The Heartless Alpha’s Beloved Luna (Avery and Gideon) novel Chapter 562

Gideon’s POV

The kiss lingered, warm and familiar and comforting. And for a moment, I leaned into it, letting her tangle her fingers in my hair, my hands splaying across her waist.

And yet, before it could deepen like a part of me wanted it to, like all the other times we’d made love right here in this very spot, I pulled back and broke the kiss.

I looked down at Avery with my brows drawn together in confusion. I wasn’t sure why I felt so strange, but I did. My hands were on her waist and the kiss had been perfectly fine and there was no reason to stop it, I didn’t want to stop it, and yet it felt as if some reflex I couldn’t name had put a few inches of space between us before I made any conscious decision about it.

Like there was a part of me that felt that something was wrong, and I didn’t know what it was or why it had happened. I just knew that I shouldn’t be doing this. Just like the night she tried to make love with me in the bed and bit me hard enough to draw blood from a wound that was still aching even now.

Avery looked up at me, her head tilted innocently. Her eyes flicked over my face once, twice, searching for something.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in a small voice. “Did I do something?”

“No, no, you didn’t do anything.” I shook my head. “I just—” There was something in the back of my mind as I said those words. A thought, or the trailing edge of one, something I’d been planning on saying to her when I walked through the door that was now just not there.

Avery blinked.

I rubbed my thumb across my jaw and sighed. “I forget.”

“You forget?” she giggled.

“I forgot what I was going to say.” I looked at her face and tried to catch whatever it was before it slipped further back. It didn’t come. “Never mind. It probably wasn’t important.”

She smiled and reached up to straighten my collar. “I was actually hoping you’d come in. I wanted to ask if you thought about the proposal.”

“You asked me, like, two hours ago,” I pointed out with a chuff.

She pressed her lips together and waited patiently without speaking.

I opened my mouth to tell her exactly what I’d said before. To wait, to give it time, to at least finish her deadline before she made any major decisions like this. That it wasn’t like her, that she’d been so adamant that she wanted to take things slow, that she told me she didn’t want to take on the title of Luna—possibly not ever.

And yet, standing here in the greenhouse with her eyes on mine, every objection I’d just had felt oddly far away. I tried to make the words come out, but they kept slipping behind this thick, gray wall of fog that had formed in my mind, the same fog that had blotted out our bond, and they just wouldn’t come out.

“This weekend,” I said.

The words were out before I’d finished deciding on them. Avery’s face lit up.

“Yeah,” I said, slower. “We can get married this weekend.”

She threw her arms around my neck, pressing her face into my shoulder, and I held her and stared over her head at the propagation tubes lined up on the worktable. My pulse was even. Calm.

The words hadn’t entirely felt like mine, but I didn’t seem to find a reason to think about them.

That evening at dinner, we broke the news to Bjorn. He was sitting at the other end of the table, pushing his food around his plate more than eating it, glancing up at the clock several times in the span of five minutes. He hadn’t said a word since we’d sat down, not even when Avery had asked him how his day went. He’d just looked at her like she was some kind of thing in his house and not his mother, grunted something unintelligible, and looked down at his plate.

Avery looked at me, smiling, and nodded her head toward him silently.

“Bjorn.” I cleared my throat. “Your mother and I have something to tell you,” I said, setting my fork down carefully on my plate.

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