“Melody!” Patricia scolded.
“I don’t want you here! Get out!” she shouted at Jace, in spite of her mother’s censure. “Not just out of my room; I want you to get the hell out of my Pride!”
Shocked gasps echoed behind me.
Jace was the only Alpha I’d ever heard of who’d taken over his father’s territory rather than his wife’s, and we all knew that someday he would lose both his territory and his home. Again.
But for her to throw that in his face, after everything he’d done for her…after he’d rebuilt the Pride, practically from scratch…
“What did you just say to me?” Jace demanded, and my hair stood on end. He loved Melody in spite of the constant pain in the ass she’d been most of her life, but no Alpha could take a challenge like that lying down. Even if it came from his little sister.
“Okay, wait!” Isaac tugged Melody back and stepped in front of her, shielding her from Jace through a protective instinct surely everyone in the room recognized. “She doesn’t mean that.”
“The hell I don’t!” Melody shouted, standing on her toes to glare at Jace over his shoulder. “He wants to keep me a child forever so he never has to give up my territory!”
“No, he’s only trying to protect you,” Isaac told her, without ever taking his wary focus from our Alpha. “Jace, your complaint is with me, not with her. She’s just upset.”
“Of course I’m upset!” Melody screeched, and when Isaac reached back to put a gentle hand on her arm, she actually seemed to calm. Their contact looked familiar and easy, as if they were very accustomed to touching each other, and not just for sex. Melody and Isaac weren’t just fooling around, and their relationship wasn’t new. Not brand-new, anyway.
With one glance at Jace, I realized he saw it too. And that he was kicking himself for not seeing it earlier.
“How long has this been going on?” He sounded at least a little calmer with the understanding that this wasn’t just a hookup gone wrong.
Isaac stood straight and tall, and unless I was imagining it, his chest was puffed out a little. “We’ve been together almost three months. But she’s only about six weeks along, if our math’s right. You’ll be able to smell the hormones soon. I can already, but I think that’s because I know what to look for. Or because the baby’s mine, or…” Isaac shrugged, and with that one simple gesture, the reality hit me.
“I’m going to be an aunt!” I grabbed Jace’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re going to be an uncle. Jace, this is good news!”
He didn’t argue, but neither did he agree. He was still caught up on how young and self-involved Melody was, and he was probably upset because she’d just deprived herself of a world of newly available choices.
“We were going to tell you soon. We really were.” Isaac held Jace’s gaze boldly, and I could hardly contain my surprise. Refusing to drop his eyes meant he was rejecting the subservient role. That was Alpha potential showing itself. Faythe had told me Jace went through the same thing—instinctively refusing to follow Marc’s leadership—the year of the revolution.
Alpha potential is innate; some shifters are born with it, some aren’t. But often, those who do have that potential don’t show it, or even realize it, until some major life event triggers a psychological shift. Jace’s was triggered by a combination of his feelings for Faythe and his grief over her brother Ethan, his best friend.
Melody’s pregnancy had obviously kicked Isaac’s Alpha development into overdrive.
I wondered if our parents had any idea.
The silence from the crowd gathered in Melody’s bedroom told me none of the others had realized it either. And that no one other than Patricia had known about Isaac and Mel’s relationship.
“Okay.” Jace nodded slowly. “What’s done is done, and we all have work to do, so we’ll have to address this later.” He glanced around the room. “Chase, go to the east cabin and wake everyone up. Luke, Warner, Abby, be ready to go in an hour.” With that, Jace leaned down to kiss me—drawing a surprised look from his mother, who’d missed that part of the discussion. Then he marched across the second-floor landing into his own room and slammed the door without another word.
I was brewing coffee in the kitchen of the lodge when Patricia came in and started pulling cartons of eggs and packages of bacon from the fridge. “If we’re all up, we might as well eat,” she said, twisting her long brown hair into a loose knot at the back of her head.
I’d never mastered that particular skill. I had way too much hair.