Nine
NINE
Mia
I WOKE AFTER several hours of coma-like sleep interspersed with smoking hot sex—which had involved at least three rounds and included enough orgasms that I’d lost count. Three things jostled for my groggy attention, each one sending a shock along my nerves, but for totally different reasons.
First, there was a mostly soft cock nestled inside me. Byron’s warm, muscular body was curled around and over me from behind, which had become a familiar sensation during the night. His weight pressed me into the pillowy soft mattress, and it had no business feeling nearly as good as it did. His knot was deflated, and I wasn’t clamping down on him. He just... hadn’t slipped out yet.
Second, and somehow considerably more jolting, teeth and lips were wrapped around the juncture of my neck and left shoulder, softly suckling at the tender skin there. My mating gland was on the other side—like most omegas, I was right-glanded. None of which did anything to stop the flood of melting pleasure spreading sluggishly through my veins in response to the symbolism of an alpha putting his mouth there.
I would have devoted more brainpower to freaking out over this and panicking about the best way to extricate myself. Except, third —the heavy drapes drawn across the hotel room’s window were utterly failing to block the bright morning sun shining outside.
Morning.
Sun.
And not early morning sun from the looks of it. I yelped in dismay, my muscles jerking before I could control them. Byron startled awake, his dick sliding out of my body even as his teeth tightened convulsively on my skin.
I felt the moment he regained enough awareness to realize what he was doing to my neck. This wasn’t difficult, since it involved him letting out an audible gasp while simultaneously shoving away from me as though my body had become red hot.
Meanwhile, I lay motionless as a statue, my omega freeze response in full force. Thank you so much, limbic system. Really helpful. No, seriously . This is great.
“Um,” I managed, since that seemed to be my default verbal response around this alpha.
Silence fell.
The room was choked with stale sex pheromones, but behind me, Byron’s spicy aniseed scent was doing something complicated that my nose couldn’t interpret. The bed shifted as he rose, putting more space between us. I finally grasped some control of my muscles and rolled onto my back, tugging the cotton sheet up to cover my breasts as I moved.
This allowed me to see him properly in the diffuse morning light. And... huh . Apparently, not even Mr. Cool could make ‘ naked and freaked out with a used condom slowly sliding off his limp dick’ look anything other than painfully awkward.
His face resembled the human version of a PC rebooting. He stared at me blankly for several excruciating seconds before blinking twice. With what looked like conscious effort, he smoothed his expression and rescued the slipping condom before it could fall all the way off, tying a knot in it and tossing it in the trash. I tried, without success, to remember at what point in the proceedings he’d lost all his clothes.
My eyes slipped down, drawn to a deep, puckered scar in his side, a few inches below his ribcage. An attempt had been made to incorporate it into a large tattoo of jungle flowers and thorny vines, but it wasn’t really the sort of scar that could be hidden.
He must have seen me looking, because there was a brittle edge to his voice when he spoke.
“Sorry, rom-com girl. I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you. Not sure what happened—just tired, I guess.”
He cleared his throat. “I have to go now, but you should help yourself to the shower or whatever. Checkout is at eleven. There’s probably, uh, some kind of a breakfast buffet downstairs if you’re hungry.”
Without waiting for a reply—which was good, since I didn’t have one—he scooped up his discarded clothing from the floor, the back of the chair, and a few other random surfaces, then disappeared into the bathroom.
I lay there, still mired in omega instincts screaming stay still don’t move from the depths of my amygdala. Less than five minutes later, Byron emerged dressed, but otherwise looking exactly like someone who’d just had a wild, hours-long sexfest in an unremarkable two-star hotel.
He gathered up his laptop without a word. At first, it seemed like he’d flee the room without so much as acknowledging me, but as his hand fell on the doorknob, he paused.
“You know, life’s too short to spend it harnessed to people who don’t treat you right,” he said over his shoulder. “Thanks for the evening, beautiful.”
The door opened. The door closed.
I lay there for several more minutes, staring at it. Eventually, my panic over how late it was overpowered my panic over how good it had felt to let an alpha fuck me and then fall asleep with his teeth teasing my neck. I stumbled into the plastic shower enclosure and scrubbed the scent of sex from my skin with something like desperation, flinching as various intimate aches made themselves known.
Clearly, my body wasn’t going to let me forget what I’d done anytime soon.
I dropped off the keycard at the front desk and drove back to Jennings on autopilot, dread sitting hot and heavy in the pit of my stomach. Nat already had suspicions about what I’d been up to lately, even if they’d been infuriatingly incorrect before last night.
I reminded myself firmly that all of this was his doing. He was the one who couldn’t keep it in his pants. Somehow, that didn’t make me any more excited about the prospect of walking into the house at nine-thirty a.m. while wearing yesterday’s rumpled clothes.
The driveway was empty when I pulled in. On the one hand, it was a relief. On the other hand, it was only a delay of the inevitable. Maybe he’d been out all night, too.
I let myself into the modest home that seemed less like a haven and more like a battleground these days. It was silent except for the rumble of the ancient gas furnace and the rattle of the icemaker. I wandered into the kitchen, having been too rushed and freaked out to consider taking advantage of the free continental breakfast at the hotel.
My eyes fell on the table. Abruptly, sick queasiness flip-flopped my stomach.
The letter . How in the hell had I forgotten about the letter?
‘I want to forget everything .’ The ghost of my own voice floated through my hazy memory, followed by Byron saying, ‘That, I can definitely do .’
The warning from the Michelin review board was gone from the tabletop. Unless we’d fallen victim to an oddly specific burglar, Nat had been in at some point last night and found it. At a guess, it was probably sitting in his office now.
Not that it mattered.
The heavy weight of failure crashed down on my shoulders, one of which bore a faint bruise from being sucked on like an omega-flavored lollipop. My Michelin star... my precious and hard-won reward for creating something exceptional. I’d fucked up, and now they were going to take it away. I fumbled for a chair and fell into it, staring at the place where the letter had been.
God damnit .
Every single aspect of my life was in a fucking shambles, and I had no idea where to start when it came to fixing any of it. Worse, all it had taken was a fat knot in my pussy and a soothing cloud of alpha pheromones tickling my nose for me to completely forget my responsibilities.
Was this the siren song that lured perfectly capable and intelligent omegas into mating bonds with alphas? This desire to let someone else bark at you until you stopped caring about your troubles... until they became someone else’s troubles?
I shook my head sharply, my bruised neck giving an accusatory twinge in protest of the sudden movement.
I was the head chef of a restaurant. Whether it had a Michelin star or not, I had responsibilities to my staff, to my customers... to the banks that held the liens on the building. I shoved away from the table and stood up, heading to the bathroom for another, longer shower in hopes that it would wash away the remaining dregs of last night.
It didn’t help much. As I was dressing for work, my phone pinged from its wireless charger on the bedside table. I checked it with a degree of trepidation, only to find a text from Luca.
Did you break Byron last night?
I stared at the words without comprehension. After a few minutes, I typed ‘ No...?’ and sent it. Then I followed up with ‘ Why? ’
Dots marched across the screen.
He was late to work and he’s acting really...
I waited. When no new message appeared, I sent ‘ acting really what? ’
Strange , Luca texted.
Somehow, responding with ‘ That’s odd, he seemed fine when he fled the hotel room like a cat with its tail on fire’ didn’t seem like the thing to do.
Before I could come up with anything reasonable to say, the dots appeared again.
So, how was it?
I swallowed hard. Was I really having this conversation over text at ten o’clock in the morning with Byron’s housemate and occasional lover?
Complicated? I sent. I got some bad news last night, and my decision making maybe wasn’t the best. I have to go to work now, but we could get coffee tomorrow morning and talk then?
Was it weird that I wanted to see Luca so soon after hooking up with his alpha? Yeah, that was probably weird. God help me, I was turning into a weirdo.
Sure, sounds good , he texted. Usual time and place? See you there .
See you there , I agreed.
Nat was already at the restaurant when I arrived. He had dark smudges under his eyes, and new stress lines framed the corners of his eyes and mouth. A result of the contents of the letter, I wondered—or of my absence last night?
“Isaiah put in his two weeks’ notice,” he said, by way of greeting.
It took a second for my brain to refocus on this new piece of information. Then, my heart sank. Isaiah had been my sous-chef for just shy of eighteen months, and he was a talented kid. Him leaving was the last thing I needed.
“Did you try to talk him out of it?” I demanded. “We can’t afford to lose him right now!”
“Yes, I tried to talk him out of it,” Nat said. “But in case you haven’t noticed, working conditions in the kitchens have been kind of shitty lately.”
My temper rose; I shoved it back down. Because what was I going to say? No, you’re wrong, everything’s peachy?
“We need to fill that vacancy as soon as possible,” I said instead. “Get a job listing posted. Get me some interviewees.”
“Thank you,” Nat said coldly. “Believe it or not, I am actually familiar with how staffing works.”
Apparently, we weren’t going to talk about the letter. Or anything else that had happened last night. Which was probably for the best.
“Sorry,” I said. “I know you do. I’m just stressed. We all are.”
Exhaustion bowed his shoulders for a moment. “Yeah,” he agreed, and went off to do whatever he’d been doing before I got there. Posting the job opening, probably.
I found Isaiah and took him aside before the lunch service started, to see if there was anything I could do to make him stay.
“I would, chef,” he said quietly, not meeting my eyes. “Honestly, I would. But it’s my mom. She’s got early onset dementia. I’m moving back to Philly to help my dad look after her.”
I squeezed his shoulder, my heart aching for him. “I’m so sorry. Of course you have to go. She needs you more than we do. If we can write you a reference or help in any way, let us know.”
He nodded, pressing his lips together to keep them from trembling, and mumbled a quiet thank-you before heading off to continue his pre-shift prep work.
The lunch crowd was a bit lighter than usual, which was both a relief and a worry. Had word started spreading that the Elderflower Inn wasn’t as good as it used to be? I tried not to dwell on it—one lunch service wasn’t statistically significant in the grand scheme of things.
I was deep in the rhythm of taking orders, organizing the line, and making sure everything that went out was the kind of quality customers expected from a nationally recognized restaurant. A couple of hours in, Nat poked his head into the kitchen and indicated he needed a word.
It didn’t bode well for our relationship that my body’s instinctive reaction was to dump a spike of adrenaline into my bloodstream, but I checked that everything was under control and stepped into the hallway that ran behind the staff areas.
“What is it?” I asked, careful to keep my tone neutral.
Nat looked like he’d swallowed a lemon after gargling with razorblades.
“Your alpha fuck-toy is out there,” he said from between clenched teeth, the words dripping poison. “Apparently he wants to thank the chef personally .”
I had a moment’s incomprehension—how could Nat possibly know about Byron? He’d never even seen him! Feeling like the floor was dropping out from beneath my feet with every step, I turned wordlessly and moved in a daze toward the pass-through, where I could peek out and scan the dining room for a blond head and piercing gray eyes.