Chapter 6 Liam
Chapter six
Liam
Five days. I've been back for five days. No real sleep. There've been blackouts. Twenty-minute crashes in my office chair where I jolt awake with her name half-formed on my tongue. Sleep that heals? Gone. She took it.
My assistant quit yesterday. I snapped at her for breathing too loud. The family thinks I'm losing it. Maybe I am. The lack of real sleep doesn’t help. Three acquisition meetings, a deposition, a quarterly call—skipped. Five freaking days. Where the fuck is she?
She's destroying me, and she's not even here to watch.
The address pings my phone a little after eight. Not from Star. From my P.I., just coordinates and a name.
Your omega is at a house owned by Robert Campbell — Cabin on Aspen Creek Rd.
Robert. Male. Cabin. His. Another alpha.
Hell, no. I don't pack a bag. I just go.
I drive myself, because if my driver opens his mouth, I'll put my fist through his teeth.
Aspen Creek Road hates suspension. Don't care.
Every second is another second he has my omega.
The cabin appears around the last bend. Small.
Rustic. Masculine. I'm out before the SUV stops rocking.
Whose. Whose porch? Whose name on the deed? Whose hands?
I pound on the door hard enough to scare her. Don't care. Silence on the other side. Just the bond, screaming through the wood.
"Open this fucking door, or I will break it down." The man on this porch is not the man who closed mergers over breakfast. That man is gone.
Then she opens it.
The world stops.
Worn tee. Boy shorts. No bra. The cotton clinging where she's sweat through it. Curls knotted on top of her head. Bare feet. Long brown legs.
Leaner.
That's what hits first. Before the rest. Her collarbones cut sharper than they did six days ago. The shirt hangs loose at her ribs. There's a hollow at the base of her throat where her pulse is going off like a hammer.
I did this.
Dark circles under those fawn eyes. Cheeks I hollowed out. Lips chapped. A faint scratch on her jaw from God knows what—the property, the trees, the splintering wood of a cabin she ran to alone because I left her with nowhere safer to go.
The bond howls. She didn't break. But you broke her. Make it better.
Her nostrils flare. She's scenting me. I see her body register it—the small jolt at her shoulders, thighs pressing together for half a second before she catches herself and locks her knees.
Good. She should brace.
Her scent hits me a beat later and—
Fuck.
It's wrong and right at once. Honeysuckle, that warm spice underneath, threaded through with grief like an acrid perfume. And under all of that, already, the first sweet curl of slick.
"Who the fuck," I say, "is Robert Campbell?"
Her chin lifts.
"None of your damn business."
I take a step. She doesn't retreat.
"Is he an alpha?"
"You don't get to ask that."
"Is he in there?"
"Get off my porch, Liam."
Her voice is steady. Her body isn't. The slick scent climbs. Her thighs shake, and she grips the frame to hide it. Doesn't matter. I'm not leaving.
"You ran to another alpha's cabin." I make myself quiet.
"You don't get to—"
"His. Name," I ground out.
"You chose her." Her voice cracks in the middle, and she shoves it back down. "You stood in my shop and told me you couldn't. Then you flew across the world to her. So tell me, Liam—what exactly do you think you get to ask?"
The mention of Bethany should mean something. It doesn't. I'll explain later that there is no Bethany anymore, but right now, I don't care if she knows. Right now, there's a name in the air that isn't mine and a cabin behind her that smells like wood and her grief and—
Faintly. Old. Stale. But there.
Another man.
I move. She puts her hands up, but I'm already through the door, already inside, already crowding her against the wall beside the kitchen because my body decided the conversation is over.
She doesn't yield. That's the part that goes feral in me. Her shoulders are squared. Her eyes are wet, but they're furious. Her chin tilts up the way an omega's chin doesn't tilt when she's surrendering. She's going to make me earn this.
Fine.
"Get your hands off me."
"No."
"Liam—"
"Where is he?"
"He's not here."
I cage her. One hand on the wall by her ear. The other low on her hip, thumb pressed into the dip below the bone where her shorts have ridden up. Her skin is hot. She inhales sharply, and her hips give—just a fraction, just enough—and then she catches it and goes rigid.
"You're soaked through, omega."
"My body's a traitor. That's not new information."
The smarter part of me knows I should slow down. Apologize. Get on my knees. The other part—the part that drove four hours to find another man's cabin and instead found his mate starving in it—is louder.
"Who is he?"
"Mine."
The word punches through me.
I kiss her.
It's not a kiss. It's the door I came here to break down.
Teeth, tongue, the whole feral architecture of no.
She fights it for two seconds—rigid jaw, fists at my chest—and then the bond breaks something open in both of us at once.
Her mouth opens. A sound comes out of her that isn't language. Her hands grab my shirt.
But she pulls back. Yanks her face away. Breath ragged. "No," she says. "No."
I freeze. My hand stays on her hip. I don't pull off, but I don't push either. The bond is screaming at me to take. The sliver of me that still remembers being a person makes me wait.
"Tell me to stop."
She stares up at me. Furious. Wet. Wrecked. "I want to. I want to so bad."
She doesn't. She does something worse. She drops her forehead to my collarbone—not soft, not surrender, more like she's too tired to hold her head up against me anymore—and her exhale shakes through her whole body.
"You don't get to do this."
"I'm doing it anyway."
"You left."
"I came back."
"That's not how this works." Her hands fist in my shirt again, pulling me closer, then shoving, then pulling. "You don't just—Liam, you can't—"
I lift her.
She gasps. Legs lock around my waist on instinct, slick already soaking through to my shirt, and the noise she makes when our hips line up is not a noise a woman in control of herself makes.
"Put me down."
"No."
I carry her past the kitchen. Past the table where I see a single mug.
One plate in the sink. No one else has been here.
The relief makes me stupid for half a second.
Then I see the nest. Sheets. Blankets. Built on the floor in the corner, like she couldn't even have the bed. A noise leaves me that isn't a word.
Star jerks her face away from my throat. "Don't you fucking pity me."
"I'm not."
"That is not for you. That was me surviving you." I carry her to it anyway.
Drop us into it like the hollow she shaped was always for two. Her body knows what to do even while her mouth is still trying to lie. Hips tilting up. Spine arching when my weight settles. Her hands go to my hair before her brain catches them and pulls them down to my chest in a fist.
"I hate you. I really do."
"I know, omega."
"Don't omega me—"
I kiss her again to shut her up. This one she lets happen.
Briefly. Long enough for me to slide my hand under the worn cotton and palm her ribs—too pronounced, too there, I starved her—and for her to make a noise that's half a sob.
When she breaks it, she's crying. Not loud.
Just the kind of crying that happens because the body can't hold it anymore.
"I don't trust you."
"Then don't trust me yet. Just let me—"
"No—"
"Star."
"No." Her hand on my chest. Flat. Pushing. Not hard, but real. "I'm not your fix. You don't get to come up here and put yourself back inside me because you feel better when you do it."
The bond doesn't care. It's screaming at me to push her hand away, to take, to claim, to fix all of this with my body the way alphas have fixed nothing for centuries. The man in me—what's left of him—holds. "Then tell me to leave."
She closes her eyes. I take that for what it is. Not a yes. Not permission. The shape of a woman too tired to keep choosing the right thing.
I'll do the choosing for both of us.
I drag the worn shirt up her body and off. She lets me. Her arms go slack over her head. The shorts I tear because I hate them. Hate that they've been against her skin every night I haven't been. She flinches at the sound of fabric giving. "Liam—"
"I'll buy you new ones."
"That wasn't the—" She breaks off because my mouth is on her ribs. The hollow place I made. I press my forehead to her sternum and breathe.
"Did you fuck him?"
Her hand stops where it was sliding into my hair. "What?"
"Robert. Did you let him near you?"
"You're insane."
"Tell me."
Silence. I lift my head. Her eyes are open now. Fixed on me. Furious in a new way—not at what I've done but at what I'm asking her to be.
"You don't deserve that question." Her voice is very quiet. "And I'm not going to dignify it."
It isn't a yes. It isn't a no. It's another, fuck you.
I drag her down the nest by her hips, spreading her thighs wide with my shoulders until she’s completely open for me, slick glistening on her swollen folds and dripping down the cleft of her ass.
The scent of her—raw, sweet, furious—hits harder than any liquor.
I don’t tease. I bury my face between her legs and devour her like a man starving.
My tongue spreads her wide in one long, filthy lick from her entrance to her clit, then I seal my mouth over that swollen nub and suck.
Hard. She arches so violently her spine lifts clean off the floor, a shattered moan ripping out of her throat.
I slide two thick fingers into her without warning, curling them hard against that spot that makes her thighs shake.
Her walls clench immediately, hot and drenched.
I pump them slow and deep while my tongue works merciless circles, building her fast and cruel.