Chapter 20 #2
Thirty years old. Auburn curls. Winks like it’s punctuation. Calls me “our girl” with the same casual confidence he uses to administer counter-agents and stage decoy apartments and slide across cruiser hoods—
He gets out.
I reach for my door handle.
And then I watch, through the windshield, as Oakley Torres rounds the front of the cruiser in a movement that is part jog and entirely unnecessary—his hand bracing on the hood as he slides across it with the fluid, athletic grace of a man whose body treats conventional pathways as suggestions rather than requirements.
He lands on my side.
Opens the door.
And stands there, one hand on the door frame, the other extended toward me, the candied blood orange of his scent arriving with his proximity—close, warm, sweet, threaded with something darker beneath the citrus that I haven’t identified yet but that my Omega physiology is cataloguing with an interest that my professional brain finds inconvenient.
I smirk.
Just slightly. The controlled, one-corner-of-the-mouth lift that is the Hazel Martinez equivalent of a standing ovation.
“You’re trying to impress me now, Rookie?”
He laughs.
The sound bouncing off the barn’s interior walls, warm and unguarded, carrying the specific delight of a man who has been called something he’s going to argue about and is looking forward to the argument.
“Come on,” he says, and the grin is full now—the sunrise-bright, impossible-to-resist expression that I’m starting to understand is not a social tool but an actual manifestation of how Oakley Torres experiences the world. “I’m not a rookie anymore.”
Another wink.
He offers his hand.
Palm up, fingers extended, the gesture carrying none of the performative chivalry that some Alphas deploy to signal dominance through courtesy. This is simpler. More honest. The hand of a man who wants to help me down from a vehicle and is offering the option rather than assuming the authority.
I look at the hand.
I look at him.
And I smile.
Not the smirk. Not the competitive, one-corner lift that I use as armor and punctuation and the only emotional expression my face has felt safe producing for the last several years.
An actual smile. Small, still guarded at the edges, still carrying the residual architecture of a woman who doesn’t do this often and isn’t sure she remembers how.
But present. Visible. Directed at a man who slid across a cruiser hood to open my door because he wanted to and because he could and because the joy of doing it was reason enough.
I take his hand.
His fingers close around mine.
Warm. The callused grip of a man whose hands have held horses’ reins and tactical equipment and my shoulders during a fever and a cheek during a kiss and now my hand during a step down from a cruiser parked in a barn on a government-owned ranch in a small town where someone wants me dead.
I accept his help down.
The gravel meets my boots with a satisfying crunch, and the barn air is cool against my arms—the crop top providing significantly less thermal coverage than a uniform jacket, a fact that my body is noting with the precise discomfort of a system accustomed to regulation layers.
I stand.
He doesn’t let go of my hand.
And I don’t pull it away.
Note that. File it. The fact that you are voluntarily holding a man’s hand and not experiencing the immediate need to reclaim the extremity suggests that the walls are doing something they have never done before.
They’re opening doors.
“Is he…” I start, and the question that forms is the one that I’ve been carrying since the hospital—the one that I always carry, the persistent, self-auditing inquiry that I can’t stop running because the data set that produced it was built on years of evidence that says you are not what people want.
“Are you even fine with having an older Omega?”
Oakley tilts his head.
The motion is characteristically his—the curious, open-angled tilt that makes him look like a man genuinely processing the question rather than preparing a dismissive response.
“You’re making it seem like you’re an elder,” he says. “Like I should be helping you across the street and asking about your grandchildren.”
I huff.
“Most people think that when there’s an age difference,” I say, and the words come out with the practiced flatness of a woman who has heard the commentary enough times to recite it.
“That the Omega past thirty is…I don’t know.
Declining. Less valuable. Operating on a timeline that the younger Alphas don’t want to share.
I just wanted to make sure you’re reminded. And okay with it.”
He stops walking.
Turns.
The motion is fluid—a pivot that brings him from walking beside me to facing me, his body positioned so that the barn’s overhead light catches the auburn of his hair and the hazel of his eyes and the particular, focused expression that has replaced the grin.
He leans in.
Not a lot. Just enough. The distance between us narrowing from conversational to something else—something that my Omega physiology recognizes at a cellular level and my professional brain is frantically attempting to categorize and failing because the category doesn’t exist in any operational manual I’ve read.
“Does me being young bother you?” he asks.
His voice has dropped.
Not to the Alpha register. Not to the commanding, biological frequency that Roman uses when he needs my body to comply.
To something else. Something lower and warmer and more deliberate—the specific, intentional modulation of a man who is choosing this proximity and this tone because he knows exactly what it does and is doing it anyway.
And I have to stop myself.
From stepping back. From deploying the competitive deflection that I’ve used for years to intercept moments like this—the sarcastic remark, the eye roll, the physical distance that says I don’t do vulnerable before anyone can test whether that’s true.
I don’t step back.
Because my cheeks are warm.
Not the flush of a fever or the heat of exertion.
The specific, capillary-level warmth that occurs when blood rushes to the surface of the face because the body is responding to proximity and scent and the particular cocktail of biochemical signals that an Alpha produces when he’s interested and isn’t hiding it.
The candied blood orange of his scent is everywhere.
Not just present—saturating. At this distance, the top notes dissolve and the deeper architecture of his chemistry becomes accessible.
The citrus is still there, still bright, but beneath it: something darker.
Richer. A caramelized heat that my olfactory receptors process with the slow, whole-body recognition of a system encountering something it was designed to respond to.
And my body is doing things.
Things that I haven’t experienced in a long time.
A long, long time.
When was the last time you got wet from an Alpha’s closeness?
Not from heat. Not from the biological imperative that strips choice from the equation and replaces it with chemistry.
From closeness. From proximity. From the deliberate, chosen nearness of a man whose scent your body recognizes as compatible and whose presence your Omega physiology is responding to with an enthusiasm that your professional brain finds deeply, structurally inconvenient.
Years.
The answer is years. Because the last pack didn’t inspire this response. Their proximity produced obligation. Their scent produced tolerance. Their closeness produced the flat, mechanical arousal of a body performing a function rather than experiencing a desire.
This is different.
This is the arousal that comes from wanting. From the body saying yes before the mind has finished running the cost-benefit analysis. From a warmth that starts low and spreads with the unhurried, inevitable heat of something that has been dormant and is waking up.
His scent wrapping around me is only making it harder to think.
“I have no problem,” I say.
My voice comes out steadier than the internal landscape justifies.
“But I don’t really…”
I trail off.
The sentence dissolving not because I’ve lost the words but because the words require a vulnerability that I’m not sure I can produce while standing in a barn with an Alpha’s scent doing things to my cognitive function that should be classified as a controlled substance.
Oakley’s eyes sharpen.
The intrigue is visible—the hazel irises darkening at the edges, the pupils adjusting, the expression shifting from warm interest to focused attention with the predatory precision of a man who has detected something incomplete and intends to hear the rest.
He leans in closer.
His eyes lower.
To my lips.
The drop is deliberate. Visible. A conscious, unhidden shift of focus from my eyes to my mouth that takes approximately one second and communicates approximately everything.
His gaze rests there—on my lips—for a duration that makes the barn’s ambient sounds recede and the October air between us feel like it’s carrying a charge.
Then his eyes return to mine.
“You don’t do what?”
Quiet.
The question delivered from close enough that I can feel the warmth of his breath and identify the individual notes of his scent—the blood orange, the caramelized sugar, and beneath both, the darker note that I can now identify as want.
The biochemical signature of an Alpha who is aroused and is not concealing it.
I bite my bottom lip.
The gesture is involuntary—the same nervous, un-Hazel-like habit that surfaces in Roman’s presence, except here it carries a different charge. Not anxiety. Not the defensive reflex of a woman protecting herself from vulnerability. Something more honest. More dangerous.
“Slow,” I mutter.
The word escaping like a confession I didn’t plan to make.
I don’t do slow.