Chapter 6 #3
Wolf’s glance flicks to him when the kettle suddenly shrieks, and he rises to attend to it.
“Oh, the pain is faint but still there.” I lift it, wiggling my fingers over the small bandage.
“You okay?” He’s rubbing the back of his neck now, and I shrug.
“Hey. It’s okay.” I mean it all the way down. “It’s healing well, honestly, and I understand exactly how it happened. I was the projectile.”
Roman studies the bandage for another moment before glancing back up at me. “No fever?”
I blink. “No.”
“Headaches?” Wolf asks casually.
I shake my head. “Nope. Should there be?”
He just shrugs nonchalantly.
I flex my fingers on my bitten hand out of instinct. “All good. It was sore the first day, but it’s mostly just itchy now.” I smile, assuming Roman is feeling guilty. “Well, if it helps, I’m still alive, I haven’t lost a finger, and I don’t seem to have developed any mysterious superpowers.”
A reluctant smile tugs at Roman’s mouth. “That’s… reassuring.”
Wolf slides two mugs across the counter before reaching for a small pitcher. His gaze catches mine for the briefest moment, and the corner of his mouth lifts as though he’s remembering me wedged in the ferns five minutes ago.
“Cream?” he asks, all innocence.
I nod because I don’t trust myself to say the word cream with that man looking at me like that.
Wolf pours mine first, then Roman’s, and takes his own black.
“So how’d Eve take it?” Roman asks, resting on an elbow, staring at me, his long eyelashes keeping my attention. “When you told her about the bite.”
“Oh, I haven’t. Not the details.” I wrap both hands around the hot cup.
“She’s got a fractured ankle to heal from.
This is nothing.” Somehow my eyes drift to his mouth, and when the corner of his lips quirks into a knowing smile, I realize he’s caught me staring.
I clear my throat and meet his eyes again.
“So don’t worry about it. I’m not upset, and I’m not making it a thing. Stuff happens.”
He nods and drinks. Then I drink, while Wolf watches me, sipping from his own coffee. And for a moment, it’s just the three of us in the dim light, and I honestly don’t know where to look, because both directions are dangerous.
One unmated Omega, two Alphas, a small room, and my body burning up, hormones tugging at my insides. It happens to everyone, because we’re not animals. I have control, and I’m using every inch of it.
They tell me about the work in the woods.
“We need to have the campsite finished by summer, seeing as the place is already booked out. Stumps are out, ground’s nearly level.
There’s a spot at the far edge where you can see clear down the ridge at sunset.
We’ll take you up there sometime,” Wolf says.
“I’d love that,” I hear myself say.
Roman’s smiling, and as he shifts on his stool, his arm brushes mine.
The contact lasts barely a second, yet an inferno inside me comes alive beneath it, sudden and impossible to ignore.
Heat surges through me so fast my breath catches in my throat, every nerve in my body awake. My skin tingles where he’d touched me, the sensation racing up my arm before dropping lower, unfurling through me. I have to grip my mug a little harder just to keep my hands steady.
God… What is happening to me?
The warmth lingers, leaving me flushed, restless, and with a bewildering, almost overwhelming urge to close the tiny gap between us and touch him again.
Roman carries on smiling, seemingly completely oblivious, while Wolf stares as though he sees through all my pretense. And somehow that makes it worse.
The temperature in my body keeps climbing, gathering low and insistent between my thighs. My breath goes shallow and my heart hammers.
Just breathe.
Except, I don’t think this is ordinary biology. I’ve been near Alphas my whole adult life, and it never once felt like wading into a warm surf with the tide pulling at my knees.
“I just have to use the bathroom,” I say at once, sliding off the stool.
“Down the hall, last door.” Roman points, and I smile, then move at a perfectly normal pace. The last few steps I take at a dead run. I get inside, shut the door, and press my back flat against it in the cool quiet.
“Okay,” I breathe the word. “Get it together. Do not be a psycho.”
My hands are shaking. My whole body is too. The bite on my hand throbs with every heartbeat, and even here, I can still smell them. That’s what scares me. All that distance, and their scents are still with me, in me, like I’ve breathed something in too deeply that I’ll never fully exhale.
They’re just Alphas. Except, I’ve met Alphas. I lived with one. I loved one.
And there it is, the floor tilting, because Jerry’s scent never did this to me.
I loved that man with everything I had, married him, bonded to him, handed him my entire future, and his scent never once dragged me under.
These are strangers, convicts in my grandmother’s woods, exactly what Jerry was the day I met him, and the parallel closes around my chest like a cold fist.
I did this once. I fell for a man serving his time on this mountain, and he promised me everything. But the world took him back inside six months. That nearly dragged me with him. The bond sickness, the clinics, the version of me they scraped up off the floor.
I can’t do it again. I physically can’t. Panic coils through my stomach, squeezing tight, because the pull toward that kitchen is still there, as though an invisible thread has wrapped itself around my ribs… and one end is tied to those Alphas out there.
I run the tap cold, splash my face, and grip the edge of the sink as I meet my green eyes in the mirror. My cheeks are blushing pink.
“They’re not your scent matches,” I whisper. “They can’t be.”