Chapter 9 #2
Declan’s voice is rapid-fire as he paces just out of the splash zone. “Hi, yeah, I need emergency plumbing at Pine Lane. Main supply line just gave up on life, lots of water, lots of sad furniture. I don’t care what your call-out fee is, just—yes. Half an hour? Great. We love you.”
He hangs up and shoves his phone in his pocket, squinting at the situation like it’s a system failure he can brute-force into compliance.
The pipe roars. My teeth chatter harder.
I’m standing ankle-deep in freezing mud in a soaking blouse and shorts. Water is streaking down my thighs. My hair clings to my neck like seaweed. Every nerve ending registers some combination of shock, cold, and oh my god the alphas are in my house.
“Street valve’s stuck,” Rhys shouts from the side yard, then a moment later appears at the fence, panting, wet from the knees down.
Mud streaks his forearms and I realize the deluge has reached my front yard too.
“It’s under three inches of decorative gravel, but I got it ninety-percent closed. Flow should be down by a lot.”
I also realize, dimly, that the roar is already a little quieter. The geyser is now a very angry fountain.
“Thanks,” I whisper, wrapping my arms around myself.
Rhys comes to stand at my side. I see the water droplets on his glasses as he flicks a glance over me, brow furrowing. “You’re blue.”
“I’m fine,” I say automatically.
I am not fine. I am freezing, shaking hard enough that my knees keep knocking, and my brain is alternately screaming about rot and mold and insurance deductibles and the fact that four out of four of my neighbors have now seen my pajamas clinging to things I did not intend for them to cling to.
Rhys doesn’t argue with me. One second I’m standing in the mud. The next there’s a warm, solid arm under my knees, another around my back, and the ground is no longer under my feet.
I yelp.
“Rhys!” I clutch at his shoulders on reflex as my legs leave the swamp. “I can walk!”
“I noticed,” he says dryly, shifting me higher against his chest like I weigh approximately nothing. His hoodie is cold and damp on the outside but warm underneath, heat bleeding through to my skin. “You looked like you were buffering.”
“I was troubleshooting.” My mortification flares. My wet blouse is clinging to my stomach and his forearm is under my bare knees. There is no part of this that is polite-neighbor behavior.
“You’re shaking,” he counters, voice low, almost gentle.
“I am n—” Another full-body shiver cuts me off.
He tightens his grip the slightest fraction. “You’re done,” he says simply. “We’ve got it now.”
It is aggressively unfair that my entire nervous system chooses this moment, when I’m soaked, muddy, and plastered to an alpha’s front, to unclench just a hair.
Behind us, Knox shouts something about putting my coffee table on cinder blocks like we’re staging a hurricane prep video.
“Did you get this place from Sweetwater Realty?” Declan asks.
When I nod, his phone suddenly appears again and he’s already dialling.
It takes me a moment to realize he’s on the phone with my property manager, rattling off phrases like “burst main,” “saturated drywall,” and “proper maintenance.” Meanwhile, I can hear Eli and Knox inside the house working to ensure my stuff is saved.
They are a machine.
They are in my yard. In my house.
And I am in Rhys’s arms.
“Put me down,” I mumble, clinging anyway. “You’re getting mud everywhere.”
He huffs. “Mia, we are standing in your surprise backyard lake. There is nowhere mud is not.”
He starts walking. Not toward my house, but toward theirs.
“Wait.” I twist to look over his shoulder. My own back door gapes, water still sluicing out in a smaller, angrier stream. “Where are you—”
“Your floors are shot for the hour,” he says. “Ours aren’t. You’re coming to ours. Hot shower, dry clothes, something warm in you before you shake apart.”
The sentence “you’re coming to ours” sinks into my chest with that same dangerous little purr my omega produced over the trash can incident. My brain, valiantly still trying to run on logic, scrabbles for purchase.
“I can’t just— I mean, you can’t just kidnap me into your house.”
He glances down at me over the rim of his glasses. Droplets cling to his lashes. “You’re not being kidnapped,” he says calmly. “You’re being evacuated.”
“If it helps,” Declan pipes up, jogging ahead to hold open the side gate, “I strongly endorse this brand of neighborly kidnapping. Also, we have better towels.”
“Dek,” Rhys warns.
“Relax. I’m not going to try to mate-bond her over herbal tea.”
Rhys’s chest rumbles under my ear. He’s not quite laughing. But he’s not not amused.
“Put me down,” I say again, weaker this time.
“No,” he answers, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You’re staying upright because I’m carrying you. You want to face-plant again in the mud and finish the job hypothermia started?”
I mock roll my eyes. “You alphas are so dramatic.”
“Pot,” he says. “Kettle.”
I have no real counter to that. But then I remember.
“My laptop!” I jerk against his grip. “Oh my God! My laptop, my notes, my backup drive—”
“Knox will get it,” Rhys says without breaking stride.
“How do you—”
“Of course I got it,” Knox calls from my back door, where he’s currently dragging my rug out of the tidal zone like a one-man moving crew. “Priorities, Mia. We’re not savages.”
“Which one is it?” Eli’s voice floats from inside. “Silver, stickers, Post-its?”
“Yes!” I shout, clinging to Rhys’s shoulders. “Please don’t drop it! And the charger! And the little black drive with the red—”
“Mia,” Eli’s voice sounds back. “I have been responsible for entire servers worth more than your student loans. I can manage one laptop.”
Rhys’s chest shakes under my cheek again. I don’t look up to see if he’s laughing at me or with me.
Probably both.
By the time he reaches their back door, my house sounds a little less like Niagara Falls and a little more like an angry shower.
The cold air hits harder now that I’m out of the spray.
I burrow instinctively closer, which I immediately regret because oh no, he is very warm and very alpha and we do not need to notice that right now.
“You can put me down,” I mumble again, as he shoulders through their back door. “I’m fine.”
“No.”
My mouth drops open at the absolute lack of room or argument. When he looks down and sees the shock on my face, Rhys Traynor bites his bottom lip, huffing something that might be a laugh as he carries me straight into the living room.
My brain stutters to a halt. The arrogance of it is infuriating, but God help me, the sheer capability rolling off him is also setting my nerves on fire. I’m too busy trying to ignore the flutter in my stomach to say a word, so I just cling to him as we enter their house.
It’s…different inside.
Last time I saw this room, it was a cuddle pile apocalypse: blankets everywhere, cushions, bodies draped over things.
Now it looks like a tech start-up moved into an Ikea catalogue.
Multiple monitors glow on the media console, one scrolling code, one showing graphs.
There’s a low hum of servers from somewhere deeper in the house.
A whiteboard leans against the wall, covered in diagrams and half-erased equations.
Nest Mode is gone. This is Work Mode.
Declan scrambles to throw a towel under my muddy feet as Rhys lowers me onto the big sectional like I’m breakable. I am not breakable; I am just…very squishy at the moment.
“Stay,” he says.
I glower. “I’m not a dog.”
“Then stop trying to run back into a flood.”
Declan appears, headset dangling around his neck, brandishing a towel. “Lift your arms.”
“I can towel myself.”
“Sure.” He tosses it at my head. “Multitask. I’ll get the heat on.”
By the time I’ve dried the worst of the water, there’s a blanket around my shoulders. It’s soft, huge, and warm from the dryer, smelling like them: molasses and espresso and chocolate, all with something calm under all of it. My shoulders drop about an inch without my permission.
Knox appears a minute later, completely soaked, holding my laptop bag.
“Patient delivered,” he says, setting it carefully on their coffee table. “No water damage. Charger, external drive all included.”
I sag in visible relief. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he says, like I just paid an invoice.
“The plumber will be delayed for an additional ten minutes,” Declan calls from the hall, phone pressed to his ear again. “Yes, we turned off the main. No, we didn’t try to ‘just duct tape it.’” He frowns, annoyed. “Yeah. Uh huh. Please hurry, my omega is sad.”
“I am not your—” I start automatically, then stop because I don’t have the bandwidth for that argument while my floors are doing the backstroke.
Rhys notices the way my hand drifts toward my laptop bag, like I’m checking it’s really there.
“You’ll be able to go back over once they’ve got the pipe capped,” he says, sitting on the arm of the couch. “Right now, you need to warm up.”
Which is…sensible. Annoyingly.
I let myself sink a little deeper into the cushion.
And that’s when my traitor brain helpfully supplies: The panties. Ask about the panties.
Right. The case of the stolen lace. Still unsolved. Prime suspects currently in this room. I tuck the blanket tighter around myself, trying to smother both the shiver and the impulse to interrogate them like a true-crime podcast host.
As discreetly as I can, my gaze slides across the room as if I expect to see a strap from my thong peeking out from beneath a monitor.
“Tea or coffee?” Declan asks, already halfway to the kitchen.
I jerk a little, then realise he can’t hear my inner thoughts.
“I—tea?” I say, because the idea of more caffeine on top of adrenaline feels like a bad decision.
“Ginger, chamomile, peppermint, or weird herbal blend that looks like potpourri but knocks you out in ten?” he calls over his shoulder.
“Chamomile,” I say faintly.