Win
The house is quiet as I step through the front door and shut it behind me, yawning loudly from being on my feet in a hot kitchen for the last seven hours.
I shrug out of my coat, hang it in the coat closet, and turn around.
Murph is two inches in front of my face.
His expression is intense. He hasn’t so much as blinked, and even though he’s my friend and I know he won’t hurt me, this strange behavior is, quite frankly, fucking terrifying.
“You scared the shit out of me.” I give my racing heart a second to recover. “What’s wrong?”
“How do you make people like you?”
I blink. “What?”
He casts an anxious glance up the stairs. “People like you. Even with your bad singing and your excessive talking, they still like you. How do you get people to like you?”
I’m used to Murph’s bluntness, so his unvarnished honesty is easy to shrug off. I cock my head, guessing this must involve Rose. That frantic glance up the stairs, as if terrified she’ll overhear this conversation, all but confirmed it. “Did something happen while I was at work?”
With a frustrated growl, Murph rakes a hand through his hair and stalks toward the kitchen.
I step out of my shoes and leave them by the front door, then follow.
“I told her I wanted to snuggle or fuck her raw. Then I asked about her dead alpha.” He swings around the second I walk into the kitchen and pins me with a fierce stare that stops me in my tracks.
“She hasn’t spoken to me since. Lunch was…
Let’s just say that if Ben hadn’t kept talking, it would have been so awkward that she’d have left me on the spot.
I need a crash course, very concise and to the point, on how to make my mate love me.
” He takes a seat at the dining table and looks expectantly up at me. “You can start now.”
I stare at my roommate with no idea what to say. It’s a new experience. I’m still formulating a response when the front door slams and Joel calls out. “Hey!”
There’s a thump, probably him setting his bag in the coat closet, and he walks into the kitchen in his navy combats, fire t-shirt, and combat boots.
“You’re back,” he says, with a surprised grin at Murph, sitting at the kitchen table. “I thought you weren’t coming back from Wyoming until tomorrow night?”
I point at Murph. “He wants me to teach him how to be likable.”
Joel wrinkles his nose on his way to the refrigerator. “He doesn’t like people other than work people and us.”
“Rose moved in,” I explain.
“She did?” Joel pulls his head from the refrigerator to reveal a grin. “That’s great.” He shuts the door, abandoning his usual after-work snack before hitting our home gym in the basement, and walks toward the doorway. “Is she upstairs with Ben? Which room?”
“She’s his scent match,” I say.
He slams to a stop halfway across the room and eyes me, then Murph warily. “What did you say?” he asks hesitantly.
“She took one look at me and ran away.” Murph scowls.
“Then she threw up. Repeatedly. Some of it could be because of the morning sickness, but it could also be because having a scent match disgusts her. I know she isn’t ready for a relationship, but I don’t know how to talk to people outside of work and to you. ”
“To be fair, you talk a lot about work at home as well,” I remind him.
He fixes his intense gray gaze on me.
Yikes. Next time, try keeping your mouth shut, Win. You might live longer.
I smile as I edge away from the table. “Just thought it would be helpful to point that out.”
“I like her,” Joel blurts out.
We swivel our heads to face him.
Joel is still eyeing Murph warily. “Just so you know, I like her and not in a ‘let’s be friends’ way.
I want it to be clear that I liked her before I knew she was your scent match, so any acts of violence would be completely unfair.
And I was the one who suggested she move in here, so you never would have met her without me. ”
Murph sits back in his seat.
Joel tenses rather than relaxes, as if he suspects this is the calm before the storm.
I clear my throat, sensing now is the perfect time to voice my own feelings. The attraction when I first saw her at the diner was immediate. Her hug at the motel cemented it.
Murph and Joel look expectantly at me.
“I also like Rose,” I say. “I’ll be immediately friend-zoned, like usual, so any acts of violence can go Joel’s way.”
Joel glares at me. “Dude.”
“Uh, sorry.” I smile apologetically at him while keeping half my attention on Murph.
Alphas are possessive of their omegas, and we’re in a kitchen with many weapons as dangerous as Murph’s two large fists.
“To be fair, I said ‘any’ violence. Not that I was encouraging him to kill you or anything. Just—”
“Sit down,” Murph snaps. “Both of you.”
My eyes drop to his hands resting on the table.
I can almost feel them wrapped around my throat, squeezing the life out of me.
I gulp nervously and scratch the side of my neck.
I’m not afraid of much, but I am a beta, and alphas—Murph in particular—aren’t exactly small.
They’re large and so commanding that even betas, who are less affected by an alpha’s dominance than omegas, feel their intensity.
I’m not the only one wary of getting closer to Murph. Joel hasn’t moved either, and the guy runs into burning buildings for a living. That tells me everything I need to know.
“If it’s all the same to you,” I say with false cheer, “I’d rather stay over here.”
Murph scowls. “I’m not going to kill you. Sit. Down.”
Reluctantly, I cross over to the dining table and perch on the edge of my seat, body angled toward the door in case I need to make a run for it.
Joel is also tense as he sinks into his chair.
Murph crosses his arms, and I flinch as if someone just fired a shot. He closes his eyes, tips his head back, and lets out a loud sigh.
I glance at Joel, confused.
He catches my eye and shrugs.
“I’ve been dragging out the work on the house,” Murph admits.
I don’t dare mention any tools in case this is a roundabout way of him saying he intends to get a hammer and kill us for daring to look twice at his mate. “What does work on the house have to do with Rose?”
Murph meets my gaze for a beat, then looks at Joel, his expression unreadable. “I told you I’d get the work on this house done as fast as I could. And I meant it. But then I stopped doing that.”
Truth be told, he’s not the only one. When Joel and I bought the foreclosed house, it was falling apart, and we worked on it every weekend and most evenings, determined to renovate it in record time.
Then Murph moved in, and that pace picked up because Murph has experience and a bunch of tools from being a freelance construction worker building condos and family homes for the last ten years.
But then the work slowed to a crawl, and it wasn’t because we were suddenly busy or got lazy.
The house is still important, but over time, flipping it has become less of a priority.
With his head back and his eyes on the ceiling, Murph says quietly, “I like living with you.”
Joel frowns. “But you don’t like people.
I know that because you specifically said you were only moving in with us because the house was a construction site and there was no chance anyone else would be moving in.
You said you’d put up with us, but that’s it.
You didn’t like people in general, so we shouldn’t be offended if you stayed in your room and kept to yourself. ”
Murph did exactly that when he first moved in after the condo construction finished.
But slowly, he started spending more time hanging out with us in the living room, nursing a beer after dinner in the backyard, or laughing as we worked together to finish this house reno.
We eat all our meals together when we’re all at home.
That isn’t the hallmark of someone who likes being alone.
Put all those events together, and you get the signs of a pack forming.
All it took was Rose and her son moving in for us to realize it.
Shit. I can’t believe I missed all those signs.
“Yeah, well. Things changed,” Murph says, avoiding both our gazes.
I glance at Joel, who looks back at me with the same dawning awareness.
Wanting to be absolutely sure about what this is, I turn to Murph and speak slowly. “Are you saying you want to keep living together?”
Murph nods. “I am.”
I relax in my seat now that I no longer have to worry about dodging fists. “But Rose changes things. We’re attracted to your scent match, and, well… she’s yours.”
He glares at me. “She is not mine.”
I raise my eyebrows from the force of his response. “Um…”
He rubs a hand over his face, as if frustrated that he can't put into words what he means. It took him a long time to open up about himself, his life on the road, and the fact that he even had siblings.
Talking comes a hell of a lot harder to him than it does to Joel and me. It’s why we never pushed him to talk or pried into his life. We just waited until he was comfortable with us, and to my surprise, he started opening up.
“What I mean to say is, she’s mine, but she’s her own person. I need her, and I want her, but she has needs and wants of her own. I refuse to get in the way of her happiness.”
Joel studies Murph through hooded eyes. “So you’re saying that I won’t wake up with your hands wrapped around my neck should I ever sleep with Rose?”
It’s reassuring to discover that I wasn’t alone in having thoughts that felt like undiagnosed paranoia was at play.
“I’m not telling you to sleep with my mate. Just… if she has feelings and you have feelings, I won’t kill you if you want to act on them.” Murph glances at me. “Either of you.”
“She won’t have feelings for me.” The quiet admission comes out with more bitterness than I expected, and Joel frowns as I push myself to my feet with a forced smile. “I’d better shower off all this diner grease and start on dinner.”
Murph calls after me, "What about advice to make my mate like me?"
“Listen and care about what a person is telling you,” I say, not turning around, more exhausted now than when I first walked through the front door. “That’s all there is to it.”
And as I walk out of the kitchen, I hear Joel ask Murph in a low voice, “What was that about?”
“Hell if I know,” Murph mutters, his eyes boring into my back.