Chapter 3 Star #2
"You told me about your mother. The cancer.
The way your father broke, and the lesson you took from it.
You sold me a tragedy, Liam. And I bought it.
I lay there in that bed, and I understood you, and I almost convinced myself it was enough.
That you couldn't love me because some part of you was too scared of losing me.
" My voice doesn't shake. I am not going to let it shake.
"And then I pulled the order form out from under my register an hour ago.
Your order form. Your company paying for centerpieces.
The wedding date is right there in the field I filled in myself. Six weeks from Saturday."
A muscle tics in his jaw, but he doesn't deny it.
"That's a lot of mess," I say, using air quotes. "Mess you made of both our lives. While I was upstairs in my bed thinking the heaviest thing on your conscience was a dead woman from twenty years ago."
"I didn't ask for this."
"For what?" I demand. "For an omega to disrupt your plans?"
"For any of this!" He steps back, rakes a hand through his hair.
"Very soon, I'll have to marry a woman I've signed a contract with.
I have a merger that depends on it. I have a board meeting on Thursday and a deposition on Friday, and somewhere in the middle of all that, my body decided that you were—" He cuts himself off.
The silence is deafening.
I knew. I knew the second I read the form. Hearing him say it is something else. The suit, the watch, the way he moved through the world like he owned every inch of it. You don't get that by accident. You get that by building walls so high that no one can touch you.
"You should have told me," I say. Quietly. "Before."
"Would it have mattered?"
"Yes." I push away from the table. "It would have mattered because it would have given me a choice—"
"Would your body have given you a choice? Mine didn't."
"We'll never know, but at least I would have known not to hope. It would have mattered because the story you told me upstairs wasn't even the real story. Your father is a half-truth, Liam. The truth is, you were already promised to someone else, and you knotted me anyway."
He flinches.
Good. "I'll finish the order," I say. "The engagement flowers. I'll have them ready for your fiancée. I'll be professional. But you need to leave."
"Star—"
"I thought you were my alpha." I shrug. "Clearly, you are not. That's fine. I'll find another."
He freezes. His brows drop, and his nostrils flare. His scent floods the room—cedar, thyme, and underneath it something hotter—rage. The bond mark on my throat lights up like a struck match.
"What did you just say?"
Not a question.
"You heard me."
He moves.
One step. Two. He doesn't run. He doesn't have to. His hand finds my throat—not squeezing, just there, his thumb pressing exactly where he marked me—and the touch quakes through me.
"Say that shit again."
"There are other alphas—"
His mouth crashes onto mine.
It is not a kiss. It's a brand. He is marking me.
His tongue forces my lips open. One hand fists in my hair, and he drags the other down my spine to my hip and yanks me flush against him.
He is shaking, his entire body is shaking, and instead of pushing him off, my hands are yanking his lapel, and I am kissing him back.
I hate that I'm kissing him back.
His mouth slides off mine and finds my throat. The bond mark. His teeth scrape it—warning, not bite—and a sound, half moan, half plea, rips out of me without permission. His arms tighten like he's heard a confession.
"There is no other," he growls against the mark. "Do you understand me? There is no other for you. Not for the rest of your fucking life."
"You're—" My voice is gone. My whole body is humming, the bond is screaming yes, every nerve is reorienting toward him. "You're getting—married—"
"I'll fix it."
"You—"
"Look at me."
I don't.
He finds my jaw and tilts my face up. His other hand is still at the small of my back, holding me against him so that the heat coming off him singes me through three layers of fabric. His eyes are wrecked.
"Look at me, Star."
I look.
"Mine," he says. Just that. Once.
He kisses me again. Slower this time. Worse.
His hand on my jaw, his thumb at the corner of my mouth, his teeth grazing my lower lip, and the bond at my throat keening, and somewhere in the middle of it, he says it again into my mouth—mine—and my knees do go this time.
His arm catches me before I drop, and the worktable rattles against my back from the way he braces us.
I am breaking. The careful glass I built around myself between Friday and Tuesday morning is cracking under his hands, and a part of me—an enormous, stupid, biological part of me—wants to let it.
Wants to tilt my head and let him put his teeth back in.
Wants to take him upstairs. Wants to believe whatever he says next as long as he keeps his hands on me.
Six weeks.
The number surfaces.
Six weeks until he marries someone else, and his teeth are inches from reclaiming me on a Tuesday morning on my own goddamn worktable.
I push. Then I push again. Harder. Pressing my weight into it until he finally lifts from my throat. Slow. Reluctant. His chest, under my palms, is heaving as if he's just run a marathon.
"Get. Off. Me."
A muscle in his jaw works.
For a long second—too long—he doesn't move, and the bond is howling yes, yes, yes, and I can feel him deciding, can feel his alpha weighing whether to accept it.
Then he steps back.
One step. Just one. His hand falls from my jaw as if the release costs him something.
"Star—"
"Leave."
"This isn't—"
"Take your lies, your excuses, and your bullshit and go."
He stares at me. Whatever's on my face, he reads. His whole body is still vibrating with claim. His hands flex at his sides. And I watch him decide—watch him take whatever's happening in his chest and shove it into a box he is going to come back for.
"I'll go." His voice is not the voice from the phone, or the worktable, or any voice I have heard from him. "Today."
I don't speak.
He moves toward the door. Stops with his hand on the frame. Doesn't turn around.
"You're mine. I'll fix it."
He leaves.
I stay standing until his car starts. Until the sound fades into city traffic, and I'm sure he's gone. Until the bond at my throat stops singing for him and starts mourning him instead.
Then I collapse onto the floor behind the worktable, arms around my knees.
Paula finds me there twenty minutes later. She doesn't say anything. Just sits beside me, pulls me against her shoulder, and lets me breathe.
"He's an idiot," she says finally.
"Yeah."
"But you're okay."
"Yeah." I lie. "I'm okay."
I look at the door he just walked out of. I won't be strong enough to say no twice.
I cannot be here when he walks back in.