Twelve
TWELVE
Luca
“I MEAN, it was really good,” Mia said, too quickly. “Best sex I’ve had in, well... a long time.”
Maybe I was imagining things, but it sounded like she’d been about to say ‘ever.’ If so, it would be a sad thing to admit, especially for someone who was married. Still not surprising, though. Byron was good at sex. He’d had a lot of practice, after all.
Before I could decide on an appropriate response, Mia plowed onward.
“You know how I said in my text that I’d just gotten some bad news, and my decision making wasn’t very good in the aftermath?”
I nodded. “Yes...?”
“Yes.” She waved a frustrated hand. “So... all of that. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and the whole thing was probably a mistake.”
I sat back, regarding her intently. “I get the feeling you haven’t made a lot of bad life choices, historically speaking.”
Her dark brows drew together. “What do you mean?”
I shook my head, trying to find the right words. “I’m just saying... getting upset about something and fucking a hot alpha so you don’t have to think about it for a few hours is pretty common. People—omegas—do that kind of thing all the time, right?”
“Do they?” she asked blankly.
“In my experience, yeah,” I told her, aware that my experience maybe wasn’t the healthiest—or most normal—template for reasonable behavior. “Your husband declared open season in the marriage, so why shouldn’t you? As long as you’re safe about it, what’s the problem?”
She opened her mouth, thought about it for an instant, and then closed it again. I watched her mentally trying out and discarding different responses before finally settling on one.
“I don’t think I was very good at it.”
I hesitated, still lost in the tangled depths of this conversation. “At sex?”
“At one-night stands.” She started fiddling with her half-finished triple espresso again. “It’s so... awkward , you know?” Her brown eyes sought mine, begging for understanding. “It’s like—there you are, waking up in the morning with this complete stranger, and he’s all, ‘Well, that was fun, gotta scoot, but help yourself to the shower and the continental breakfast—bye now!’ And you’re still stark naked in the bed with your hair plastered down with dried sweat, wondering what the hell just happened.”
I stared at her, lost in that desperate gaze as the sense of the words penetrated.
“Wait,” I said. “He slept with you?”
Confusion sculled across her delicate features. “Three times.”
I hesitated on a breath before shaking my head in frustration. “No, I mean he fell asleep with you in the bed and stayed all night? He didn’t leave until morning?”
Because, this was Byron we were talking about, wasn’t it? Had he been taken over by a pod person or something?
She winced. “I think we were both pretty tired. This is what I mean about being bad at one-night stands. Should I have left first? He seemed surprised I was still there when he woke up.”
I continued to gape at her, unable to look away as my brain raced in confused circles. There was a pod person living in the bedroom down the hall from me. An alien creature had burrowed into Byron’s stomach and taken over his brain.
At least that explained why he’d been such a basket case at work yesterday. Which government agency dealt with alien pod person invasions? Was it the CIA? Or maybe the NSA?
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” I told Mia. “Just let it be what it is. As long as you had a good time, it’s fine, right? If your husband can do whatever he wants, so can you.” My brain finally latched onto an important point it had skimmed over earlier. “What was the bad news? Sorry, I should’ve asked earlier.”
She scraped a hand down her face, pulling at the skin. Her eyes slid away from mine again. “I got a letter. Or, rather, the restaurant did.”
“What kind of letter?”
Her voice lowered to a barely audible mumble. “They’re taking our Michelin star away.”
And... ouch .
“Oh, Mia,” I said, all too aware of how much of her self-image seemed to be tied up in the success of the Elderflower Inn. “I’m so sorry. That sucks .”
She nodded, still not looking at me. “Nat and I let our marriage problems bubble over into the business. There was a stretch of time when things in the kitchen were... not good. Apparently, that just so happened to be when the undercover Michelin inspectors were there to check on us.”
Christ, what a shitty piece of luck.
“I’m so sorry,” I said again. “How does that work, though? They take it away, just like that, and write you a letter to let you know?”
“Not exactly.” She grabbed a napkin and started shredding the corner into tiny pieces. “The Michelin guide publishes their US version in January. Assuming they don’t reverse their decision, when the new one comes out, we won’t be in it anymore.”
“So, they might change their minds?” I asked, grasping for a silver lining.
She shrugged a shoulder, still focused on reducing the napkin to its constituent cellulose fibers. “It’s very easy to lose a star. Much more difficult to gain one.”
“You already did it once, though,” I said, striving for optimism. “That means you can do it again.”
“Doing it once destroyed my marriage,” she replied darkly. “I don’t know if I’ve got another Michelin star left in me at this point.”
We finished our coffees in unhappy silence before parting with a promise to do something fun and low stress soon. Neither of our hearts were really in it.
In the coffee shop parking lot, I saw that someone had stuck flyers under the windshield wipers of every single vehicle. It was a pet peeve of mine, partly due to the waste of paper and the inevitable litter when flyers blew away or people crumpled them up and tossed them on the ground.
Still, I glanced at the sheet—drawn by the well-designed layout and tasteful graphics. GRAND OPENING , it said. Join us at St. Louis’s hottest new restaurant, Bella Vita—conveniently located in historic Soulard.
I winced, knowing Mia had probably found an identical flyer on her windshield. I doubted that an announcement about a new competitor would make her morning any better. With a sigh, I tossed the flyer onto my passenger seat and headed out.
Rolling into the Hope Project ten minutes early, I saw that Zalen’s Bronco and Byron’s Audi were already parked in their usual spots. This wasn’t unusual for either of them, especially when there was something out of the ordinary going on.
Zalen’s current focus was a fifteen-year-old beta kid whose stepfather liked his victims young and male. I’d interacted with the boy a few times. He was messed up in the head in a way that I recognized all too well, even if the circumstances were a little bit different. In fact, I recognized it so well that I made a point of avoiding him as much as possible.
I wasn’t shirking my job. It wasn’t my responsibility to fix the kids. I was here to help make sure enough money flowed in to keep the place running—because otherwise, Zalen would fund it out of his own pockets until he eventually went bankrupt.
What he and the others were doing was an uphill battle—and didn’t I know it. Seriously, the quickest path to burnout in this avocation was to look at the success rates. They weren’t good, to put it mildly. Most of the teens who came to the Hope Project ended up right back in the gangs... addicted to drugs, in jail, or dead in an alley somewhere.
But some of us survived.
That had to make everything else worth it, or else what was the point? You needed to tell yourself that what you were doing was making a positive difference in the world. It was the truth, at least from a certain point of view. A low success rate was better than no success rate at all.
Anyway, Zalen was trying to keep his current project away from the abusive stepdad while also keeping him out of the foster system. The kid was so close to an age where he might be able to claim emancipated minor status. We just had to get him there in one piece, with the skills he’d need to make it on his own.
All three of the alphas were getting dangerously invested in the teen. I knew better, because I knew the steep uphill trek he faced. Mind you, the others knew better, too. It just never seemed to stop them.
I hauled my backpack up to my second-floor office and went back to work on the Johnston-Park Foundation grant, hoping that their next request wouldn’t involve blood and urine samples or pledging someone’s firstborn child.
Concentration wouldn’t come. My thoughts kept drifting to Mia, and the puzzle of why I felt so drawn to her when omega biology should have insisted that she was a dangerous rival.
Neither reaction made sense. I’d decided long ago that the only way to be safe was to keep distance between myself and other people. Emotional distance, anyway. Zalen and the others had taught me that I could have the things I needed—a home, a job, safe partners to help out with my heats and... other things—while avoiding the complicated and dangerous shit that went along with alphas thinking they controlled me, just because I was an omega.
Mia was an outlier. A growing exception to my emotional distance rule.
She’d tempted me closer by having problems I thought I could solve for her. That was my weakness, and I knew it. Fixing someone else’s problems meant I was too busy to focus on my own.
Stuck with an emotionally abusive beta husband? Play him at his own game and win. Better yet, divorce his cheating ass. A good enough lawyer could probably get Mia complete control of the restaurant as part of the settlement.
But this was more than my normal displacement activity. It was getting personal . I was treating her like a friend... except I didn’t have friends. I had acquaintances. Well, acquaintances and whatever the alphas were. Housemates with occasional benefits?
Argh .
The grant paperwork stared accusingly up at me from the screen. Where was my brain today? Hell, what time was it?
Answer—almost lunch time. Christ .
I managed to finish the page I was on and start the next one. Then I went down the hall to the employee break room to get something from the vending machine. Byron was there, leaning forward with both hands braced on the countertop next to the sink, staring at nothing.
“Hi. You okay?” I asked, my tone cautious.
He straightened abruptly, as though he’d only just noticed I was there. “Yeah.” Gray eyes swept me up and down. “You?”
I shrugged. “Distracted today.”
His nostrils flared, scenting the air. “You were with rom-com girl this morning. Is that why you’re distracted?”
I wasn’t sure why the question made me feel so off balance. “Dunno. Maybe.”
He nodded, as though I’d given a meaningful answer. “Right. You. Me. In my room. Meet me there at nine p.m. tonight.”
The sense of relief that washed over me wasn’t something I was proud of. “Just the two of us?” I asked, because that was unusual. Like, really unusual.
“Yeah,” he confirmed. “Just the two of us.”
The rest of the day dragged, my brain caught between its earlier distraction and anticipation of what was to come—pulled so thin between ruminating on the past and future that there was no bandwidth left for the present. I finished the workday, drove home to Ladue on autopilot, ate food that I didn’t taste, and watched TV that I didn’t pay attention to.
As nine p.m. finally rolled around, some of the tension drained from my shoulders as the promise of quieting my ugly inner voice, at least for a little while, beckoned. Byron’s room was almost a caricature of a manly man’s retreat—all mahogany and dark leather; thick rugs and expensive oak. A massive flat screen TV dominated one wall.
By nine-fifteen, I was kneeling naked and bound on one of those luxurious rugs. A baseball game played on the screen behind me—Cards versus Cubs, not that I cared. My arms were strapped behind me, wrist to opposite elbow... my legs bent double, ankle strapped to thigh, so I was sitting on my heels.
In front of me, Byron slouched down on his leather couch until his hips were at the edge of the seat cushion. He unzipped his pants, his spicy scent growing stronger as he pulled his soft cock free of his boxers.
I knew he’d gotten himself off before I’d showed up, probably using a sleeve to keep his knot warm after he came. Chances were, he wouldn’t get hard again at all tonight. If he did, he’d take care of it himself later, after I left.
A hand gripped my hair and guided me forward until Byron could feed his cock into my mouth. Even soft, it was all I could take, making it completely impossible to focus on anything else.
I closed my eyes and groaned in relief, unable to stifle the noise as all my troubles and worries fled.
“Shh,” Byron said. “I’m trying to watch the game.”
My mind went soft and blank. The TV buzzed meaningless nonsense behind me. A hand stroked through my hair like someone absently petting a lapdog. My cock grew heavy, half-hard with a sort of distant, gentle arousal. I couldn’t do anything about it with my arms bound... and I didn’t particularly want to, anyway.
No one was going to fuck me, or demand anything at all of me except to keep the dick in my mouth warm. I rolled my head to the side a bit, so I could rest against Byron’s thigh, his open zipper pressing a zigzag pattern into my left cheek.
Afterward, when we were finished, I pulled my joggers over my hips and reached for my T-shirt, a question pressing at the back of my teeth.
I shouldn’t ask. I’d already decided it would be too complicated. Asking was pointless since I’d said right up front that I didn’t want to do it.
I shouldn’t...
“Have you considered bringing Mia here as our third?” I blurted.
Byron looked up at me, surprised.
“No,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what to feel about the fact that I could tell he was lying.