Chapter 9 Ray
Ray
He's burning up. That's the first thing I register — the heat of his skin under my palm, way too hot, like a fever but different.
Hotter. His eyes are glassy and his breathing is wrong and I can smell him, really smell him, in a way I haven't been able to before, and my palm is on his forehead and my brain is finally catching up to what the rest of me already knows.
"Miles. How long has this been building?"
"I'm fine." He pulls away from me and stands up, swaying, grabbing the nightstand. "It's just the altitude. Or the stress. It's going to pass."
"That's not what this is."
"You're not a doctor, Garcia."
"No, but I've got a nose and you smell like—" I stop myself.
Like everything I've ever wanted. Like a sweetness that's making my pulse hammer and my skin prickle and my cock pay attention, which is fucked up because he's clearly in pain and I apparently don't care.
"You smell different. Way different. And you're burning up. "
He sits back down on the side of the bed and drops his face into his palms. His shirt is damp at the collar and between his shoulder blades, and his fingers are shaking.
Miles Covington, who I have never seen lose his composure once in the entire time I've known him, is sitting on a hotel bed with his face buried in his palms and every wall he's built crumbling around him.
"When did you last have a heat?" I ask.
"I don't want to talk about this."
"I know. When?"
He's quiet for a long time. "Years," he says into his palms. "I've been on suppressants since I was a teenager. I haven't had a full heat in—" He cuts himself off. "A long time."
That scares me more than anything else he's said tonight.
A heat after years of suppression. I don't know a lot about omega biology, but I know enough to know that a breakthrough heat is bad.
It's not a normal cycle. It's everything the suppressants held back flooding in at once, and it hits harder the longer it's been held down.
I pull out my phone. Devon's name is right there at the top of my contacts, and I stare at it.
My thumb hovers over the call button. What would I even say?
Hey Dev, I'm in a hotel room with my boss and he's going into heat and I'm the only alpha here and I think I might be in love with him and I have no fucking idea what to do.
Devon would tell me to call a doctor. Devon would be right.
I close my contacts and open my messages instead. I type: Hey, something came up at the conference. Might need to stay a couple extra days.
Devon replies almost immediately: Lol did you get invited to an after-party? Don't do anything I wouldn't do
I stare at the screen. My brother is on his couch with his baby and his mate and everything is fine and normal and I'm standing in this room with the air getting thicker and sweeter by the minute and nothing is fine.
Yeah, something like that, I send back. All good. Kiss Gabe for me.
I put my phone away.
Miles hasn't moved. His face is in his palms and his breathing is ragged and I need to do something useful because if I just stand here I'm going to lose it.
"Okay," I say, more to myself than to him. "Okay. Here's what we're going to do."
"We're not going to do anything. I'm going to ride this out and you're going to—"
"I'm extending the room." I pick up the hotel phone. "The conference is done. We'll stay until this passes."
"Garcia, you can't just—"
"Watch me." I dial the front desk and when someone picks up I'm surprised by how steady my voice sounds.
"Hi, this is room 412. We need to extend our stay.
Possibly two additional nights." The woman asks if there's a problem and I say no, just a change of plans.
I ask about additional towels, extra water, and whether room service runs through the night.
She tells me everything I need to know and I thank her and hang up.
It felt good to handle something concrete. One thing done. Manageable.
Miles is staring at me from the bed with an expression I can't fully read. Part anger, part relief he won't name.
"You just extended the room without asking me."
"Yeah."
"I'm your boss."
"I know. You can fire me later." I grab the room service menu from the desk. "What do you want to eat?"
"I don't need you to take care of me." His voice is thin and angry, but the anger is wobbling.
"You haven't eaten since the reception. That was hours ago."
"I'm not hungry."
"Miles, you're going into a heat that you haven't had in years and you're going to need fuel. I'm ordering food. You can yell at me about it or you can tell me what you want." I hold up the menu. "They have soup."
He looks at me for a long beat, and I see the fight drain out of him. Not because I won the argument. Because he's too tired to have it. "I don't care. Whatever you want."
I order water, crackers, fruit, soup, some bread.
I don't know what people eat before a heat.
I order what seems right. While I'm on the phone, Miles gets up and goes to the bathroom, and I hear the faucet running.
He comes back with a wet face and damp hair at the temples and sits on the opposite side of the bed from where he was before, like changing positions will change anything about what's happening to him.
"You should call Richard," he says. "Tell him I'm sick. Food poisoning, or a migraine, anything that explains why I'm not at the closing breakfast tomorrow."
"Okay. What about you? Should we call a—"
"No." His voice is sharp. "No doctors. No medical. Nobody comes in this room."
"Miles—"
"If anyone finds out—" He stops. Swallows. "If this gets back to the firm, if they know I went into heat at the conference, after everything, after the presentation—" He's gripping the mattress so hard his knuckles are white. "I will lose everything."
"You won't."
"You don't know that."
I don't. He's right. I don't know how the firm would handle this, and I don't know what the HR policy is on unreported heats during business travel.
But I know that the look on his face is the same one he had in the hallway after the gala — that exhausted, cornered look of someone who's been performing so hard for so long that the idea of anyone seeing the real thing is more terrifying than the thing itself.
"Okay," I say. "No doctors. No one comes in. Just us."
The knock comes about twenty minutes later.
I open the door and the bellhop is young, an alpha, and the second the door swings open his face changes.
His nostrils flare. His eyes go wide and then they drift past me, looking into the room, searching for the source of the scent that's pouring out of the suite like heat from an open oven.
I don't decide to do it. I just move. I step forward into the doorway, filling it, my palm on the frame, my shoulders squaring up. I can feel myself getting bigger, taking up more space, blocking his line of sight to the room. To Miles. The bellhop takes a step back.
"Thanks," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like me. It sounds flat and hard and like a warning. I take the tray from him and close the door with my other arm.
I stand there with my back against the door, holding a tray of soup and crackers, breathing hard.
My heart is going fast and my grip on the tray is white-knuckled and there's a word in my head that I've never thought about anyone before.
Mine. Not in a fun, flirty way. Not in the way I've said it to hookups when things get heated.
In a way that feels like it's coming from somewhere very old and very deep, somewhere that doesn't care about professionalism or hierarchy or the fact that I'm a twenty-three-year-old legal assistant who doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.
Mine. He's mine. And I just almost growled at a bellhop for smelling him.
What the fuck is happening to me.
I set the food on the desk and bring Miles a glass of water. He takes it without looking at me and drinks half of it, and I sit in the chair across from the bed and try to figure out what comes next.
It gets worse. Not all at once — in stages, like the tide coming in. Miles paces. He sits down. He stands up. He goes to the bathroom and I hear water running. He comes back wet-faced and shivering even though the room is warm.
I try to get him to eat and he takes one look at the soup and pushes it away.
"The smell," he says, and I move it to the kitchenette counter and crack the balcony door instead.
The cold mountain air helps for about a minute, and then he tells me to close it because the cold is making the cramps worse.
He snaps at me when I get too close. "Stop hovering.
" When I sit down: "Would you stop staring at me.
" When I suggest he try lying down: "I'm not a child, Garcia, I know how to manage myself.
" Each one is sharper than the last, and I take it, all of it, because I can see what's underneath.
He's scared. He's in pain. And he's humiliated that I'm watching it happen.
I bring him a cold washcloth without asking. He snatches it from me and presses it to the back of his neck and doesn't say thank you, but he doesn't throw it at me either, and his shoulders drop a fraction when the cold hits his skin. I'll take that.
The room is getting warmer. I don't think it's the heating.
Miles's scent is thickening in the air, sweeter and heavier than before, and I'm responding in ways I'm trying very hard to ignore.
Every time he paces past me I get a wave of it and my pulse jumps and my cock twitches and I hate myself for it.
He's in pain. He's scared. And I'm sitting here getting hard because the scent is rewiring me in real time — a growl building in my throat every time he moves, my vision narrowing to track him, the urge to cover him so strong my fingers ache from gripping the armrest. I'm going to have to unpack that later, when I'm not busy trying not to be a monster.
Then a bad wave hits. He's standing near the window and he doubles over, arms wrapped around his stomach, and the sound he makes is awful — this low, grinding noise through his teeth. I'm on my feet before I can think about it.
"Don't touch me," he says, but his voice is broken. He's gripping the windowsill with white knuckles and he's shaking, all of him, head to heels. "Don't — just don't—"
"I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
"It doesn't even matter," he says, and his voice cracks. "My body does this, it goes through all of this, and it doesn't even—" He stops. His jaw clenches. He stares at the floor like he's said something he can't take back.
I don't know what that means. I can hear that it matters — it goes deeper than just hating heats — but I don't understand it, and right now isn't the time to ask. So I just stand there, close enough to catch him if he falls, and wait.
The wave passes. Miles sinks onto the bed, exhausted, his fight gone. He's not pushing me away anymore. He doesn't have the energy. He's just sitting there, damp and shaking and too tired to pretend.
I sit next to him. Not touching. Just close enough that he can feel me there.
"You should go," he says. No conviction in it.
"No."
"This is going to get worse."
"I know."
"You don't—" He swallows. "You've never done this before."
"No."
"You're scared."
"Yeah." I look at him. He looks at me. His eyes are fever-bright and his face is flushed and he looks terrible and beautiful and like someone who stopped expecting anyone to stay. "I'm staying anyway."
He doesn't say anything. He just sits there, and I feel the moment he stops fighting.
It's not a big dramatic thing. It's just the tension leaving his shoulders, the clench in his jaw loosening, the way he leans toward me instead of away.
He's done. He's too tired and too scared and too deep in this to keep pretending he wants me to leave.
We sit on the bed in the quiet room and I listen to him breathe and I don't try to fix anything or say anything smart. I'm just here. Whatever's coming, I'm here.
He turns his head and looks at me. Not the sharp, cold look he gives me at work. Not the angry, desperate look from the bathroom. An expression I've never seen on his face before — open and terrified, asking for something he doesn't know how to ask for.
I lean in, or he leans in, or we both do.
It doesn't matter. His lips touch mine, and it's soft.
It's the softest thing that's ever happened between us.
No anger in it, no frustration, no adrenaline.
Just his mouth on mine, warm and trembling, and his fingers coming up to rest on my jaw like he needs to make sure I'm real.
I kiss him back. Slow. My palm on the back of his neck, gentle, cradling him. He makes a sound against my lips that's not pain and not pleasure, just — need. Just this aching, raw need to be close to someone, and I pull him closer and he lets me.
His skin is hot under my palm. Hotter than before.
The kiss changes — his grip on my jaw tightens, his breathing shifts, and I can feel the heat building in him, crossing a line from want to need.
His lips part and the sound he makes against my mouth is different now, deeper, more desperate, and the sweetness of his scent hits me like a wall and every instinct I have locks on to him.
He's shaking. I'm shaking. His fist knots in my shirt and pulls me closer, and his skin is so hot it's almost alarming, and I can feel the exact moment where this stops being a choice and starts being something neither of us can stop.
I hold him tighter and I don't let go.