Chapter 4
four
JULIA
I followed the walking mountain of flannel and muscle into the kitchen, my new boots clicking against the gleaming hardwood floors. This had to be August… or Boone, as the pack called him, though using his last name felt almost impersonal to me. My Omega didn’t like it.
August it is.
Gideon had told me all about him, but the sun-eclipsing size of the man still hadn’t prepared me for the reality of him.
He was rugged and handsome, with warm chocolate brown eyes and long brown hair pulled up in a messy man bun. His muscles had muscles, and I suddenly found myself wondering how I could put all that strength to good use.
My mind went straight to the gutter, and I had to shake my head to physically redirect my thoughts to safer waters.
Like the house—if you could even call it that.
This place was gigantic. Thick, vaulted timber beams crisscrossed high above us, making the space feel less like a simple ranch house and more like a sprawling luxury lodge.
My gaze tracked over the large island with comfortable seating and then to the top-of-the-line appliances, but it was the sheer number of windows that pulled me up short.
Outside, the Wyoming landscape stretched forever.
Endless rolling plains gave way to rugged rock formations, all sitting under a sky so vast it made New York feel like a claustrophobic shoebox.
I’d spent my entire life surrounded by concrete and sirens, thoroughly convinced I’d despise this kind of empty isolation.
But staring out at that impossibly wide, unbroken horizon, my ribs physically expanded.
For the first time in years, I felt like I could genuinely breathe.
The inside of the house didn’t hurt, either. It smelled like a perfectly lived-in blend of all of them, their signatures mingling into something warm and masculine that sank straight into my bones. It helped to ground the nervous energy I was trying my best to hide.
Not that I was succeeding.
My heart had been hammering since the man Gideon had called Stetson had trapped me against the side of the truck, all dominant Alpha strength and a scent so demanding my Omega was still quietly begging me to bare my neck to him.
His gorgeous green eyes had pinned me in place just like his arms had, and I hadn’t been able to look away.
He was a gorgeous specimen of a man, with brown hair shaved shorter on the sides and left a little longer on top.
With golden skin, a short, well-groomed beard, and his hat on, he was the living, breathing definition of a cowboy.
And then there was the other one. The guy by the round pen with the hard edges Gideon had warned me about.
Colt. I’d been struck by how beautiful he was with full, thick black hair and sun-tanned skin wearing a pair of jeans that should be illegal on him.
Except he’d taken one look at me, gripped the silver chain around his neck like a lifeline, and turned his back.
Unambiguous, agonizing rejection.
I shoved the sharp sting of it down into a dark little box where it belonged. I didn’t care if he hated me. I was leaving anyway. Probably.
August didn’t say a word as he moved through the kitchen.
Despite being six-foot-four and broad enough to dwarf the refrigerator, he didn’t loom.
He just existed in the space, effortlessly efficient.
He tossed a homemade peanut butter and pumpkin treat to Dusty, who caught it with a happy snap of his jaws, before pulling a plate of warm food from the oven and setting it on the island in front of me.
“Eat up,” he grunted, his deep voice rumbling through the quiet room.
I stared at the plate. I desperately needed a distraction, and aggressive stress-eating was my preferred method of handling catastrophic life choices.
I picked up the fork, staring down at the plate piled high with roasted chicken, root vegetables, and a rich, dark gravy. I stabbed a potato and shoved it into my mouth.
The flavor hit my tongue, savory and perfectly seasoned, melting instantly.
It was infuriating. I desperately wanted it to taste like cardboard so I could easily justify walking out the front door, but my traitorous stomach grumbled, basically singing a love song to the giant standing on the other side of the island.
I chewed, swallowed, and pointed my fork directly at Gideon. He was leaning against the counter, trying to look entirely too casual for a man who had just dropped a bomb on his entire household.
“Start talking,” I demanded, not letting his good looks and boyish charm sway me.
Gideon ran a hand through his ash-brown hair and offered a sheepish, lopsided smile.
His pretty blue eyes—eyes that had probably gotten him out of more than one scrape—became pleading as a deliberate sweep of his warm cinnamon and vetiver scent drifted across the kitchen, a Beta instinct clearly designed to de-escalate my irritation. “Now, Julia—”
“Don’t,” I cut him off, narrowing my eyes.
I forcibly hardened my posture, refusing to let his pheromones manipulate me into relaxing.
“You registered this pack with the OMA. You checked the boxes, went through the whole process, approved the scent match, and arranged for my arrival. And you did it all without telling the men actually living in this house. Why?”
August shifted. He didn’t say a word, but his scent shifted, bringing the comforting notes forward just for me while his dark eyes locked onto Gideon, his silence just as demanding as my words.
Heavy boots thudded against the hardwood floor, announcing Stetson before he appeared and stopped in the doorway, his broad shoulders practically blocking the exit.
The gravity in the room shifted, weighed down by the dominating surge of his wild sage and sweet coffee scent.
He was furious, his dark green eyes burning a hole into his packmate.
“Yeah, Gid,” Stetson rumbled, the authority in his gravelly voice pressing down on all of us. I gritted my teeth against the urge to shrink in on myself as he added, “Explain yourself.”
Gideon winced, dropping his gaze to the floor for a fraction of a second before squaring his shoulders.
He didn’t look like a man who regretted his actions, just one who regretted the messy fallout.
“I did what needed to be done,” he said quietly, addressing Stetson.
“You were all pulling away from each other. You needed an anchor. You need an Omega.”
I scoffed, dropping my fork onto the ceramic plate with a sharp clink. “So you legally kidnapped one to fix your roommates? Brilliant plan.”
Stetson’s gaze snapped from Gideon to me, and his attention made me squirm in my seat.
His jaw worked, a hard line of tension feathering along his short, dark beard.
He didn’t look like a man who appreciated my particular brand of sarcasm, and he certainly didn’t look like a man who needed “fixing.”
I understood why he looked so conflicted. He hadn’t been expecting an Omega to descend into his life like this. But had he stopped for a single second to consider what this was like for me?
I hadn’t asked for this either. I’d spent six years perfectly content to die alone.
Then his scent profile slid across a polished OMA table and ruined my entire life.
I had hurt my best friend. I had boarded a jet, leaving behind the only family who actually gave a shit about me, to cross the damn country and take the biggest risk of my existence—only to be totally charmed by the very Beta who decided to drop a me-sized bombshell on his pack who didn’t even know I was coming.
And the scariest part? Standing here, drowning in the masculine perfection of their combined scents, I couldn’t bring myself to regret it. I hadn’t wanted a pack. Not ever. But now... my biology was screaming that I was exactly where I belonged.
Stetson’s Alpha power dialed up to a punishing degree, silently demanding that I acknowledge his authority. Every instinct I possessed urged me to drop my eyes, to bare my neck, to sink to the floor and present my pussy to him like some desperately whipped Omega begging for a knot.
I locked my joints instead. It took every brutal ounce of my willpower, but I refused to flinch.
I kept my head high, gripping the edge of the island so hard my knuckles throbbed, and I glared right back at him.
I was not submitting to a man who treated my arrival like some sort of hostage situation.
August moved. He didn’t speak, just slid a heavy glass of ice water across the countertop until the condensation bumped gently against my white-knuckled grip. His quiet, steadying signature washed over me, distinctly separate from Stetson’s aggressive notes. A deliberate buffer.
I flicked my eyes over to the giant. He just tipped his chin at the glass.
In my periphery, I saw Stetson scrub a rough, calloused hand over his face, dragging it down his jaw.
When he dropped his arm, the furious edge had bled out of his posture, leaving behind something exhausted and deeply weathered.
He looked at the floor, then out the window toward the barn, before finally meeting my eyes.
“Gideon should’ve told us what he’d done before he ever brought you into this,” Stetson said, his gravelly tone dropping an octave, losing the bark of command and leaving only the rough edge of the truth behind. “I’m sorry you’re caught in the crossfire of our mess.”
Dammit.
It was so much easier to fight a monster.
If he had gotten angry and yelled, I could have kept glaring.
I could have fueled my righteous indignation all the way back to the airstrip, safe behind the walls I’d spent six years building.
But staring at a man who was big enough to swallow his pride and apologize for being prickly to the stranger sitting in his own kitchen?
That completely dismantled me.
It made my chest physically ache and that dark little box where I’d shoved Colt’s painful rejection rattle hard on its hinges. Because a furious, unreasonable Alpha was easy to walk away from. A fiercely protective, exhausted man who recognized when he was being unfair... wasn’t.
My fingers slowly uncurled from the edge of the granite.
I reached for the heavy glass August had pushed toward me and took a long, deliberate sip of the ice water to give myself a moment to recalibrate.
The freezing temperature hit my stomach, helping to distract my brain from the scent-haze clouding my senses.
I needed my wits intact, not melting into a puddle over a gruff apology.
“It is a spectacular mess,” I finally agreed, setting the glass down.
And they don’t even know the half of it.
I kept my voice level, deliberately stripping out the biting sarcasm I usually weaponized. “But for the record, I don’t need rescuing. And I don’t need to be treated like a bomb about to go off, either. I’m not made of glass. You don’t have to tiptoe around me.”
Stetson held my gaze. The exhaustion was still carving deep lines around his mouth, but a flicker of approval lit up those dark green of his eyes.
“I’m starting to figure that out,” Stetson murmured.
I took another mouthwatering bite, deciding how much of my life I wanted to share with them. “I never planned on this. Any of this. I spent six years fighting the OMA so I wouldn’t end up shipped off to a house full of strangers.”
I looked up, meeting Stetson’s gaze head-on. Genuine surprise flashed across his handsome features. He probably assumed every Omega grew up dreaming of a perfect scent match and a happily-ever-after.
“I stumbled across your scents by accident,” I winced, remembering the moment all too clearly.
Adeline’s stricken face was branded on my brain, causing me physical pain every time I thought too hard about what had become the best and worst day of my life simultaneously.
“And from the moment I realized we were scent matched, my Omega totally hijacked my body. Instincts are a bitch, right?” The joke landed like a lead balloon.
Shit. I forced myself to keep talking. “I am trying to say—poorly, apparently—is that I boarded that plane fully intending to see what this was.”
August shifted. He moved around the large island, his giant frame eating up the space until he was standing just an arm’s length away.
Surprisingly, for such a large man, I didn’t feel crowded by his presence, even as his body heat warmed my side.
In fact, I liked it. I breathed him in, sorting through the complexities in his scent—woodsmoke arrived first, all outdoorsy and masculine, followed by the aromatic notes of cardamom that were a mix of citrus and spice with woody undertones, and lastly vanilla, the sweetness hidden under the gruff exterior.
It was an intoxicating mixture that had me wanting to lean into him just to get a better lungful.
“What do you mean ‘on accident?’“ August’s deep voice was quiet, snagging on the exact word I hadn’t meant to emphasize. His dark eyes were far too perceptive, locking onto me right as a brutal wave of guilt over Addy washed over me. He saw it all in real time, even as I tried to hide it.
I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly painfully tight. I wasn’t ready to talk about the collateral damage I’d left in my wake just to get here, which just added insult to injury. I waved a hand dismissively, forcing the protective shield back into place around my heart. “Story for another time.”
August studied my face for a long second with those all-seeing warm brown eyes of his. A lesser man would have pressed, demanding answers to satisfy his own curiosity. Instead, he nodded, letting me have my secrets for now.
Gideon shifted his weight against the counter, trading a fast, loaded glance with his packmates. Beside him, August went perfectly still, as if he was holding his breath.
“So,” Gideon started softly, his usual lopsided smile was replaced by something painfully hopeful. “Will you stay?”