Thirty-One
THIRTY-ONE
Mia
BYRON WAS LONG gone, leaving me rattling around alone in the huge house. But even a couple of hours later, my body still buzzed with the memory of his nearness... of the scent of aniseed and old leather inside his car.
His sexy, sexy car.
Goddamn it, why did he have to drive my childhood pinup car? It was so random . Like, it wasn’t enough that he was handsome and dangerous and smelled like the best Italian cooking and fucked like a stallion. He also had to drive a perfectly restored red Audi Quattro.
“ Argh ,” I said to the ceiling of my empty bedroom.
There was nothing to do until an hour or so before my planned nine p.m. dinner. It wasn’t as though a serve-yourself taco bar required huge amounts of pre-prep.
Did omegas who lived with alphas feel this way all the time ? If I was an actual beta woman instead of just playing one inside my doomed marriage, I’d have a trusty vibrator hidden away in my belongings. But I was an unbonded omega married to a beta man—one who’d probably have felt threatened by the idea of me using bottled alpha pheromones and getting myself off without him.
I sprawled among my hoard of borrowed pillows and blankets. They were already starting to smell like a combination of me and Luca after only one night. Like the last week before school break, when the air was full of the scent of flowers and mown grass, full to bursting with the endless possibilities of summer vacation.
The alphas’ scents weren’t obvious in this seldom-used guest bedroom. Yet my nose still knew they were there. Fennel and aniseed. Lime and vanilla. My brain even conjured the memory of rich bergamot laced with cinnamon, despite the house holding no trace of Emiel’s dampened pheromones that I’d been able to detect.
My hand stroked down my front, detouring over one breast. My skin tingled, even through the worn cotton of my ‘day off’ T-shirt. Feeling ridiculous, I continued my trek downward, delving beneath the elastic waistband of my sweats and burrowing into my practical black panties.
I was wet, but I knew within seconds that my body wanted something more than my own fingers. With what was probably an overly dramatic sigh, I pulled my hand free and stared at the ceiling some more. What was I doing, lying here in the middle of the afternoon and frigging myself to thoughts of the people who were letting me stay in their house?
“Mia Dimitriadis, you are an idiot,” I said, and got up to wash the fragrant slick off my hand.
I spent the next few hours logged into the cloud account where Nat backed up all the restaurant’s business records, stressing out about the dip in revenue we’d seen ever since the Bella Vita opened nearby. It was a relief when the front door opened a few minutes before six.
Closing down my laptop, I wandered out and found Luca in the front hall.
“Heya,” I greeted. “How was work?”
He met my eyes with a smile, but it was strained. “Hi. Not great, actually. There’s still no sign of the kid, Tony. The cops showed up a couple of hours ago to interview Zalen and search the place. I guess his mother sent them over to harass us.”
“What?” My eyes widened. “Can they do that? Zalen hasn’t done anything wrong!”
Luca shook his head wearily. “I don’t think they had a warrant. Zalen offered to take them around the building—since, as you say, he hasn’t done anything wrong. No one there has even seen Tony since he disappeared.”
My heart ached, both for the teenager and the alphas who’d been trying to help him. “What a mess,” I said. “Look, it’s still a couple of hours until I need to start the meal prep, but do you want a drink first? I’ve got tequila and limes for the sauce.”
“Sold,” Luca agreed. “It’s been a tequila kind of day, now that you mention it.”
I found a couple of shot glasses and dipped the rims in salt while he dumped his work bag and changed clothes. We perched on stools at the breakfast bar and saluted each other with our drinks, downing them and chasing the alcohol with wedges of lime.
“Better,” Luca said with a sigh.
I nodded. “Good. Hey, did you know that Byron came back here at lunch and drove me to the grocery store?”
Luca peered at me as though he was waiting for a punchline. When there wasn’t one, he said, “Really?”
“Really. Love the car, by the way.”
He shrugged. “It’s pretty cool for something that old, I guess.”
I scoffed. “ Pretty cool , he says. There’s a TV show I have to introduce you to. Byron as well, if he’s willing. And, well, the others too, if they’re interested. I just have to figure out if it’s streaming anywhere. I don’t think it ever came out on DVD on this side of the pond.”
“What’s it called?” Luca asked. “I’ll track it down for you.”
I told him, and he dragged me back to his room with him while he googled it. The only option was an obscure streaming service I’d never heard of that specialized in old British shows.
“Do you guys have this one?” I asked skeptically.
Luca was busy tapping in payment details. “We do now,” he said.
It was such a silly little thing—a subscription with a free trial that he could cancel as soon as I left. But I still found myself getting teary. I blinked back the burn in my eyes, trying to convince myself it was the fault of the single shot of tequila.
“Thank you,” I said, succumbing to the urge to wrap my arms around him from behind.
He gave a weak laugh and patted my hand. “It’s no big deal, seriously. But I reserve the right to jeer at the television if this series is terrible.”
“What... you don’t trust ten-year-old me’s taste in TV shows?” I demanded, mock offended.
“Ask me again after I’ve seen this one,” he said, and this time his smile reached his eyes.
The others trailed in over the next hour or so, Byron first, then Emiel, and finally Zalen, who looked positively haggard. Since there was no reason to wait, I started dinner, chopping and measuring while Emiel and Luca sat around watching me work. Emiel looked almost as bad as Zalen did. I guessed that Tony’s disappearance was weighing heavily on him as well.
“Are you a fan of spicy food?” I asked him. “Byron wasn’t sure.”
“It’s okay,” Emiel said, as communicative as ever.
“I’m doing the salsa on the side, but it’s going to pack a kick,” I warned him.
There was something deeply satisfying about throwing fresh ingredients in a blender and ending up with a velvety, fragrant sauce a minute or two later. I sauteed the vegan chorizo, chopped up the various garnish options, seared the shrimp, and started crisping up the first few tortillas while Luca went to round up the others.
“You didn’t have to do this, you know,” Emiel said from his perch on one of the stools.
I glanced over my shoulder, surprised. His dark eyes were on me, like he wasn’t sure what to make of me.
The feeling was mutual.
“I know,” I said. “It’s not a problem, though. I wanted to. I’m a chef. I like cooking for people.”
His face still bore faint impressions of the beating he’d taken—so much worse than my own black eye had been. “You didn’t have to come to my fight, either.”
I stilled, only just remembering to flip the tortilla I was crisping before I gave him my full attention. “Luca asked me to. He’s my friend, so I said yes. He was worried about you.”
I had the sudden sense of having wandered into quicksand, but this had been bothering me... and now I lived here, with these four complicated men. For the moment, at least.
“He shouldn’t.” Emiel’s face was taking on a hint of that disconcerting blankness I’d seen in the fighting ring.
“Shouldn’t worry?” I asked carefully. “Emiel, Luca cares about you. I think he’s going to worry about something like you getting the crap beaten out of you in a cage fight.”
“He shouldn’t,” Emiel repeated, still in a monotone.
I hesitated, then plunged deeper into the mire. “Why do you do it? Fight, I mean?”
For a long moment, I thought Emiel wouldn’t answer.
“It helps to have an enemy you can hit,” he said, after an interminable pause.
There were bright red Do Not Proceed signs plastered all over that sentence. I’d just drawn breath to barge past them when footsteps in the hallway announced the arrival of the others.
Emiel’s eyes met mine. I held them, trapped in their rich brown depths. “The food smells really good. Thanks for making it. No one here can cook for shit.”
I wrenched my attention away to rescue the tortilla before my taco became a tostada. “Like I said, I enjoy feeding people,” I told him, trying to inject an air of lightness. “And don’t worry, I’ll school Zalen on the finer points of pasta as soon as I get the chance.”