Chapter 85: Inseparable

Daphne

The man was a f.ucking magician. Nathan Straight - or whatever his real name was, had disappeared without a trace, leaving nothing but a gaping hole in my heart, and a sick, gnawing feeling in my gut.

I had to keep reminding myself that I barely knew the guy. We’d had some intense moments and some hot sex, but there wasn’t anything real or substantial between us. He had tried to warn me that he wasn’t going to stick around, but I had stubbornly fordged ahead.

He wasn’t my mate. That was just me romanticizing a moment, because I wanted it so bad. If he was my mate, he could not have just picked up and walked away.

In truth, I was embarrassed too, and ashamed of myself, for falling for his act. For falling for him. I was a psychologist, for heaven’s sake. I was supposed to know better.

There was nothing to do but shove all that emotional drama aside, and forge ahead with my school work. Graduation was only a month and a half off, and there was still so much to do. Lectures to attend, papers to write, my thesis to polish up, some assistant teaching to do. There was simply no time to cry over a man.

At least I now I had the room to myself. I shoved the empty bed up against the wall, and put a purple sheet over it so that it wasn’t so empty and depressing. I bought a house plant, something with big green leaves, and put it on the extra desk. And I got on with life. Because thats what well adjusted adults did, right?

And, after weighing my options for a few weeks, I formerly accepted the offer from Bella’s father in Canada. The palace was three hours from home. Putting that much distance between my brothers and my best friend, my adorable nephew, and the rest of my pack family was a little sad and scary, but I felt like I needed a change of scenary. I needed a new start.

After corresponding back and forth through email, the king, Louis, said he was planning to come spend a few days with his daughter and his grandson. He would plan it to coincide with my graduation, and then I could travel back with him as my personal escort.

I had met Louis Levesque several times, as he traveled to our pack regularly to see Bella and the baby. The very first time I saw him was at Bella’s ceremony. He was a tall man, but he’d been very thin, almost skeletal. His face might have been handsome once, but years of confinement, near-starvation, and mental angish had taken their toll, leaving him looking hollow-eyed and haunted. But each time he returned, he looked a little better. His body steadily gained muscle mass, his color and complexion improved, his face filled out, and he once again began to carry himself with the grace and dignity that his title demanded.

People still called him the Mad King. But he seemed perfectly sane to me. I thought he was kind and interesting, and I was looking forward to working in his pack. It felt good to have a direction for my future and a purpose to move toward.

If I was tired, I blamed it on the workload.

If my appetite wasn’t as enormous as it normally was, well, I was too busy to stop and eat.

The nagging nausea…

And then suddenly it was done. My thesis was submitted and accepted, all of the papers were completed, classes were winding down for the semester, and I was packing up my lonely dorm room and saying goodbye to my housemates for the last time. It was time to pack away my clothes, my books, and my belongings for the last time. I would come back for my graduation ceremony, but there was no need to continue to live on campus.

As I was dumping items into a file box to take to the car, I pulled an unopened box of tampons out of my desk drawer. I froze with the box in my hand.

I had bought them before I even moved to Bleakley house.

And I had never opened them.

They slipped out of my numb fingers and fell into the cardboard carton.

There had to be a reasonable explanation. I’d never missed a period before, I was as regular as rain, but I had been under a lot of stress for the last couple of months. I’d always heard that stress could mess with a woman’s cycle.

And besides that, we had used protection every time. Even when I was so passion-drunk that I would have thrown caution to the wind, Nate had been extremely careful. Even that time in the shower, he’d brought a condom.

So it had to be stress. It had to be.

But deep down, I knew it wasn’t.

I grabbed my keys and drove my half-packed car to the local pharmacy, grabbed three different brands of pregnancy test off the shelf, and hurried back to the register to pay. I recognized the cashier as a young undergraduate at the university. He took a look at my purchases and raised an eyebrow with a knowing smirk. I handed him the cash with a growl that wiped that smirk right off his pimpled face.

A.sshole.

I drove home, and parked, and sat in the car for a long time before I finally picked up the bag from the pharmacy and walked slowly up the stairs. That sick, raw feeling in my belly was stronger than ever as I walked down the hallway to the shared bathroom with the feeling like I was walking to my death.

“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s stress.” I muttered to myself. But I wouldn’t know unless I peed on the damn test.

I shut the door with trembling hands, and turned the lock before I dumped the tests out on the bathroom sink. I picked one test randomly and ripped it open to read the directions, not that the directions were complicated. Pee on the stick. Wait two minutes. One line, not pregnant. Two lines…