His Wicked Alpha (Messy Ever After #3)

Chapter 1

Miles

"In my defense," Ray says, leaning against my office doorframe, "the client sounded really upset."

I don't look up from my screen. "The client is always upset, Garcia. That's why they hired a law firm and not a therapist."

"Right, but she was crying, and I felt like—"

"You felt." I finally glance at him over the rim of my glasses and immediately regret it, because Ray Garcia at nine in the morning is a specific kind of problem I'm not equipped to deal with before my second coffee.

His tie is crooked. His hair looks like he styled it by sticking his head out of a car window.

His shirt is wrinkled in a way that suggests ironing is something that happens to other people.

He's also somehow the best-looking person I've ever seen in my life, and I hate myself a little bit for noticing.

"You felt like circumventing two weeks of negotiation strategy to tell a client that, and I'm quoting your email here, 'everything is going to work out. '"

"It is going to work out. We have a strong case."

"That's not the point."

"What's the point, then?" He crosses his arms, and his sleeves strain against his biceps, and I look back at my screen so fast I nearly give myself whiplash.

The point is that you don't freelance emotional support to clients when there's a carefully constructed communication plan in place.

The point is that we bill by the hour and your little pep talk just undermined my leverage for the next round of mediation.

The point is that your arms have no business being that distracting and I've been having extremely detailed dreams about your hands for weeks and I want to throw my stapler at your head.

"The point," I say, keeping my voice flat, "is that I need you to follow the plan. My plan. The one I spent forty hours putting together. Can you do that?"

He grins at me, relaxed and unhurried, like I didn't just dress him down. "Following plans. Got it. That's my whole thing."

"Your thing is showing up late with coffee stains on your shirt."

"Hey, this stain is from yesterday's shirt. Today's shirt is clean." He tugs at his collar like he's presenting evidence, and a faint cloud of him drifts across my desk. Cracked pepper and ginger and something clean and bright, and my whole body goes rigid.

I hate his scent. I hate it because it cuts through every defense I've ever built.

I spend a fortune on the best suppressants money can buy, I keep my office at sixty-eight degrees, I run an air purifier on high all day, and none of it matters because the second he walks in, some deep, useless part of my brain goes soft and hungry and I want to bury my face in his neck and just breathe.

It's disgusting. It's unprofessional. It's the omega bullshit I've spent my entire adult life training out of myself.

"Sit down," I tell him, because if he keeps standing there radiating alpha pheromones and that effortless, tail-wagging charm, I'm going to say something I'll regret. "We need to go over the Whitmore deposition prep."

He drops into the chair across from my desk, all long limbs and loose posture, and props his ankle on his knee like this is a hangout and not a workplace.

I pull up the file and start walking him through the witness list, and he actually pays attention for once, nodding in the right places, even jotting something down in that chaotic little notebook he carries everywhere.

The problem with Ray Garcia—well, one of approximately nine hundred problems with Ray Garcia—is that he's not actually stupid.

I know this. He catches things. He reads people with this annoying, instinctive accuracy that makes me want to scream, because I've spent years developing that skill and he just has it, like it costs him nothing.

He made a junior associate cry last week, and when I stormed over to handle it, I found out he'd made her cry by being so patient with a difficult research task that she got emotional about it.

What kind of psychopath makes people cry with kindness?

The other, much worse problem is that I find him attractive in a way that makes me question every professional decision I've ever made.

It's not just the scent, or the shoulders, or the way his eyes go all focused and intent when something actually interests him.

It's that he looks at me like he's trying to figure something out, like I'm a puzzle he's decided is worth solving, and nobody has looked at me like that in years. Maybe ever.

Last Tuesday he reached across my desk to grab a pen and his forearm brushed mine and I thought about it for hours.

Hours. I sat in a meeting about tort reform and thought about Ray Garcia's forearm.

I went home that night and got myself off thinking about his hands on my hips and his breath against my ear, and then I lay there in the dark staring at my ceiling and wanting to throw my phone into the ocean, because this is not who I am.

I am not the omega who falls apart over some alpha with a crooked smile and a shirt that doesn't fit right.

I'm Miles fucking Covington. I made senior associate at twenty-seven. I don't pine.

"—and the deposition's on the fourteenth, right?"

I blink. "The sixteenth."

"Right, the sixteenth, that's what I said." He didn't say that, and we both know it, and the corner of his mouth twitches, and I want to bite it.

I want to bite his mouth. At work. Fantastic. Someone should revoke my law degree.

"You're staring at me," he says, not looking up from his notebook.

"I'm glaring."

"If you say so, boss." He underlines something in his notes, and I catch a glimpse of his handwriting—messy, slanted, surprisingly legible. There's a doodle in the margin that looks like a shark wearing a tie.

"Don't call me boss."

"You are, technically, my boss."

"Then call me Covington. Or sir. Literally anything else."

He looks up and his expression is pure mischief, the kind that spikes my blood pressure. "You want me to call you sir?"

My face does not get hot. It does not. "I want you to stop talking."

"Noted." He scrawls something else in his notebook, and I guarantee he just wrote call him sir more often.

This is my life. This is my professional, meticulously curated, absolutely under-control life.

I am one of the youngest senior associates in this firm's history, and I spend an embarrassing chunk of my mental bandwidth trying not to think about what it would feel like for this idiot to pin me against the wall.

Some days, I think the universe assigned Ray Garcia to me as a punishment for something I did in a past life.

He's a test I keep failing. Every time I think I've got a handle on whatever this is—this buzzing, low-grade fever that ramps up whenever he's in my space—he does something that knocks the floor out from under me.

He'll say something unexpectedly thoughtful, or I'll catch him frowning at a case file with this focused intensity that's the complete opposite of his usual laid-back warmth, and I'll want things I've trained myself not to want.

Then he'll say something stupid and I can breathe again.

It's a cycle. It's exhausting. I'm handling it.

I'm about to redirect us back to the witness prep when a knock comes at my open door—two quick raps, more announcement than request. Richard Aldridge fills the doorway the way senior partners tend to, like the building was constructed around him.

He's sixty-something, silver-haired, old money in every stitch of his suit, and he's been my mentor since my second year.

I owe him my career. He also terrifies me in a way I will never admit out loud.

"Miles. Good, you're here." His eyes flick to Ray. "The Linden Conference. I've spoken with the board, and we want your presentation on the Morrison case to be the firm's centerpiece."

My pulse spikes, but I keep my face perfectly still. "I appreciate the confidence."

"It's not confidence, it's expectation." He steps into my office, and even Ray sits up a little straighter.

"This is your partnership audition, Miles.

The board will be watching. Caldwell from the New York office will be there.

So will half of the judicial circuit's most influential names.

" He gives me a look that's almost warm, the way a surgeon might look at a promising incision.

"You're ready. Just don't give them any reason to second-guess it. "

"I won't." My voice comes out steady, which is a miracle, because inside I'm doing math I don't want to do.

Three days at a mountain resort. The stress of a career-defining presentation.

My suppressant refill is due at the end of the month and I'll need to make sure the timing works and I'm already calculating the overlap and I don't want to think about this right now.

"The logistics are a nightmare," Richard continues, pulling out his phone and scrolling.

"Twelve partners from six firms, three days of panels, plus the gala.

I'll need you to coordinate with the conference organizers on our presentation slot and make sure the AV setup for the Morrison materials is flawless. It's a lot of moving pieces."

"I'll handle it."

"The Morrison file alone has two hundred exhibits," Ray says from his chair, and both Richard and I look at him.

He's got that relaxed, half-slouched posture, but his eyes are sharp.

"If you're doing the multimedia presentation you prepped last month, the AV setup for that is pretty specific.

You'll need someone on-site running the tech so you can focus on the room instead of worrying about whether slide forty-seven loaded correctly. "

There's a pause. Richard's gaze shifts to Ray, and it's different this time. He actually looks at him.

"Garcia, isn't it?" Richard says.

"Yes, sir."

Richard looks at me. "Is he any good with the technical side?"

Ray set up the multimedia exhibits for the Morrison mock presentation and did it faster and more cleanly than the IT department would have.

He's annoyingly competent when he decides something is worth his attention.

But admitting that out loud, in front of him, feels like giving him something I can't take back.

"He's adequate," I say.

"Bring him." Richard pockets his phone. "You'll need support on-site, and if he already knows the Morrison file, it saves us the trouble of briefing someone new." He gives Ray a nod that's almost approving. "Don't make me regret it, Garcia."

"Wouldn't dream of it, sir." Ray's voice is professional and pleasant, and I want to scream.

Richard turns back to me. "I'll have my assistant send over the conference details. Book travel for both of you." He pauses at the door, and there's something in his expression that's less mentor and more warning. "This matters, Miles. Don't let anything distract you."

He leaves with two sentences of pleasantries about the weather and then he's gone, his expensive shoes clicking down the hallway. The silence he leaves behind feels heavier than his presence did.

I can feel Ray looking at me. I can always feel Ray looking at me, which is its own special kind of hell.

"So," Ray says, and I can hear the grin without looking. "Mountain resort, huh?"

"Don't."

"Three days? That sounds—"

"Garcia."

"I'm just saying, it could be fun."

I finally look at him. He's smiling at me with that open, unguarded expression that makes my stomach flip, and his scent is still everywhere, persistent, like it's soaked into the walls of my office and is never leaving.

"It will not be fun," I tell him. "It will be three days of work in a different location. You will be professional. You will be on time. You will iron your shirt. You will not speak to any senior partner unless spoken to first. Are we clear?"

"Crystal." He stands up, all six-foot-something of him, and the way he moves—unhurried, confident, like the world will wait for him—makes my teeth clench. "For what it's worth, boss, I'm not going to let you down."

I hold his gaze for a second too long and my stomach drops, and I look away first, which never happens.

"Close the door on your way out," I say.

He does, and the click of the latch is very loud in the quiet office. I sit there for a long moment, perfectly still, my hands flat on my desk, breathing in the fading ghost of pepper and ozone.

Three days. A shared hotel. A career-defining presentation in front of every person who has the power to make or break my future, and Ray Garcia will be right there next to me the entire time.

I should be panicking about the presentation.

I should be pulling up the Morrison exhibits and running my talking points.

I should be doing anything other than sitting here remembering the way his voice sounded when he said I'm not going to let you down, all simple and sincere, like it was the easiest promise in the world to make.

My fingers drift to the side of my neck, just below my jaw, pressing against the skin there. It's a habit I don't remember starting, touching the spot where a claiming bite would go if I were the kind of omega who let anyone close enough to leave one. I'm not. I never will be. There's no point.

I drop my hand the second I realize I'm doing it and reach for my coffee instead, but it's gone cold, and I drink it anyway.