2. Sven
Two
Sven
I’ve got my hand around my cock before I’m even fully through the door.
Don’t judge me. I held it together for fucking hours.
Hours of sitting in that building knowing she was in it too, breathing the same air, her scent fucking crawling through the vents into my office until I couldn’t read a single line of the budget I was supposed to be reviewing.
Fucking hours of pretending to be the boss. Calm, controlled.
Now I’m home, and the door’s barely shut, that I’ve got my back against it and my fist already moving.
Esme.
Vanilla, warm sugar, and omega slick under it…
sweet and dark. The kind of scent that brings a male to his knees.
I caught it the second the AC kicked on this morning, and my body just knew.
Before I even saw her face, or learned her name, the oldest part of me sat straight up and went: That one! Fucking Mine!
I stroke myself harder, picturing her. Full tits pressing against the fabric of her blouse, the loose waves of her brown hair framing her gorgeous face.
Her beautiful hazel eyes, that cute little nose, her full mouth…
Thick fucking everywhere. With hips I want my giant hands on.
I couldn’t stop fucking looking. The curve of her waist, her gorgeous brown skin, those cute fuck-me glasses.
Fuck, and how her pulse jumped in her throat from twenty feet away.
I groan, my head against the door, working myself roughly.
I’m thinking about getting my mouth on that pulse. About what she’d taste like, her scent right from the source, between her thick thighs, the slick I could smell building on her by the end of the meeting. Fuck!
I wonder how fucking wet she was for me…
Mine. The word pounds through my mind with every stroke.
Mate. My omega. The one. Five generations of Greymark males have scented their mates and known in one breath.
My grandfather caught my grandmother’s scent from across a fucking battlefield and walked through bullets to get to her.
I always figured it’d happen to me someday, but never thought I’d walk into a staff meeting and get fucking ruined for the rest of my days.
I picture her under me. On her back, her lush thighs spread, her fucking perfect body laid out for me, soft and gasping, fucking taking me.
All of me. I see myself filling her. Fucking breeding her.
The sounds she’ll make. I imagine her saying my name in her sweet voice, Sven, the way she whispered thank you…
I come so fucking hard, my vision goes white.
With my fist clamped tight, her name grunted through my ragged breaths, and my body shaking against my front door like I’m seventeen again instead of a grown alpha who runs a whole goddamn public library.
Spilling over my hand, imagining it’s her I’m filling, her I’m marking, her, her, fucking her!
Then I stand there for a moment, breathing hard. fucking wrecked.
I look down at the mess on my hand, on my jeans and boxer briefs, and I huff out a laugh, because, Christ. One day. I met her fucking today, said one fucking word to her. And I just jacked off against my door like a feral animal the second I got home.
Nobody would believe that the alpha they go quiet around, the one who clears a room just by walking into it, just came apart over the new hire like a fucking pimply teenager.
They think I’m carved out of stone. Good.
I’ve been happy with people leaving me the fuck alone, and my reputation for being terrifying does exactly that.
I’m not nice. I’ve never been nice. I’m the oldest of seven in a family that’s loud, warm, and suffocatingly loving, and I came out the quiet one.
But Esme. The second she walked into my damn building, I felt my walls fucking crack. Felt myself go soft in a way I have never been. Couldn’t help it. She blinked at me, looking like she was bracing to get the same treatment I give everyone else, and I just… couldn’t. Not to her. Never to her.
Something small hits my shin. I look down, and Pickle is sitting on my boot, looking up at me with his one good eye and the milky blind one, his tail wagging, because it’s past his dinner time.
“Yeah, yeah.” I wipe my hands, tuck myself back, and scoop him up.
He weighs nothing in my hand. Eleven pounds of ancient, half-bald, three-quarters-blind, little disaster of a dog that somebody dumped in a parking lot two winters ago and that I told myself I’d foster for a week. The fucker still sleeps on my chest…
He licks my jaw. Outside of my family, there’s exactly one creature that’s seen me gentle, and it’s this ridiculous animal. I’d scorch the earth before I let anything happen to him.
“You gonna fucking love her,” I rumble, carrying him to the kitchen to get his food. I set him down by his bowl.
The little asshole is not listening. He’s eating. Fair.
I straighten up and look around my place, too big, too quiet, all the books and the good light and the silence I built on purpose. None of it ever bothered me before. It bothers me now. One fucking day, and the life I built bothers me. Fuck.
But I’m gonna do this right. She’s small.
She’s human, she’s soft, she’s new in a city where she knows nobody, and I’m me.
Seven feet of grumpy alpha orc who clears rooms. I could scent-mark her, rut her, and have her round by spring…
Every fucking instinct I’ve got is screaming to do exactly that: take, claim, mine, fucking now!
I’m not gonna. Not like that.
She moved her whole life out here to build something.
I’m not gonna be the asshole who crashes it all.
I’m gonna be patient. Fucking court her.
Like she deserves. Let her get used to me.
Let her choose instead of getting swept away by an alpha twice her size who knew in a heartbeat that she was his.
She is mine. That’s settled, bone-deep. Just doesn’t know it yet…