Chapter 18 Golden Boy #2
Her hair cascaded around her shoulders—loose, tangled, the purple-to-turquoise-to-platinum gradient catching the warm bedroom light and throwing back colors that complemented the flush on her cheeks and the pink of her lips with the kind of chromatic harmony that appeared accidental and was probably genetic.
The colors reminded me of my own rebellion—the vivid, fuck-convention green that I’d been maintaining since my second year of competitive hockey as a visual declaration that Renzo Viteri did not blend into backgrounds.
But hers felt different. Less rebellion, more identity.
The dark purple at her roots transitioning through the turquoise mids to the platinum tips like a spectrum she’d been born to wear, as natural on her as the melanin in her skin or the storm gray of her eyes.
She was born to be exactly this. And more. Whatever “more” looks like when it’s built on this foundation.
She leaned down.
Grinning. The expression wide, confident, carrying the specific, sovereign energy of a woman who understood that the man beneath her was comprehensively, enthusiastically at her mercy and who intended to take her time enjoying that fact.
Her hand traveled from my chest upward—along the column of my neck, the fingertips tracing the tendons, the thumb finding the pulse point beneath my jaw where my heart was hammering at a rate that professional sports medicine would have flagged—and her fingers wrapped around the front of my throat.
Squeezed.
Lightly. Just enough pressure to restrict the airflow by a fraction—not enough to threaten, but enough to remind. Enough to communicate, in the physical language that predated words, that the hand around my throat belonged to someone who was choosing restraint and could choose otherwise.
Fuck.
I am turned on by this.
Like, genuinely, fundamentally, this-is-going-to-change-my-preferences-permanently turned on by an Omega squeezing my throat.
This is a dangerous revelation. Dangerous because she’s not our official Omega.
She’s not anyone’s official anything—she’s a woman in heat whose biology has lowered her inhibitions and elevated her confidence to a level that I suspect is actually her baseline when she’s not spending every waking hour constructing walls against a world that’s let her down.
And the question that’s forming in the back of my skull, beneath the arousal and the mint-scented desperation, is: how the fuck am I going to find someone who can do THIS type of foreplay?
Never thought that would be a problem for me.
But here I am. Enduring this blessed moment like it’s a curse, because the blessing is temporary and the craving it’s creating is going to be permanent.
“What is the golden boy thinking about?”
Her voice was low. Husky. Carrying the warm, heat-roughened timbre that hours of cycling had produced—a vocal texture that hit my eardrums and traveled directly to the base of my spine without pausing for cognitive processing.
The nickname—golden boy—was new. Delivered with the teasing, proprietary familiarity of a woman who had decided, in the span of their acquaintance, to assign me a label, and the label told me what she saw when she looked at me: the charm, the surface shine, the polished exterior that I wore like a jersey.
I let my tongue run slowly along my bottom lip.
The movement was deliberate. Calculated with the specific, performer’s awareness of a man who understood that certain gestures, timed correctly, produced measurable effects.
And it worked—her gaze tracked the motion, her storm-gray eyes following the path of my tongue with the focused, involuntary attention of a woman whose heat-amplified visual processing had just received an input it found compelling.
“How I’m going to find an Omega,” I said, “who can get me this excited for being a dominating badass.”
The honesty was unplanned. Raw. The kind of admission that my sober, controlled, playboy-default self would have packaged in three additional layers of irony and delivered with a wink rather than a confession.
But the heat in this room—her heat, radiating from her skin and saturating the air and dissolving every filter I’d ever installed—had turned my usual communication style from curated to transparent, and the words came out carrying their actual weight instead of the decorative packaging I normally wrapped them in.
She grinned.
The expression was devastating. Power and pleasure combined into a single, slow-spreading smile that transformed her flushed, heat-bright face into a weapon of mass seduction.
The storm-gray eyes glittered above it—sharp, knowing, carrying the satisfied light of a woman who had just extracted a truth she’d suspected and was savoring the confirmation.
“Aww.” The syllable was dripping with mock sympathy, the verbal equivalent of a cat watching a mouse it had already caught try to negotiate its release. “You like being a bottom, Viteri?”
“Fuck yeah.”
Zero hesitation. Zero packaging. The admission launched from my mouth with the clean, unimpeded velocity of a truth that had decided it was done waiting in the staging area and was going to deploy itself regardless of the social consequences.
“But I think that only applies to you.”
She grinned wider—the expression climbing to a wattage that could have powered the arena lights at Olympia’s main rink. She leaned down, slow, deliberate, until our lips were brushing—the lightest possible contact, the ghost of a kiss, the promise of pressure without its delivery.
“Hmmm.” The vibration of the sound traveled from her lips to mine and through my jaw into my skull. “You’re gonna make someone jealous.”
I smirked. Couldn’t help it—the reflex was too embedded in my social operating system to suppress, and the direction her comment pointed was too tempting to resist.
I looked to the corner of the room.
Luka Petrov occupied a beanbag chair that was approximately four sizes too small for his frame—the oversized, shapeless piece of furniture compressed beneath two hundred and ten pounds of post-heat goaltender into a configuration that looked less like seating and more like a hostage situation between a man and a textile.
He was naked. Unselfconsciously, completely, the kind of casual nudity that came from hours of intimacy in an enclosed space where clothing had been deprioritized somewhere around hour two and hadn’t been revisited since.
The nudity did nothing for me. I was straight as a geometrically perfect line—same as Maddox, same as the vast majority of my sexual history, which was exclusively and enthusiastically populated by Omegas of various descriptions and zero Alphas.
But the strategic potential of the visual was not lost on me.
Specifically: the blackmail potential. Because somewhere upstairs, separated from this scene by approximately twelve feet of floorboard and a ventilation system that was essentially functioning as a pheromone delivery service, Kael S?rensen was lying in his bed pretending to be asleep while his rut blockers fought a losing battle against the scent of the Omega he’d sent a proxy to claim.
And Kael clearly had a thing with Luka that he was attempting to bury under approximately seventeen layers of denial and one hotel room in Stockholm that he’d never discussed and thought no one knew about.
Except everyone knew about it.
The tension between those two had been approximately as subtle as a foghorn since Luka had been introduced to the Ironcrest roster as the backup goaltender.
The hallway encounters that lasted three seconds too long.
The eye contact during team meetings that carried more data than the actual briefings.
Kael’s jaw doing that micro-clench thing every time Luka’s name was mentioned in conversation, as if the syllables themselves were a physical stimulus he was managing through dental compression.
They have history. The kind that lives in hotel rooms and closed doors and the specific, charged silence that two people maintain when acknowledging what happened between them would require a level of vulnerability that one of them isn’t capable of and the other isn’t willing to demand.
But right now, the history was irrelevant, because Luka’s green eyes were locked on me with an intensity that transcended “jealous” and entered a territory that could only be described as “actively calculating the most efficient method of ending a human life and disposing of the evidence.”
His jaw was set. His arms crossed over his bare chest—the muscular, veined forearms of a goaltender creating a barrier that was less about comfort and more about restraining the hands attached to them from doing the thing they clearly wanted to do, which was remove me from his Omega’s vicinity with the kind of speed and force that made highlight reels.
If looks could kill, I’d be dead. Revived by paramedics. And then killed again, slowly, with a level of deliberate attention designed to ensure I fully appreciated the experience of my first death before being subjected to the second.
A cold sweat prickled down my spine. Not metaphorical—actual, physiological, my body’s autonomous response to the presence of a larger, territorial Alpha whose pheromone output was broadcasting threat at a volume that my survival instincts were translating into run.
And maybe that was why Luka Petrov didn’t have a pack of his own—because the man was a dominating, possessive, venomous-when-provoked force of nature whose territorial instincts operated at a level that made coexistence with other Alphas a negotiation that most men weren’t equipped to survive.
“Think he’s planning my murder?” I asked.