh and finally give voice to one of my inner thoughts. “What happens in two months?”

A deep grumble in his chest sends a shiver through me as we burst out of the building and into the warm, LA sunshine.

“Lark, I don’t know,” he replies with a soft sigh, “but I have two months to figure it out.”

Bitch Red is our server again. This time, though, I won’t put up with her flirting with him. As she saunters over to us, making it a point to swivel her hips for the good-looking man across from me, I see red—and not the cherry-dyed fake kind.

With a huff of annoyance, I slide out of my seat and loop around the table. Once he realizes that I want to sit with him, he slips an arm around my shoulders and hauls me to him. Being locked in his protective embrace is something I wouldn’t mind spending more time doing.

A pop of gum drags me from the heavenly scented bubble that is him.

“Hey, cutie. What can I get you?” she asks pointedly at Alpha, overlooking me altogether.

Irritation crawls its way through my veins like scattering spiders. Unaware of the tension between us, Al spouts off the same order he got the last time we were here—the yogurt parfait included.

As if it’s the most annoying thing she’s ever had to do, Red turns her attention to me. “What can I get you—Oh my God! Does your shirt really say you hate people?” she demands with red lips forming a shocked “O.”

I chuckle darkly. “Yep. You included. Scrambled eggs and orange juice. Oh, and maybe a napkin to clean up your drool from looking at my man.”

Her eyes snap to mine and she regards me nastily.

Alpha tightens his hold around me. “That will be all,” his authoritative voice booms.

At first, I think he’s scolding me, but when I realize he’s talking to Red, I internally high-five myself. I watch with glee as she scampers off with her fake-ass red tail between her legs.

Red = 0

Lark = 1

“Your man, huh?” He gives a deep laugh.

I ignore the way it furls its way inside me—twisting and turning and washing over every nerve ending in my body. Instead, I attempt to overlook the way a certain part of my body pulsates eagerly for him, but it’s pointless. My body is warm and tense with need to have him again.

“Well, mine for two months, I suppose, Al with no last name.”

I expect a retort, but he kisses the top of my head. All I want is to be angry with him—to hate him for making me feel things for him when my heart was given to another long ago. But I can’t. Even though I don’t fully understand what we are, I do know I don’t want him gone.

Ignoring him for the entire week was hell. And after seeing the depression he’d worked himself into—the depression I had caused—I know I don’t want to ever ignore him again. I might be a callous, unloving bitch, but I’m not evil.

“I’m going to figure that out,” he whispers so quietly that I almost don’t hear him.

God, how I want to believe that.

I think.

I don’t even fucking know him.

The constant war that wages in my head about Alpha blooms once again to life. He thinks his name is Connor. He showed up out of the blue to rescue me from Pedro. He technically could be deemed a stalker for his obsessively overprotective ways. And he has no job or last name. I don’t know the first thing about him, yet I’ve slept with him several times.

There’s just one problem with that argument.

I feel like I know him. Something about him invokes in me the same feelings my husband once did long ago. There’s a familiarity with Alpha that I felt with Connor. Is it possible to find another person to love in your lifetime? At one time, I would have said no. But now, tucked into Alpha’s rock-hard side, I question that answer.

My heart aches at the possibility of loving another like I did my husband. What we had was special and unique. I can’t give a part of myself I’ve already given to Connor to another man. I’ll feel as if I’m stealing that part of the us we were to become the us Alpha and I could be.

I’ll never take that away from the love of my life.

Alpha may be whittling down the rock of my heart to find the inside, but he will never be my husband.

Alpha is not Connor, and I’d be doing myself a favor to remember that.

Lark & Connor = 1

Lark & Alpha with no last name = 0