Their Clueless Alpha Princess Chapter 11

Their Clueless Alpha Princess Chapter 11

Thea’s POV

I said yes before I could talk myself out of it.

Two seconds. That was all it took. Vesper smiled at me across the diner counter with that gentle, unhurried look, and my mouth moved before my brain caught up.

“Saturday sounds great.”

He nodded like he’d expected the answer. Like asking me out was something casual and small, not the single best thing that had happened to me all week. He left a generous tip on the table and walked out with his book tucked under his arm, and I stood behind the counter with a dish towel in my hand and my pulse in my ears.

Vesper Aldric had asked me out. Me. The girl who lived in a basement and wore hand-me-downs.

The grin lasted all the way through the dinner rush. It lasted through washing the dishes and clocking out and walking home in the cold. It lasted until I remembered that Saturday at three, I was supposed to meet Soren Solvane at the library parking lot.

I pulled out my phone and dialed his number.

He picked up on the first ring. “What.”

“I need to push our meeting back two hours. Something came up on Saturday.”

Silence. Then: “What came up.”

“I have a date.”

More silence. I could practically feel the temperature drop through the phone.

“Vesper?” he said.

I blinked. “How did you-”

“Five o’clock. Don’t be late.”

“Wait. You didn’t agree to the-”

“If you want me to look at your list, you’ll give me a reason to be patient.”

I bit my lip. He had a point. The list was the only leverage I had in this deal, and I’d already used it once to get him into French class. Burning it over a scheduling conflict would be stupid.

“Fine,” I said. “Five o’clock.”

“You didn’t answer my question.” His voice was flat. Bored, almost. “What do you like about him?”

The question caught me off guard. Not because it was rude – Soren was always rude – but because it sounded almost like he

cared about the answer.

“That’s none of your business,” I said, and hung up.

I stared at the ceiling of my basement room and thought about why I liked Vesper.

It wasn’t complicated. He had the best grades in our year. He read the same books I read. He noticed my library schedule without me telling him. And once, freshman year, it rained so hard the gutters overflowed, and every other kid got picked up by their parents while I stood under the school awning with no umbrella and no one coming.

Vesper had walked up, handed me his umbrella, and left without a word.

Three years later, I was still holding onto that umbrella story like it proved something. Like a boy who lent you his umbrella in the rain was the same thing as a boy who would show up when it mattered.

Saturday. One o’clock. The bookshop on Elm Street.

I wore my cleanest jeans and the one blouse that didn’t have a stain on it – a navy button-up I’d found at Goodwill two months ago. I’d washed my hair twice, dried it with the broken hairdryer that only worked on one setting, and even borrowed Juno’s lip gloss, which she’d pressed into my hand that morning with a wink and a whispered “Get it, girl.”

I looked like I was trying. I hated that I looked like I was trying.

The signing was supposed to start at one-thirty. I got there early, found a spot by the fiction shelves where I could see the door, and waited.

One-thirty came and went. Then two. Then two-thirty.

I unlocked my phone eleven times. No messages. No missed calls. The line for the signing wound through the store and out the door, and Vesper was not in it.

By three o’clock, I’d read the same paragraph of a display book four times without processing a single word. By four, the signing was wrapping up. By four-fifty, I put the book back on the shelf and walked out.

He wasn’t coming.

I made it to the library parking lot at five-ten. Soren was leaning against a black sedan with his arms crossed, gold eyes tracking

me from twenty feet away.

“You’re late,” he said. “Two hours and ten minutes.”

“I was only ten minutes-”

“I counted from three.”

I opened my mouth to argue. Then I closed it. The anger I should have felt at his pettiness was somewhere far away, buried under four hours of standing alone in a bookshop waiting for someone who never showed.

“Sorry,” I said. “Let’s go.”

He studied me for a beat. I looked away.

We drove to the first address on my list – a girl named Cara who worked at an ice cream shop on the west side. I led Soren inside, scanning the counter for Cara’s face. I spotted her scooping mint chip behind the register.

Then I spotted something else.

Darcy. Sitting at a window table with a waffle cone in one hand and Vesper’s arm in the other.

She saw me at the same moment I saw her. Her eyes lit up with that particular shine she got when she knew she’d won something, and she tilted her head and smiled.

I couldn’t move.

Vesper stood up. He looked genuinely sorry, which somehow made it worse.

“Thea, I’m sorry.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I ran into Darcy on the way to the bookshop. She twisted her ankle, and I took her to urgent care. I didn’t mean to miss our plans.”

Plans. Not date. Plans.

“It’s fine,” I heard myself say. “Is her ankle okay?”

“Much better now.” Darcy lifted her foot to show a neatly wrapped bandage, and even the bandage looked expensive. “Vesper

was so sweet about it.”

That was Vesper. Always helping someone in trouble. I couldn’t blame him for being kind.

But he could have called. One text. One thirty-second voicemail. That’s all it would have taken, and he hadn’t bothered. Why even ask me out if I wasn’t worth a phone call?

I wasn’t angry. Angry would have been easier. I was just tired, and the tiredness sat in my chest like a stone I’d been carrying all afternoon without noticing.

I felt the sting behind my eyes and swallowed it down.

“Glad you’re okay,” I told Darcy, and turned away before my face could betray me.

A voice landed at my shoulder. Cold. Flat. Unimpressed.

“Is this what made you late?” Soren stood behind me, hands in his pockets, gaze flicking from Vesper to Darcy and back to me.”

Your taste in men needs work.”