TEMPORARY MATES PERMANENT CRAVINGS novel Chapter 222

Two hundred and twenty two

Cassidy POV

The fundraiser carried on as daughters drifted between tables and volunteers moved quietly through the crowd collecting pledge forms.

A projector near the stage cycled through photographs of newly funded shelters, scholarship recipients, and refugee families standing in front of freshly completed homes.

Laughter rose from one corner of the room when someone won a bidding war over a vacation package. Across the hall, two women debated donation figures. To anyone walking through those doors, it was exactly what it appeared to be: a room full of wealthy women raising money to improve other people’s lives.

I kept walking until I reached the women’s restroom near the eastern wing. The door swung shut behind me.

For the first time all day, nobody was asking questions or watching me.

I gripped the edge of the sink and let out a shaky breath before staring at my reflection.

The fluorescent lights overhead were unforgiving. They highlighted every sleepless night, every old scar, every memory I spent most days pretending no longer mattered.

Cold water ran over my hands.

The girl had no idea what she was asking. No idea what it cost to lose a child. No idea what it did to a person when everyone else kept living afterward.

My hand drifted to my stomach before I realized what I was doing.”

The habit remained even after all these years.

I closed my eyes.

Thirty years ago

My stomach became impossible to hide by the middle of the second trimester.

The first comments came from neighbors. An older woman from three houses down stopped me outside a grocery store and smiled at my stomach.

“At least Kieran will do the right thing before the baby comes.”

I smiled politely. She smiled back.

A week later, two Gamma women fell silent when I entered my mother’s restaurant. One of them lowered her 1 voice.

“If he wanted to marry her, he would’ve done it already.”

The other glanced toward me and wore a sympathetic look. Neither looked embarrassed when they realized I’d

heard.

I walked away without a word.

The story spread on its own after that. Some people pitied me, while others treated me like a cautionary tale. A few acted as though carrying an Alpha’s child should have been reward enough.

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I learned when to nod, when to leave conversations early, and which stores had self-checkout.

Kieran tried harder than anyone gave him credit for.

Whenever I arrived at a doctor’s appointment, he was already there. Sometimes he brought my favorite donuts, Sometimes he had an envelope of cash, as if to apologize for leaving me.

We almost never talked about us. There wasn’t an us anymore.

There was simply a baby and two adults trying to live with the consequences.

His mother invited me to the pack house as though things were still the same, despite knowing what my response would be.

One afternoon, she appeared at my mother’s restaurant without warning. The lunch crowd came to a standstill. Conversations died. Customers and staff alike lowered themselves to their knees.

My mother’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. She almost dropped the tray she was carrying.

I started to kneel too.

“Don’t you dare.”

The Luna crossed the room before I could react and pulled me into a hug.

“Your Majesty,” my mother whispered. She tried to usher her toward one of the empty rooms in the back.

The Luna waved the title away as though it annoyed her.

“I came to have lunch with my grandchild’s mother.”

She glanced around the restaurant.

“I’ll eat here. And everyone’s meal is on me today.”

The room erupted. People who had spent the last month gossiping about me suddenly found their food fascinating.

The Luna settled into a chair and patted the seat beside her. I sat.

She spent most of the meal asking whether I was sleeping properly, whether I was eating enough, and whether the doctors were happy with the baby’s progress.

The smile on her face appeared genuine.

“You’re carrying an Alpha heir.”

I looked down at my plate. She said it as though it solved everything. As though the title itself could mend my broken heart and bridge the distance that already existed between Kieran and me.

“You’ll always be part of this family,” she told me, stretching out her jeweled hand to give mine a squeeze.

That, and many other gestures, were how she and her son kept offering me a place in their future.

I stopped arguing. I also stopped believing them.

Vanessa tried.

She stopped by the house and restaurant more than once. She tried talking about ordinary things as though we

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could somehow find our way back to where we’d been before all of this.

One of the appointments fell on a rainy morning. I was flipping through a worn magazine in the waiting area when Vanessa arrived with Kieran.

Vanessa’s face brightened.

“Cass.”

I was back in the days when hearing my name from her meant lunch plans, gossip, and arguments over things

that didn’t matter.

Vanessa crossed the room and sat beside me while Kieran went to speak with the receptionist.

My fingers tightened around the edge of the magazine.

I wanted to be mad.

I was mad.

The problem was that every version of that anger sounded childish inside my own head. She hadn’t stolen him. He hadn’t cheated. Nobody had lied or betrayed anyone.

The mate bond had simply arrived and rearranged all our lives.

Vanessa smiled uncertainly.

“How have you been?”

I stared at a page I’d stopped reading when my eyes caught the ring on her left hand.

The diamond was a single oval stone set in a thin platinum band. The kind of ring chosen by people who didn’t need size to prove anything.

Vanessa followed my gaze. Her hand shifted slightly in her lap, and the smile faded from her face.

She lowered her eyes to the ring.

“I know how it looks.”

A bitter laugh almost escaped me. I wasn’t sure there were enough words in the language to explain how it looked.

Vanessa twisted the ring around her finger.

“Cass, I’ve tried giving you space. I’ve tried calling. I’ve tried pretending things weren’t awkward.”

“Awkward.”

Pain crossed her face.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No?”

She looked down.

“The guilt is eating me alive.”

The admission took some of the fight out of me, because I believed her. She genuinely wanted things to be normal

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again.

“I miss you,” she said quietly.

The waiting room noise filled the silence between us. A child cried somewhere down the hall, and a nurse called another patient’s name.

“I wish things were different.”

I looked away.

“So do I.”

Hope flickered across her face.

“Cass…”

She hesitated, then reached into her handbag. My stomach sank before she even pulled out the envelope.

“Whatever you want to ask, the answer is no.”

Her shoulders dropped. The wedding invitation sat between us.

“I wanted you beside me.”

I laughed. I couldn’t believe she was serious.

“Cassidy Hale?”

A nurse stood at the doorway holding a clipboard. Relief washed through me so fast it almost made me dizzy.

I stood. The invitation remained in Vanessa’s lap.

“I hope it’s beautiful.”

The words came out flat. Vanessa looked down at the envelope. I turned and followed the nurse into the examination room.

The conversation afterward felt even more awkward, collapsing under the weight of everything we weren’t saying.

Kieran wasn’t far behind. A hand resting at the small of her back. A private smile. A glance exchanged across a room. Tiny things that probably meant nothing to anyone else.

I noticed every single one.

It would have been easier if she’d done something cruel. Instead, Vanessa remained stubbornly kind. She invited me places. She kept trying to leave the door open even after I had already walked away from it.

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