A Mate for Lu - Amy Bellows Page 0,4
know it isn’t good to dream about a man swooping in and fixing everything about my life. But God, that fantasy felt good.
All I can hope is that things will be better for Mary. Maybe she’ll be an alpha. Maybe she’ll be luckier with love. I hope she never has to stand all alone in her kitchen and burn the sketches she drew of someone who doesn’t want her.
I hope she doesn’t turn out like me.
No alpha is going to save us. I walk into the front room and unlatch the top of the coffee table. Inside my laptop is charging. I get it out and get to work.
I have to be the one to put food on the table, which means I need to bid on some jobs. Maybe I can get something that will pay well enough to get Mary some new clothes.
We spend so much time in our bear forms because she doesn’t have many clothes that fit anymore. Most of them are too small.
I shouldn’t have spent money on those collard greens.
Who knows? Maybe Sam will actually sell our book.
Maybe.
4
Sam
Jesse spends the night sulking in their room. They even refuse to come to dinner. Morgan and Parker are quieter than normal at the dinner table. Maybe because of the way Jesse’s acting, or maybe because they’ll miss Lu too. By the time they go to bed and I finally have a few minutes to work, I can’t manage to focus. I keep thinking about the way Lu wrapped up those brownies in a panic.
I hurt his feelings. He was just trying to feed me and my kids, and I was rude to him.
At one o’clock, I finally give up trying to work and go to bed. But my bed feels so empty. And cold. I spend half of the night tossing and turning, wishing I had been more polite—wishing I had set my feelings aside to be the type of friend Lu needed.
The next morning, I wake to an email from our agent.
Good morning Sam and Lutz,
I have received an official offer from an imprint of HarperCollins. Attached is the official paperwork, but the basic numbers you need to know are a $5,000 advance with a 2,000 copy print. But that’s only with sample illustrations. Now that we have the book in its entirety, I’ll query more aggressively.
Let me know what you want to do.
Sincerely,
Frank Glynne
My heart sinks. Only five thousand dollars. After all of the sleepless nights I spent perfecting every word—after all of the time and love Lu put into those beautiful illustrations. A print of two thousand is nothing. There are so many kids who need a book like this. Will they even be able to find it with a print that small?
In the beginning, the picture book gave me purpose after Allen died. But now… I don’t know. I feel lost.
I exit out of my email and send Ed a text.
Do you have any advice for a lonely man on a bad day?
Ed’s mate died forty years ago. He’s seventy, so he often jokes that he’s been a widower for longer than he hasn’t. He sends back a response immediately.
Your right hand is your best friend?
I laugh. Giving up sex for the rest of my life is hard sometimes. The idea of it is so big, I can’t wrap my mind around it completely. But the celibacy portion of this isn’t what overwhelmed me last night.
Not that kind of lonely, Ed.
He sends me a winking emoji. Sure, that’s what they all say.
For God’s sake. He’s shameless.
I think I’ve done something terrible. It’s time I told someone about my feelings for Lu. I type the words out and send them off before I have the chance to second guess myself. I have feelings for another omega.
It seems like forever before he responds.
Did you do the horizontal tango with him?
Why did I ask Ed for advice in the first place? He’s always been accepting of the occasional widower who ends up taking a human mate after the loneliness gets to him. But Ed knows that I’m a one-man guy. I bonded to Allen for life, and that means both of our lives. Ed made the same commitment to his omega, and he kept it.
I haven’t had sex with him. I haven’t done anything with him. Well, I touched his shoulder once.
Ed sends a shocked emoji. Scandal. Someone call the police. We’re gonna have to throw you in jail.
This isn’t helping.
I want to be true