Chapter 12
Twelve
LINCOLN
Kai stumbles over his introduction, and I pinch my eyebrows together. He never struggles with this sort of thing. Taking a deep breath, he shoots me a searching look. Does he want me to take over? I arch an eyebrow, prepared to do just that, but then I almost fall to my knees as a blend of lavender and musk, so alluring, so perfect, slams into me.
An omega.
But not just any omega. Although most omegas smell good, this scent is...rich and welcoming. It’s sunshine and lying in a hammock on a warm spring day. It’s a campfire crackling. It’s a warm hug.
No. This isn’t some random perfume.
Is it our scent match?
Kai’s eyes say a hundred things.
Let’s find her now.
Fuck this meeting.
Where is she?
What would Vic think?
Fuck.
He should be here. He’s pack. No matter how hard he tries to break away from us, that fact will always be true.
Kai shakes off whatever he’s thinking and finishes his introduction. Mandy, our account manager, gestures to the two chairs at the front of the table, and I drop into mine, covering my mouth with my hand as I search the room. There are at least a dozen Moon & Rock employees here. They’re all clustered together on the opposite side of the table, except for a few.
One smug-looking alpha is sitting the closest, but I don’t even spare him a second of the attention he’s so desperately seeking.
Mandy is already ruled out. Her scent is a different sort of floral, rosy, and wholly unappealing in comparison to the smooth, simple richness of the lavender. It’s so distinct. Kai’s hands are under the table, but I catch him clenching and unclenching them, clinging to his professionalism when I’m sure he’s as desperate as I am to go around the room and smell each one of the employees.
He would never. Only the evil eye Kai sends my direction has me tempering the urge to go for it.
Fun sucker.
“Veronica,” Mandy says with a smile.
A young woman with bright red hair stands, hands shaking as she sets a board on the stand and turns toward us. Lemon and sugar. Can’t say I’m not relieved. I’m sure Veronica is nice enough, but she looks like the type of omega who sat in the front row and wanted to be president of the debate team.
Maybe I’m being too judgmental, but there’s so much you can read from a person simply by the way they hold themselves. When one doesn’t have a lot of friends or company growing up, one gets used to people watching, and with people watching comes knowledge.
My gaze skips over the rest of the room, but everyone is listening to Veronica present.
Surely, our match realizes we’re here. Right?
My attention snags on blonde curls and pretty hazel eyes. She’s adjusting her top. A nervous tic. Is she hiding from us? I picture myself fisting her hair as I drive my cock inside of her cunt and—force myself to look away before I think too hard about it being her.
Godammit, there are too many people in this room.
A growl rumbles deep in my chest.
Veronica trails off with a squeak.
Kai glares at me. Get it together .
Fuck. He’s always been better at keeping his reactions under control, but the little vein on his forehead tells me that even he is struggling.
“Uh, thank you, Veronica,” Mandy says. “That was wonderful. Arnold, why don’t you go next?”
“Of course,” the smug alpha says as he stands and shoots us a cocky grin. “Prepare to be amazed.”
“I think we can move on to the next presentation,” Kai says coolly.
The entire room stiffens.
We’re coming off as total assholes, but one thing Kai hates more than anything is overconfidence.
“That would be a mistake,” Arnold says, stupidly trying to argue his case. “I can assure you, my pitch is the best one in the room.”
The blonde scoffs and my gaze shoots to hers. Our eyes collide, and she sucks in a quick breath, face turning bright red before she looks down to mess with her top again. Definitely hiding something. I breathe in, trying to discern if the appealing perfume is coming from her, but the patchouli scent of the alpha still trying to argue his case is too overpowering to tell.
I tip my head and smirk at her. She swallows before wrenching her gaze away.
“Like I was saying—” the alpha begins, but I’m over him. Not simply because he’s an alpha. One: he looks like he’d confidently tout his ability to deep throat a bag of dicks. Two: blondie doesn’t like him.
Seems like reason enough to shut him up.
“Next,” I bark, glaring at the asshole alpha. “Or would you like to be solely responsible for Mandy losing Good Vibes as a client?”
“Arnold,” Mandy warns between clenched teeth.
Displeased but properly scolded, the alpha grinds his jaw and drops into his seat. The next few presentations are a blur. They could be good. They could be the exact sort of campaign that’ll launch Good Vibes into the stratosphere. I’m not paying attention, and based on the way Kai’s attention continues to stray around the room, neither is he.
I’ve narrowed it down to the two remaining at the back of the room. The gorgeous blonde who’s made it her mission to avoid my probing gaze and the pretty brunette sitting next to her, but my hopes are set on the one who scoffed at the alpha.
Like she was tired of his bullshit.
Like perhaps she isn’t afraid to speak her mind.
Like she’d match my jabs point for point.
She hasn’t so much as shifted, she’s barely breathing, and her fingers drum over her knee.
“Thank you, Jane?”
The brunette stands, and Kai and I both stiffen, waiting the five seconds it takes for a fresh wave of perfume to wash over us. This one is sweet, but barely discernible. A beta. Not our scent match.
My focus zeroes in on the blonde, and she narrows her eyes at me as I mouth gotcha . Her gaze falls to my lips for a second. As I quirk an eyebrow, her eyes lift to take it in before flitting to Kai, who is eyeing her with his quiet intensity.
We could be wrong.
There’s a slim chance that she might not even smell like lavender.
My mind roars in protest.
I want it to be her.
The brunette finishes—Joan?—and Mandy nods at the blonde. “Daria, go ahead.”
Daria. I roll her name around in my head as her knuckles tighten around the canvases she’s clutching.
“Please, Daria ,” I practically purr, too desperate to taste her name on my lips to wait for her to stand. “We’re ready for you.”
We’ve never been more ready.
When she stands, Kai trembles next to me, another indication that this isn’t all in my head. He’s been dying to know who that scent belongs to, and it’s only a matter of seconds until we know for certain if it belongs to Daria. She places her canvases on the stand and keeps her back to us, but that doesn’t stop her scent from slamming into the both of us.
Kai sucks in a sharp breath.
I bite back a groan as that sweet and smoky scent coasts over my skin. But there’s a hint of something else, that musk from before. Only, this time, with her standing and the skirt billowing just above her knees, I know exactly what that scent is.
Slick.
Desire.
She straightens her shoulders and turns, looking at Mandy instead of us. “What is it that you want?”
You .
The answer is on the tip of my tongue, but her eyes move around the room. “What is your deepest desire?”
The smell. I breathe in again, ready to make a deal with the devil, so long as I can bury my face in the crook of her neck. My cock throbs and I bite my cheek.
Finally, her eyes meet mine, boldly staring me down. There’s a glint of a challenge, almost as though she’s daring me to say it out loud. She gives Kai the same look, and I swear I hear him stifle a purr.
“What do you desire, Daria?” I ask, interrupting her pitch and not giving a damn. A dark chuckle nearly tumbles from my lips when she blushes. She fucking knows.
“To be wholly consumed,” she whispers before clearing her throat and gesturing to her canvas. “To be craved. Desired. Pleasured.” Her voice dips to a husky tone. “That’s what we all want, or at least, that’s what that carnal part of us wants. Only a few are brave enough to admit it, to proudly go after what they want. But what about everyone else?”
Even though she doesn’t look at me or Kai again as she presents, I’m hanging on every word, the silky, rich texture of her voice going straight to my cock. Her scent is heady in the air, and Arnold waves his hand in front of his face, elbowing the person sitting next to him, but they give him a dirty look before focusing on what Daria is saying.
Would it be horrible to punch him?
Probably, but even still, I struggle to resist yanking him across the table by his collar and slamming my fist into his nose. He doesn’t like the way my omega smells? Maybe he’ll enjoy the scent of his own blood.
“—And that is Good Vibes.” Daria finally looks at us again. “The freedom to explore, to embrace that desire, to give in,” she murmurs, eyes bouncing between me and Kai.
A few people clap and Mandy thanks her. Daria stiffly grabs her canvases and escapes from the conference room. Mandy shoots a disapproving look at her back but quickly turns to us.
“That’s all we have for you today.”
“Mandy,” Kai says, voice rough, “can we have the room?”
She blanches, mistaking his tone for annoyance with her. “Of course.” She claps her hands and gets her people moving. As soon as the room clears out, I launch myself out of my chair and storm toward Daria’s seat.
The conference room windows are transparent, but not even that stops me from dropping to my knees and burying my face against the cloth material. Only the giant table blocking me from view saves my dignity as I groan, rubbing my cheek over the lingering lavender and musk.
She’d been needy, our omega.
All that desire, simply because of our scents.
“Linc,” Kai says from beside me.
“It’s her,” I say, lifting my face from the chair.
And he too falls to his knees, not strong enough to resist the urge to breathe in her perfume. He purrs and clutches the arms of the chair.
“She’s our scent match.”
“Obviously,” he groans. “God, that scent.”
“We should call Vic.”
“We should invite her to dinner. Court her.”
“Or we could fuck her over the table,” I suggest, licking my lips. “She’s soaking.”
“She wouldn’t like that,” Kai says, always the reasonable one.
“Why don’t we ask her?” I glance toward the hallway, which has emptied. “She might like putting on a show.”
“Her pitch was the best,” he says, ignoring my train of dirty thoughts. Right, Mr. Reasonable doesn’t want to rut her at a client’s place of business. He runs his hand over his scruff. “We could ask Mandy to make her our in-house support.”
I nod. Of course. That makes more sense. “Then we could bend her over our conference table.”
“As much as I want to bury my cock inside of her, I want to make sure she needs us too. Wants us...” He trails off and pauses. “She has to meet Vic. I won’t make him suffer through another omega who despises him, and if she won’t accept him?—”
“Then, we won’t accept her,” I say simply.
As much as I love her scent, Vic is pack, and while he thinks he isn’t, that will never change. We can’t do this without him. It’ll be all of us or none of us. My pack is the only family I’ve ever had. The people who birthed me and gave me a place to live don’t count. They were never around, leaving me to grow up with only the clouds or our dog, Otis, to talk to.
Kai pulls out his phone and dials our distant pack mate. It takes five rings before Vic’s gruff hello comes through the line.
“Well, hello, darling. Have you been a naughty boy?” I ask before I can remind myself to be serious.
Kai nudges me with his elbow, and I snap my mouth closed.
“Vic. We found our scent match.”
A heavy silence follows the verbal bomb Kai just dropped.
“We’re going to ask her to dinner, and we want you there. If we do this, we do it together or not at all,” I say quickly. “We’re pack, Vic.”
It’s been weird without him. Almost like we’ve been grieving a man who’s still alive. I guess that’s what a breakup is supposed to feel like. When Felicia left us after we refused to give up Vic, I felt relieved. Nothing like the gut-churning anxiety I feel now as I wait for Vic to give us an answer.
If he says no, that might be the true end of our pack. But if he says yes, then it’s not over yet.
“I’m not moving back in,” he warns.
“But you’ll come to dinner?” I ask, trading a tentative nod with Kai.
“I’ll meet her.” He sighs. “But don’t get your hopes up, guys. Even if she is the pack’s scent match, she might hate me as much as Felicia did.”
“She won’t,” Kai promises.
I scowl at him. He shouldn’t say those things.
“Making promises you can’t keep again, Malakai?” Vic says harshly.
Kai rears back, like he’s been slapped, but the last grandiose promise he made Vic left us all broken. It’s his nature to put everyone at ease. To try and take care of people or fix something that’s broken. There was no fixing that last relationship, and as much as I hate Vic not living with us, I’m fucking relieved that Felicia is gone.
“Come meet her. If there’s even the slightest hint that she isn’t interested in having a beta in her pack, we’ll walk away.”
“You say that now,” Vic mumbles.
“Need I remind you that we’ve done it before?”
He scoffs. “Technically, Felicia left, and this is different. If she’s really our fated mate...” He trails off, but I’ve known him long enough to finish the sentence. Are you going to be able to resist?
Truth is, I don’t know. The only thing I do know is, I refuse to lose Vic completely. He’s my brother, blood be damned.
“We’re not picking her over you,” Kai says this time. “And that’s a real fucking promise. We can survive without a scent match, but we can’t keep living without you. It’s fucking miserable.”
“Text me the location and time.” With that, he hangs up.
I blow out a hard breath. “Okay?”
Kai nods. “Okay. Let me go get Mandy.”