Epilogue
. . .
ARCHER
I’m belting along with the latest pop song that’s been giving me dopamine when there’s a sharp rap on the bathroom door.
“Shit!”
I’m running late. I knew I only had a minute to hop in the shower to wash off the scents clinging to me from a day of making candles, yet here I am, only half clean because I decided I had to listen to that song. Again.
“Uh, sorry to bother you, but Ruby said you weren’t answering your phone.
She said Beau is running a little late.” The harried voice of my new hire, Rowan, makes me cringe.
The thirty-something beta is such a nice person, and they’ve already made running the store a million times easier, but they’re very earnest. To the point that they thought they needed to knock on the bathroom door to give me a message right away.
I think they’re a little traumatized from their former employer, who would’ve screamed at them for any delay, so I try to make my voice as friendly as possible as I shout back over the music playing from my phone. “Thank you! I’ll be out in a moment.”
“Do you want me to box up those custom orders so I can drop them off at the post office tomorrow morning?” Rowan yells, clearly unbothered by this unconventional chat setting.
“Uh, that’d be great, actually. Thanks!”
I was planning on coming back to the shop later tonight and doing it myself because I’m still not used to having help.
Before I hired Rowan, I was up until 2 in the morning packing orders.
That is until Ruby and Beau realized what I was doing when I fell asleep during a movie date for the second time.
Beau is the one who convinced me that getting help was imperative now that my scent-memory candles went viral.
It turns out Karissa, who got that last-minute candle for her grieving mate, has a decent following on socials and when she posted about how grateful they were for me bringing a piece of their alpha back to them, there was a deluge of orders that’s only grown as various blogs and influencers shared my candles.
It’s been enough that I recently converted the second-floor apartment space into a workshop and office.
Which brings me back to why Beau is coming to pick me up in the first place.
I’m moving in with my pack. Well, technically I’ve been moved in for a few weeks now, but he’s helping with the last boxes of my stuff tonight.
So much for taking it slow.
What started as getting to know you dates quickly morphed to full weekend sleepovers, then to spending more nights together than apart.
We tried to be cautious and take our time, but it quickly became clear that none of us really wanted that, and it felt silly to keep forcing ourselves to slow down.
Apparently, when you’re scent-matched to two people who respect you, care about your well-being and interests, and are incredibly sexy, it’s hard not to fall fast.
I smile to myself as I finish my scrub down and towel off, joy swelling inside me as I think about the night I told Beau and Ruby I loved them.
It was right before we decided to officially move in together.
We’d gone to watch Beau’s hockey game that afternoon, and after Ruby and I worked out all the horniness on our alpha that had built watching him on the ice, we’d ordered a pizza.
It wasn’t a particularly remarkable moment, but I was snuggling with Ruby when Beau came back into the living room with not just the pizza, but the garlic knots that I’m obsessed with and the ice cream that Ruby is feral for.
I couldn’t keep myself from blurting out that I loved them.
I didn’t even have a second to be embarrassed for my weird behavior or potentially making things awkward, because the words flowed from Ruby and Beau in response, like they’d both had them bottled up too.
Like it was a relief to let them out. We laughed, ate our food, and came up with a plan for our pack moving in together.
When people talk about the magic of scent matches, it’s all bodies crashing together and primal need.
And sure, we had that. But it’s so much deeper.
I never knew that I could be so comfortable around another person.
It feels like I’ve been wearing a mask my whole life—one that varies from person to person, but still always there—and with Beau and Ruby I can finally see who I am when I’m safe to take it off.
By the time I’m dressed in fresh clothes, Beau has arrived, greeting me with his signature hug that has me melting against him, kissing my hair as we scent mark each other.
A little purr builds in my chest at the hint of extra sugar and citrus when I breathe him in.
The unique blend of my scent matches is the best thing in the world, and for as good as I am with fragrances, I could spend a lifetime trying to recreate it and never come close.
He smiles at me as we pull apart, his beautiful blue eyes sparkling. “Guess it’s a good thing I’m late.”
“I mean…if you’d gotten here on time, you could’ve joined me in the shower.”
He huffs a laugh. “And scandalize poor Rowan? Very unprofessional of you.”
“Hey, they’re the one knocking on the bathroom door to talk to me while I’m showering. If they’d happened to hear something, it wouldn’t have been my fault.”
“Hmm.” That’s Beau code for “I don’t agree with you, but you’re adorable and I’m your alpha so I’m not going to argue.”
I pat his cheek and grin back at him. “Alright, let’s get out of here before Ruby gets annoyed with us for taking too long.”
Beau scoffs. “Who do you think is the reason I was late?”
There’s a low pulse of arousal in my belly, the way I always feel when I think about them together. My perfume rises, and Beau lets out a soft groan.
“God, you smell good.”
I place a hand in the middle of his broad chest. “Rethinking your policy on sex in my workplace?”
He laughs and shakes his head, taking my hand in his and giving it a kiss. “Nope.”
I pretend to pout as we head back down to the shop, where I’ve piled up the remaining boxes by the back door of what was once my workspace and is now almost all storage and packing materials.
Beau tries not to let me carry any of them, but I scoff at him and do it anyway, secretly loving how grumbly his alpha gets when I don’t listen.
The drive over to his house isn’t long, and we spend the entire time discussing our casting choices for the recently announced Moonblood TV series and theories for what will happen in the next book in the series.
We’ve convinced Ruby to read them, but she’s still not caught up, so we can only truly geek out about it when she’s not around.
Our stunning omega greets us at the door, the hem of her sundress showing off her luscious thighs and making me understand why she made Beau late.
I want to bury my face between them. But then again, when do I not?
I’m addicted to her taste and giving her pleasure.
I can’t believe how long of my life I spent not even considering how good sex with an omega could be.
Having my chin coated with her slick is one of my favorite pastimes.
That and using the new cock sleeve that both expands inside her like a knot and squeezes me like a lock. Last time we used that, Beau came back from the animal shelter to find us both passed out in the nest. Now we use it only when he’s there to supervise, which our alpha very much enjoys.
She catches me drooling at the sight of her and laughs. “Save that energy for tomorrow, sweetheart.”
I pout. “Why not now and tomorrow?”
She rolls her eyes and tugs me into a hug that has us both purring right away. When she tries to step back, I nestle my face against her breasts. “Please?”
She sighs, as if it pains her as much as it pains me to deny my advances. “I’m close to my heat. If we all go to the nest now, it’ll set it off and then we’ll have to reschedule.”
I groan and kiss the top of her breasts, but step back. We’ve been discussing and planning for tomorrow for at least a month. I can hold myself together until then.
“It’ll be worth it,” she says with a dirty grin that has my cock twitching.
“Dammit, we really should’ve fucked in the shower,” I grumble to Beau, who laughs and gives me a sympathetic look.
“If you get too needy, we can fuck in the car later,” he says matter-of-factly.
I instantly think of the time I brought him lunch at the garage and got so worked up by the sight of him all sweaty and rough that I begged him to fuck me over the hood of the car he was working on.
I let out a choked sound, and he winks at me.
In a few short months, he’s gone from being hesitant and nervous to an absolute menace. I blame and thank Ruby for that.
We haul my boxes into the house, dropping them off in their corresponding rooms. Beau cooks dinner while Ruby and I work on unpacking my stuff—during which she teases me relentlessly by bending over and flashing her panties and the deep line of her cleavage.
Her perfume has me desperate to screw tomorrow’s plans and bring both my scent matches into our nest to relieve the ache of arousal, but I want to prove that I can be good.
I like being good for her as much as I like getting off.
During dinner Beau tells us about the litter of kittens that were dropped off at the animal shelter that tested his resolve to not get a pet until we’re settled in together, and Ruby regales us with some juicy drama between subscribers in the comments of her latest post. I tell them about the custom candle I was asked to make from an alpha’s scarf, which smelled like macaroni and cheese and bacon, and we devolve into joking about which scents would’ve been an absolute no-go for each of us.
For Ruby, it’s wet dog. Beau settles on the stench of a hockey locker room after a game.
I’m not that sensitive to scents, which is important for my job, but decide that I’d have to decline a custom candle order if it smelled like rotting fish.
After dinner is done and we’ve cleaned up, we head to the living room and snuggle up on the couch, Beau in the middle tonight, as a barrier between me and Ruby’s teasing.
We put on the latest episode of Omega’s Choice, which Ruby is obsessed with hate-watching.
She goes on a rant about how for a show that’s supposed to be giving omegas the chance to find their perfect pack, it doesn’t give them any decent options.
I have to agree with her. I liked the first season of the show, but once it became popular, it turned into a bunch of fame-hungry alphaholes who keep getting more blatant about caring more about followers than finding their mate.
Beau nods along with our grievances, bemused that we’re watching this show if we hate it, but happy all the same to be spending time with us.
The episode ends, and there’s a lull in our conversation, where we all let the comfort of being cuddled up together wash over us.
Eventually, Beau clears his throat. “So. Your heat is going to happen soon.”
She nods. “Yeah, it definitely feels like it. Usually I’ll have a bunch of heat spikes for a couple of days, then a few chiller days, then it comes back with a vengeance for the full thing.”
“Right.” There’s a weighted silence that has me sitting up to focus more on Beau.
“Everything okay? Dr. Stills told me that the likelihood of Ruby’s heat triggering mine is low, and we checked my hormone levels. It’s going to be another month or two before my next one.”
“Ooo, did you ask him if his omega would be willing to do a scene with me?” Ruby asks, waggling her eyebrows.
She’s joked about it ever since she found out that my new doctor at the omega clinic is Camille Clairmont’s alpha.
Ruby is a total fangirl for Camille after the omega’s high-profile court case.
“No, of course not!”
She laughs and lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Damn. That woman is an absolute babe.”
“Anyway.” I focus back on Beau, and Ruby laughs. “It’ll be fine. You won’t have to handle two omegas in heat.”
The furrow between his brows remains in place. Ruby frowns. “I was joking about Camille. I mean, would I be honored to have her do a scene with me? Absolutely. But I’d never ask Archer to proposition—”
“Do you want to bond?” Beau interrupts in a rush of words that take me a second to parse.
My mouth falls open, and Ruby’s snaps shut.
Beau grimaces. “It’s too soon. I wanted to check in before the heat because I know my alpha will want it. That…that I want it. But we can think about it in the future. Much further in the future.”
His worry melts my heart, and I take his hand in mine. “I want it, too.”
We turn to look at Ruby and find her grinning. “Uh, yeah, of course I want it. I didn’t want to pressure you, but I should’ve known better. We’re absolute shit at taking things slow.”
I laugh, and the tension in Beau’s spine eases.
“You’re both sure? It’s a big commitment. I don’t know if you want to have to deal with my…” He swallows hard. “I don’t want my depression to weigh either of you down once we share bonds.”
Ruby takes his face in her hands and forces him to meet her gaze. “Yes. I’m sure. I want to be with you, Beau. Your depression is a part of you, one you’ve worked so hard to manage, but I don’t expect it to magically go completely away.”
I curl around him from behind, pressing a kiss to his shoulder. “Bonding with you won’t weigh us down. It’ll give us a better ability to know when you’re hurting and give you the support you need.”
“Fuck.” Beau sniffs and lets out a shuddering exhale. “I love you both so much. How did I get so lucky?”
As we hold each other and share our love and reassurances, I can’t help thinking that I’m the lucky one.