4. Sky
Sky
The kiss consumes me. Her mouth opens under mine, yielding and demanding at once, and the taste of her—vanilla, heat, and the bright electric honesty my body already registers as mine—sends a pulse of need through me so sharp I have to break away or spend against her like an untried youth.
I press my forehead to hers, breathing hard, my ears rotating to track every sound in the room: her breath, her heartbeat, the ventilation system, the elevator chiming forty floors below, the blood moving through her throat where my mouth already wants to mark.
“Not here.” The words scrape out of me.
Her fingers twist in my shirt. “Anyone could—”
“I know.”
“I don’t care.”
The desperation in her voice nearly destroys the last civilized part of me.
I catch her wrists, gentle but firm, her pulse racing against my thumbs.
Contact sends information through my nervous system in a violent rush: elevated temperature, suppressed fear, arousal sharp enough to border on pain.
Her aura burns around her, that impossible clear gold I have trusted since the first moment she stood in my office and refused to shrink.
She wants this. Wants me. Despite the danger.
Despite the power imbalance. Despite every reason a rational woman should run from a Layn Alpha half-mad with mate sickness.
“I will not claim you on a desk where any employee could walk in and find you exposed, vulnerable, mine in ways they would not understand and I could not tolerate.”
Her eyes widen, dark and bright, the journalist measuring risk, the Omega measuring threat, the woman who has learned to expect disappointment bracing for it. “Then where?”
I answer by lifting her.
She gasps, arms locking around my neck, and the small surrender of her body against mine goes straight to the oldest part of me.
I carry her through the connecting door to my private quarters, space I have never shared, never needed to share, furnished with the spare efficiency of someone who has treated Earth as assignment rather than home.
The outer room opens in quiet layers: low seating, dark wood, a narrow kitchen I barely use, a staircase leading to the sleeping level above.
I take her up because instinct demands height, privacy, defensible ground.
The door seals behind us with a soft pneumatic hiss, and I set her on the edge of my bed, wide and low, dressed in charcoal linens that will show every mark she leaves.
The ring on my hand pulses once, faint luminescence against my skin.
I deactivate all external communication.
No brothers. No work. No interruptions. For the first time since arriving on this planet, I become entirely unreachable, and the freedom of it burns through my chest like atmosphere after suffocation.
Beatrice sits with her hands braced behind her, blouse half-unbuttoned from our collision against the desk, copper-brown skin gleaming with heat and effort.
She does not look fragile. She looks furious, curious, aroused, and alive in a way that makes the room around her irrelevant.
Her gaze tracks me as I remove my glasses.
The blue-tinted shield leaves my face, and the full amber glow of my eyes touches her without barrier.
Alien. Predator. Alpha. The truth I have hidden from cameras, investors, enemies, employees.
Her breath catches.
No fear enters her scent.
Only want.
“Your ears,” she says, voice lower now. “They’re moving faster.”
“They respond to you.” I set the glasses aside and begin on my buttons, methodical despite the tremor in my fingers.
“Every sound you make. Every shift in your breathing. Your pulse beating against the thin skin of your throat.” My shirt falls open, then down my arms, and her gaze moves over the blue-violet flush deepening across my chest. “I am exquisitely sensitive in this state. You could destroy me with a whisper.”
She laughs, sharp and surprised. “You? Destroyed?”
“Watch.”
I take her hand, the gesture slow enough to allow refusal, and guide it to my ear, to the delicate outer ridge already rotating toward her touch.
Her fingers brush me, barely more than curiosity, and pleasure arcs through my nervous system with the force of a blow.
My breath breaks. My cock strains painfully against my trousers.
“Oh.” Wonder enters the word. Wonder and power. “That’s—”
“Again.” Diplomacy abandons me. “Harder.”
She grips the ridge between thumb and forefinger, and the sensation detonates some ancient response that predates speech. I sway toward her, catching myself with one hand on the mattress, the other closing on her hip with force I immediately check.
“Forgive—”
“Don’t apologize.” Her grip tightens. My groan leaves me raw. “I want to see you like this. Uncontrolled. Real.”
I am real. With her, more real than I have been in any boardroom, any council chamber, any royal transmission where duty required a carved face and bloodless decisions.
Not CEO. Not diplomat. Not the shield my family sent to Earth.
Skylor. Male. Mate-sick and desperate, offering the one thing I have denied every being on this planet: access to what lives beneath the performance.
The remaining buttons of her blouse open beneath my fingers.
Lace appears. The swell of her breasts. The dark peaks of her nipples visible through the thin fabric.
Her scent intensifies, Omega sweetness cutting through the coffee and musk of my own arousal, and I lower my mouth to the skin of her collarbone, the hollow of her throat, the racing pulse that begs for teeth.
“Skylor.” My name breaks in her mouth. “I need—”
“What?” I pull back enough to hold her gaze. “Tell me. Demand it. I am yours to command in this.”
The battle in her eyes scars something in me. Desire against shame. Want against long practice in denial. The woman who has learned to suppress every hunger warring with the Omega whose body will not be denied.
“Touch me,” she whispers. Then, stronger, “Please. I ache. I’ve never—no one’s ever made me—”
The pieces align before she finishes.
I still, forcing my hands to gentleness while my body screams claim, mark, possess. “Beatrice.”
Her gaze flicks away.
“No.” My hand cups her cheek, guiding her back. “Stay with me. Has anyone touched you? Anyone at all?”
The shake of her head is small enough to wound.
“I dated. I tried. But when it came to—” She gestures, helpless and angry at the same time.
“They didn’t want me. Not really. Not enough to—” Her jaw tightens.
The words cost her. “I was chubby, growing up. The bullying was exactly what you’d expect from creative little monsters with internet access and no home training.
You don’t need my trauma narrative. The point is, no one chose me. No one ever chose me.”
The confession lands in my chest like stones dropped into deep water.
Her aura has always burned clean, gold and stubborn and bright, but now the shape of it makes cruel sense.
The sharp tongue. The competence polished into armor.
The professional distance. The refusal to be ornamental in any room.
All of it protecting a girl taught that her body was wrong, her wanting unwelcome, her presence something to justify before she took up space.
“Earth men are blind.” The statement emerges fierce and absolute. “Weak, stupid, and blind.”
A shaky breath leaves her. “That is a sweeping diplomatic position.”
“It is a fact.” I stroke my thumb along her cheekbone, down to the corner of her mouth.
“You are everything a man could want. Everything a mate could dream of. Your mind. Your temper. Your ambition. Your inconvenient truth-telling. Your copper-brown skin. Your curves. Your voice. Your stubbornness.” My thumb presses lightly against her lower lip, and her mouth parts.
“Your softness. Your strength. The way you risk everything for stories that matter. The way you stand in front of power while your hands shake and still tell the truth.”
Her eyes shine. Tears gather and do not fall because pride holds them hostage. Some part of her chooses to believe me. Or chooses to act as if she can believe, which may be braver.
“Show me,” she whispers. “Show me what they were too stupid to want.”
Reverence slows me where fever would make me rough.
I strip her carefully, not because I lack hunger, but because every revealed inch deserves proof before possession.
Her blouse. Her bra. Her skirt. Each layer falls away, and her body answers my gaze with a responsiveness that makes my ears rotate frantically, tracking every gasp, every small catch in her breathing, every pulse of slick-sweet need.
She is lush and trembling, thighs parting when I kneel, hands twisting in the sheets as if pleasure is another room she has never been allowed to enter.
My mouth finds her first.
Her whole body jerks. One hand flies to my hair, the other to my ear.
Her fingers close around the pointed tip by accident, and pleasure slices through me at the same time her slick floods my tongue.
I groan against her cunt. The sound makes her hips buck, and the taste of her deepens, hot Omega need meeting the Layn response in my saliva.
The chemical reaction starts at once. My tongue slicks over her clit, and her thighs open wider, muscles softening beneath my hands.
“Oh.” Her voice tears on the small word. “Oh, that’s…”
She does not finish. Good. Words are not needed yet.