Hunter #2
She’s gathering her files. Moving fast but not rushed—the difference between urgency and panic is a performance she executes flawlessly.
Her paralegal holds the door. She passes within three feet of me on her way out and the full force of our blended scent hits my nervous system like a closed fist. My hand goes flat on the glass table.
My vision tunnels. Her heels click against the carpet—steady, measured, unhurried—and then she’s gone, and the room smells like the ghost of her, and I sit in it with ink on my fingers and a cracked pen and the threadbare remains of my composure.
My phone buzzes forty minutes later. I’m in my office with the door locked, jacket off, sleeves rolled, trying to draft a motion I’ve started four times. Her name on the screen stops my hands.
I don’t open it. For ten seconds. Fifteen. Then I open it because not opening it is its own kind of defeat.
No text from her. The thread is empty. She hasn’t sent anything. My phone buzzed for a calendar reminder—a deposition prep that means nothing, that I’ll reschedule or delegate or ignore, because the only case that exists right now is the one I’m losing against my own biochemistry.
I type a message. Delete it. Type it again. Delete it again. The third time, I send it before the lawyer in me can redact it.
I could smell how much you wanted me from across that table. That’s an invitation I won’t be able to refuse much longer.
The read receipt appears instantly. She was already looking at her phone. Already waiting.
No response. The silence is louder than any reply.
***
I stay at the office.
Past six, when the associates leave. Past eight, when the cleaning crew runs vacuums down the hall. Past ten, when the security guard does his rounds and pauses outside my door, surprised to see the light still on.
The motion sits unfinished on my screen.
The cursor blinks at the end of a sentence I’ve rewritten eleven times.
My office is immaculate—every file in place, every surface clean, the degrees on the wall arranged in neat, orderly rows.
Harvard Law. Order of the Coif. Every accolade proves I earned my position through discipline and intellect.
None of it means shit.
Her question echoes in my head, mocking me.
“How are alphas doing?” Not fucking well.
I summon my father’s face. The hollow eyes.
The untouched meals. The way he’d sit in his study for hours staring at nothing other than her picture.
The image overrides the pull. Everyday for a week, I scraped by, holding onto my sanity.
Until Jaleesa strode into the office with the proud set of her shoulders and her sucker punched me with her proximity.
Daring to wave raw meat before a starving lion.
Grinding my teeth I remind myself, again, that I’m not an animal.
It works until eleven. At eleven-fourteen, I’m in my car with my hands on the wheel and her address in my head—not typed into the GPS, not looked up, just there, memorized from the times I’ve almost driven to her apartment and turned around.
Every night since the lodge. Every damn night, the address surfacing in my mind like a verdict I keep trying to appeal.
Tonight the appeal is denied.
Her building is a brownstone in a neighborhood that’s nicer than I expected and less expensive than she deserves. Third floor. No elevator. I take the stairs two at a time and I’m not winded when I reach her door because the breathlessness I’m experiencing has nothing to do with exertion.
I knock.
Footsteps. A pause—the length of a woman checking a peephole and deciding whether to open the door or pretend she’s not home. The deadbolt turns.
She’s in a T-shirt and shorts and her curls are loose and her scarf is gone and my mark is right there—dark, raised, permanent against the mahogany skin of her throat. No jasmine. No blocker. Just her, and the scent hits me so hard my hand goes to the doorframe to keep my knees from buckling.
I don’t wait for her to invite me in. I step across the threshold, into the warm air of her apartment that smells like her and only her, and the relief is so violent my chest shudders.
“Why are you here?” She’s backed up two steps, but she hasn’t told me to leave.
“Because I can’t not be. The rawest sentence I’ve ever spoken, and it leaves my mouth without clearance from any part of my brain. Because you’re mine and I need you.”
Her jaw tightens. Her arms cross. But she doesn’t step back again. “Now?”
“Right damn now.”
“Define now.” She arches her brow and narrows her eyes. The challenge is so damn sexy I nearly drool. She's beautiful, standing barefoot in her hallway with our scent filling her apartment.
“Tonight.” I take another step. Close enough to see her pulse at the base of her throat, hammering against the edge of my mark. “A taste. A sip. Just enough to get us through.” I offer the excuse like any other addict.
“Us?” One eyebrow wings up again. “So this isn’t just the alpha who can’t cope. This is a mutual crisis.”
I take a slow, deliberate breath through my nose.
Pull her in—not with my hands but with my lungs.
Her scent floods my system: the dark, layered base notes of her omega, and underneath that, the sharp, sweet tang of slick.
She’s wet. Has been since she heard my knock, maybe longer, maybe since the text I sent from my office, and the knowledge that her body has been answering mine all night—across the city, through walls and distance and every rational defense they’ve both constructed—is staggering.
“Us,” I answer. My voice drops irritated with delay.
“This is us.” I say against her lips. Licking the crevice and forcing my way inside.
Not gently. There’s no more time for softness or patience.
My hand grips the back of her neck and my mouth claims hers and the taste of her—the real taste, not the jasmine, not the blocker, her—detonates through my nervous system like the first hit after withdrawal.
She kisses me back. Hard. Her fists in my shirt, pulling me closer and pushing my chest at the same time—a contradiction that is fundamentally, infuriatingly her. Then she shoves back.
My mind spins, registering the rejection. My heart drops before realizing, she reached behind me and shut the door. The deadbolt turns under her fingers—a precise, deliberate sound.
She looks up at me and says the two words I’ve come to hate more than any opposing brief, any hostile cross-examination, any verdict that’s ever gone against me.
“For now.”
For now. The loophole she inserts into every contract between us.
The escape clause she keeps in her back pocket while her body signs over everything.
Two words that mean I’m choosing you tonight but reserving the right to unchoose you in the morning, and every time she says them, the part of me that doesn’t want permanent—doesn’t want the bond acknowledged, public, irreversible—has to swallow a barrel of flaming rage.
My control snaps.
We don’t make it to the bedroom.
Her back hits the hallway wall and my mouth is on her throat—on the mark, directly on it, my teeth scraping the raised scar tissue that proves she belongs to me. A low growl rips from my chest. “Mine,” I bite out against her skin, branding her again with the word.
The sound she makes vibrates through my jaw and down my spine. My hands are under her shirt before the front door stops rattling in its frame. Hers are already at my belt, yanking at the leather with a desperation that matches the frequency thrumming through the bond.
No tenderness. No negotiation. This is the cost of pretending we don’t belong to each other, and the debt is extracted here, against a wall that’s too narrow for the violence of our need.
I lift her. My hands cup her ass, fingers digging into the plush weight of her, and her legs wrap around my waist like she was born to be there.
The first contact—her heat searing through the thin barrier of her shorts—makes me grind my teeth until my jaw aches.
I pin her to the wall with my hips. “You feel that?” I rasp, rocking against her. “That’s you, wet for your alpha.”
I strip the T-shirt over her head. No bra. Her breasts are full and heavy against my chest, her skin hot, her nipples hard pebbles. When my mouth closes over one, she arcs into me so violently her skull thumps the drywall. She doesn’t seem to notice.
The shorts go next. She kicks them off. No underwear. Bare. Ready. She was waiting. The locked door and the crossed arms were theater. Her body was open for me before I knocked. The knowledge makes a raw sound tear from my chest, something that belongs to the animal, not the man.
“You were waiting for me like this, weren’t you?” I snarl, my fingers finding her slick folds. She’s dripping. Soaking wet. “Ready to be filled. Ready to be fucked.”
She gasps, her hips bucking against my hand. “Hunter—”
“Say it.” I slide two fingers inside her, stretching her. Her inner muscles clench around me. “Tell me you wanted your alpha to come claim you.”
Her head thrashes against the wall. “Yes.” The word is a torn sob.
That’s all I need. I rip my belt open, my zipper screaming in the quiet hall. I don’t bother taking my pants off. I just free my cock, thick and aching, and position myself at her entrance.
“Look at me, Jaleesa.” My voice is a low command. Her eyes, dark and blown wide, lock on mine. “You’re going to take every fucking inch.”
I push inside her.
Her fingers dig into my shoulders and her mouth opens on a gasp that fills the hallway.
She’s so tight, so hot, a velvet clench around the head of my cock.
The angle is rough, deep, gravity doing half the work.
I set a pace that has nothing to do with finesse and everything to do with the famine that preceded this.
She matches it. Takes it. Demands more with the roll of her hips and the dig of her heels into my lower back.