TEMPORARY MATES PERMANENT CRAVINGS novel Chapter 232

Two hundred and thirty two

Lisa POV

The plan to see Cameron sounded great until someone had to explain how we were supposed to pull this off.

Alpha Kieran and Franklin had spent a considerable amount of time checking routes and changing plans. They were trying their hardest to solve a problem with too many missing pieces. The goal sounded simple enough, but reality was anything but simple.

When Franklin showed me the injector, it looked so ordinary that it was difficult to believe everyone was placing this much hope in it. Yet I wondered if I could trust it without fearing that it would fail.

My mother, Kieran, even Franklin, had their own doubts. That possibility was there. What if I walked into that house and everything went wrong?

The closer we got to actually seeing Cameron, the less confident I grew.

My mother, who pretended to be calm, was anything but. Every question carried another one underneath it.

Are we doing the right thing?

What if he hurts her again?

I covered my mouth to hide a smile when I overheard Kieran telling my mother that she had walked enough laps to qualify for a marathon, with her retorting that it wasn’t funny. She came to me later in my bedroom, saying that waiting had become its own form of torture.

“Him being lucid doesn’t mean safety,” I said.

She sat beside me on the bed and held my hand. After hesitating, she said, “Cameron may be himself, but he may also be struggling.”

“And that’s why we’ll be there with you, so that if something feels wrong, we leave. And if he reacts badly, we deal with it.”

“You’ve handled more in a few months than most people face in years,” she said, the corner of her mouth forming a smile. “Hell, when I thought my life was over, I hadn’t even endured a fraction of what you have.”

My smile brightened.

“You cried for days when you found out Dad was cheating.”

She scoffed. “That doesn’t count. Crying is free. People cry and keep going all the time. The impressive part about you is that you keep going.”

My hand drifted to my stomach. In two weeks, the baby would be six months along. So much had happened since I’d signed that contract that sometimes it felt as though I’d been pregnant forever.

And now, with the baby, I wasn’t walking into Cameron’s house alone. The baby was coming with me.

That brought comfort and fear in equal measure; comfort because I already loved the child and the father, fear because every decision I made affected the child who couldn’t choose or protect himself.

He was trusting me to do that for him.

“You’ve done that thing again,” Mom said, nudging me, referring to me blanking out.

1/5

+15 Benus

“Share your thoughts.”

“It’s nothing much,” I said with a shrug. “I just keep wondering, what if there was no stolen bond?”

She shot me a confused look.

“I mean, what if there’s no conspiracy hidden underneath everything? What if Evangeline had been telling the truth all along, and I was simply a surrogate who had gotten too emotionally involved?”

Her mouth formed a grimace.

“Well, there’s only one way to find out.”

The idea hurt more than I wanted to admit. If I truly wasn’t his mate, then what was all of this? It meant that I had built and imagined a version of events around something that never existed, and Evangeline was right that I had stepped into a place that was never mine.

“Cassidy sent another message,” my mom said later, coming in with a mug of steaming cocoa.

“What now?” I said as she sat beside me.

“She told Franklin not to tell Cameron you were coming.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t explain.”

I sighed. It sounded exactly like Cassidy to drop a life-changing instruction and not explain it.

“At least she’s helping,” I said.

“It’s more than that,” my mother said. “She’s thinking ahead.”

She was right. A few days ago, Cassidy barely tolerated us standing in front of her cottage. Now she was sending instructions and planning around problems.

“I wish there was a way to help her,” I said.

My mother chuckled.

“She’d probably throw us off her property.”

“That woman has been carrying anger for so long that I don’t know what she would do without it. She’s built walls around herself. The sad thing is, none of it is fake. If anything, her anger is earned.”

I agreed. “She doesn’t even need us.”

We fell into a comfortable silence until I noticed she was staring at me.

“What?”

She reached over and brushed hair away from my face.

“Tell me, if this works, what do you want?”

“What?”

“If it works.” She gestured vaguely. “The bond with you and Cameron.”

2/5

+15 Benus

I remained silent.

“I haven’t really thought about that.”

“Lisa, you’ve spent so long surviving that you haven’t thought beyond survival. So you have to think deeply about what happens after this.”

How could I, when I didn’t know? There were so many possibilities. Cameron could get better or not. The bond could be real or not.

“If everything works out, you deserve to want something too,” she said.

My thoughts couldn’t stop hopping from place to place, even after she left. I’d spent so much time worrying about whether Cameron would survive that I hadn’t stopped to think about what came afterward. Surviving this seemed to be the beginning of another set of problems.

What if he survived and everything got better, except he didn’t love me the way I thought he did? Or whatever existed between us wasn’t enough to survive everything that had happened? I’d fisked so much without ever admitting how much of my future had quietly attached itself to his.

Then there was the opposite possibility. What if he loved me and it still wasn’t enough? What if he lost the fight anyway and the child grew up hearing stories about his father being consumed by a cult?

And I knew that somewhere along the way, this had stopped being about romance or proving a bond. It was about whether there was a future waiting on the other side of all this and whether any of us would still be standing when we finally reached it.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned in bed, then decided to get up and go for a walk.

Alpha Kieran’s study light was on downstairs, spilling into the hallway. He’d fallen asleep at his desk with one arm folded beneath his head. Papers, maps, and security routes covered the table.

I stepped closer.

Every path into Cameron’s house had been marked and reconsidered. There were even notes about the guards who would be present. Kieran was trying to prepare for every disaster he could imagine.

And just like my mom and me, he was nervous.

He always seemed to have an answer or a plan. Looking at the desk, certainty had very little to do with it. He was worried too. Maybe not in the same way my mom and I were worried, but worried all the same. The difference was that he buried his worry under action.

And to him, this wasn’t only about saving Cameron. He treated Cameron’s situation as something deeply personal, maybe because he knew what it looked like when a life slipped out of control and spent years living with consequences he couldn’t undo.

The drive to Cameron’s pack began before the sun disappeared. By the time we got to Kieran’s border, the sky had turned the color of bruised steel.

Alpha Kieran and a guard occupied the front passenger seats while my mother sat beside me. The silence was heavy. It felt like the kind of silence that settled over a family outside an operating room.

Every now and then, my mother reached for my hand, then let go, only to reach for it later. I didn’t need to hear her words or her thoughts to know that she was frightened.

3/5

Shundred and thity two

+15 Benus

My eyes followed the road ahead while memories crowded in. Meeting Cameron for the first time, the awkwardness of being a surrogate, the attraction I wasn’t supposed to feel, and the nights I spent convincing myself that what I felt would pass if I ignored it long enough.

We got into Wildfangs at exactly 8:30. My heart thrashed wildly against my chest when the private road leading to the estate came into view.

It felt strange seeing it again. The last time I had traveled this road, I hadn’t known how much of my life was about to change. Back then, the biggest problem in my world had been carrying a child for a man who wasn’t mine. Then came Evangeline, the attacks, the poisoning, the running. The familiar road now felt like looking at the beginning of a story whose ending I still didn’t know.

My mother’s fingers closed around mine. I squeezed back. The brass gates stood ahead in the distance. What frightened me was the uncertainty beyond those gates. There was a chance we could walk through them and discover we’d been wrong about everything.

The vehicle stopped near a side entrance instead of the main driveway. Two guards who normally patrolled that section were nowhere in sight, and another pair waved us through after a brief exchange with Franklin.

We moved quickly from there. Kieran led the way through a service corridor, while my mother and I stayed close. I was putting on a hoodie. The foyer and the rest of the downstairs area were empty, with no servants in sight. The arrangement had worked, but then again, it was Franklin. Franklin ran this place.

The deeper we moved into the private wing, the more familiar everything seemed. This was where I had lived when the pregnancy began, where I had spent weeks convincing myself that Cameron was my employer and nothing more, and where every line I drew had slowly blurred until it stopped being professionalism and something else began.

A strange unsteadiness settled into my feet when the door opened. Cameron’s voice reached us before I saw him. He was standing near the window, speaking to Franklin about the mines and shipments.

His voice sounded normal.

Nadia waved, and her “hey” made Cameron look up.

My heart couldn’t stop pounding, like a clock running against time. At first glance, he looked the same; the same face that had occupied so many of my dreams. But there was a tiredness around his eyes, the type that sleep couldn’t fix, as though he was fighting something nobody else could see.

He remained there and simply stared. I didn’t move either.

Behind me, Alpha Kieran quietly closed the door. The room felt crowded with people and yet strangely quiet, with everyone watching us.

Cameron’s gaze moved from my face to my stomach and back again.

“What are you doing here?”

His voice sounded rushed, rough, and genuinely confused.

I gave Alpha Kieran a quick look, and he nodded for me to continue.

“Hello to you too,” I said.

Franklin chuckled. Nadia was smiling.

Cameron glared at Franklin.

4/5

thy taQ

15 Benus

“You knew?”

Franklin wisely looked elsewhere.

“And you too, Alpha Kieran,” he said. “Nobody thought this was worth mentioning?”

Kieran shrugged.

“We’re here now, unless you want us to leave.”

Cameron looked at me.

“How did you even get in here?”

“Very carefully,” Nadia said, beating me to it.

His eyes didn’t leave me.

“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” he said.

The words caused a stir in my stomach.

His eyes settled on me. A hundred questions seemed to pass through them.

Are you okay?

I managed a nod.

His eyes landed on my stomach and remained there. The helplessness returned to his face.

Despite everything that had happened between us, and the frightening mental strain he was facing, he sounded just like himself.

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