Chapter 12
TWELVE
PHOENIX
The Seafoam Inn’s breakfast spread looks like it was assembled by someone who gave up halfway through.
A single chafing dish holds oatmeal the color and consistency of wallpaper paste.
Beside it, a fruit plate features slices of cantaloupe so pale they’re nearly white and strawberries with green shoulders that suggest they were picked approximately six weeks too early.
There’s a basket of dinner rolls that have the dense, shiny look of something that came frozen in a bag, a tub of margarine—not butter, margarine—and a coffee carafe that, based on the smell, contains reheated motor oil.
I’ve attended wrap parties catered by food trucks in strip mall parking lots that put this to shame.
“This is worse than I expected,” I whisper to Mason as we stand in the doorway of the dining room, which is really just a parlor with three card tables draped in checkered cloth.
An elderly couple occupies one table, methodically working through bowls of the wallpaper oatmeal with the grim determination of people who survived the Depression. They don’t look up.
Mason steers me to the farthest table and pulls out my chair. I sink into it, still buzzing from what just happened with my mother and Atticus. I let him hang up on her and then I stared at his dick like it was hypnotizing me.
I might actually be losing my mind.
Mason returns from the buffet a minute later with two bowls. Mine contains a scoop of the oatmeal and a sad cluster of fruit. His has a single-serve cup of yogurt, the kind you find in gas station coolers, and a tiny croissant.
I stare at the oatmeal. A skin has formed across the surface. I poke it with my spoon and it resists, rubbery and defiant.
“This oatmeal has a texture.”
“Eat it anyway.”
“It moved, Mason. I poked it and it moved.”
He doesn’t respond. His phone is already out, one hand scrolling through emails while the other brings a spoon of yogurt to his mouth.
The blue light from the screen catches the shadows under his eyes, the tension around his mouth that hasn’t eased since we landed in this town.
His glasses sit slightly crooked from sleeping on that torture device of a loveseat, and he hasn’t bothered to fix them.
I abandon the oatmeal and pick up a strawberry. It crunches between my teeth—not in the good way. More in the way a tennis ball might crunch if you had the jaw strength to bite through one. I set it back on the plate and watch Mason instead.
His thumb moves in quick, practiced flicks across the screen.
Every few seconds his jaw flexes, the muscle at his temple jumping, and I know that particular rhythm.
Bad news has its own cadence on Mason’s face.
Small bad news makes him sigh. Medium bad news gets the jaw clench.
Big bad news—the kind that rewrites schedules and requires damage control—produces this: the dead-eyed scroll, the mechanical chewing, the total absence of commentary.
I’ve been reading Mason Aldrich for three years. This is big bad news.
“Mase.”
His thumb doesn’t stop. “Mm.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Delay with the replacement aircraft. Maintenance team from Boston can’t get here until tomorrow morning at the earliest.” He still doesn’t look up. “We’re here another day.”
Another day. Another twenty-four hours in this doily-encrusted time capsule of a town, sharing one room with an alpha who catches me ogling his morning situation and an assistant who looks like he’s being slowly murdered from the inside out.
I pick up my spoon and let it hover over the oatmeal.
I set it back down.
“Oh no,” I say, voice flat as the cantaloupe. “How terrible. Stuck in a quaint coastal village with no schedule, no press, no cameras, and no mother. Whatever will I do.”
Mason’s thumb pauses. His gaze lifts just enough to pin me over the rim of his glasses.
He peels back the foil on his yogurt, takes a single precise bite, then points the spoon at me.
“You will be on that plane when it gets here.”
I lean back in my chair, tilting my head. One eyebrow climbs slowly toward my hairline. “And if I don’t want to be?”
“Phoenix.”
“What exactly is your plan, Mason? Are you going to pick me up and carry me onto the tarmac? Fireman-style? Over one shoulder with my legs kicking?” I pluck a piece of cantaloupe from my plate and examine it like a jeweler appraising a suspect diamond. “Because I’m heavier than I look and I bite.”
“I’ll do what I have to do.”
“Please. I would wipe the floor with you.”
Mason sets down the yogurt. Sets down the spoon. Sets down his phone.
He looks at me.
Not the professional look. Not the patient, long-suffering assistant look he gives when I’m being difficult about schedules or dietary fabrications.
This is something else. Something that starts in those gray-blue eyes and pushes outward like a wave finding shore, quiet and certain and completely, devastatingly direct.
My breath hitches. The cantaloupe stops halfway to my mouth.
“You really want to know which one of us would win in a fight,” he says, voice low and slow like drips of honey. “There is only one way to find out.”
The cantaloupe drops onto my plate.
Part of me wants to launch myself across the table. Make him prove it. Force him to subdue me like some wild thing that needs to be tamed for its own good.
The air between us pulls tight as piano wire. My pulse thuds in my throat, in my wrists, behind my knees. Mason’s gaze doesn’t waver—those storm-gray eyes holding mine with a gravity that pins me to my chair more effectively than any physical restraint.
His lips part.
“Mason?”
The voice comes from behind me. Male. Unfamiliar. Rough around the edges like gravel dragged across asphalt.
Mason’s entire body changes in the span of a single heartbeat.
The heat drains from his expression like someone pulled a plug.
His spine goes rigid, shoulders locking into a line so sharp it could draw blood.
The softness—that impossible, electric softness that had been pooling in the space between us—vanishes.
What replaces it is something I’ve never seen on his face before.
Fear.
I twist in my chair.
The man standing in the doorway of the dining room is the kind of alpha that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
Lean and wiry, coiled with the compact muscle of someone who uses his body as a tool rather than an ornament.
Tattoo sleeves crawl up both forearms, disappearing under rolled cuffs.
Black hair shot through with silver at the temples, dark eyes that scan the room with the quick, predatory efficiency of someone accustomed to cataloging exits and threats in the same breath.
A small silver hoop glints in one ear. Scars crisscross his knuckles—not decorative, not accidental. Earned.
He looks like the kind of man mothers warn their daughters about. The kind of man who has a mugshot somewhere that’s more flattering than most people’s headshots.
Every omega instinct I’ve spent years suppressing screams at me to make myself smaller.
Mason hasn’t moved. Hasn’t breathed, as far as I can tell. His hand rests flat on the table, fingers splayed, and I can see the tendons standing out beneath his skin like cables under tension.
“Mase?” I keep my voice low. “Who is that?”
He doesn’t answer me.
The man’s face splits into a grin that transforms his entire appearance—still dangerous, but shot through with something raw and genuine that catches me off guard.
“Holy shit, it is you!” He strides into the dining room like he owns it, boots heavy on the hardwood, voice loud enough to make the elderly couple finally look up from their oatmeal.
“Mason Aldrich. I thought Earl was full of it, but here you are. In the flesh.” He spreads his arms wide, rings catching the light. “How the hell have you been, man?”
Mason rises from his chair. The motion is stiff, mechanical—a marionette pulled upright by invisible strings. His face has rearranged itself into something I’ve never seen before: a mask so carefully constructed it makes his professional composure look sloppy by comparison.
“Dom.” The single syllable carries the weight of a decade.
The tattooed man closes the distance between them in three long strides and pulls Mason into a hug that lifts him half off the ground.
Mason’s arms stay pinned at his sides for a beat too long before they come up—slowly, reluctantly—to return the embrace with the enthusiasm of someone defusing a bomb.
“God, you look good.” Dom holds Mason at arm’s length, hands gripping his shoulders, dark eyes roaming his face like he’s memorizing it. “LA agrees with you. All polished up like a fancy shoe.”
“Dominic, this is—” Mason extracts himself and gestures toward me with a hand that isn’t quite steady. “Phoenix Riviera. Phoenix, this is Dominic Romano.”
Dominic turns those dark eyes on me, and the full force of his attention lands like a spotlight.
Up close, the scars on his knuckles tell stories I’m not sure I want to hear, and the silver threading his temples catches the wan morning light.
He smells like motor oil and woodsmoke and something sharper underneath—alpha, unmistakably, but restrained. Leashed.
He extends his hand.
“Nice to meet you, Phoenix.”
Just that. No gushing. No wide eyes. No oh my God, I loved you in that thing. Just a calloused palm offered across a checkered tablecloth like I’m any other person eating bad oatmeal on a Tuesday morning.
I take it.
His grip is firm, warm, and something sparks where our skin connects—a tiny jolt of awareness that zips up my wrist and settles somewhere behind my sternum. Not unpleasant. Not expected. I pull my hand back a beat too fast, tucking it into my lap.
“Likewise.”