Chapter 18 Golden Boy #3
The question came out with approximately thirty percent more genuine nervousness than I’d intended, the playboy composure I’d maintained for a decade developing a hairline crack under the sustained pressure of Luka’s death stare.
Octavia giggled.
The sound was warm, bright, carrying the heat-loosened, uninhibited frequency of a woman whose filter had been dissolved by hours of hormonal cycling and who found the dynamic between the two Alphas in her vicinity genuinely, delightfully entertaining.
She leaned down—closer, her lips grazing my ear, her scent concentrating at the point of proximity into a sweetness so dense it made my vision blur at the edges.
“Probably,” she whispered. The word was amused, conspiratorial, delivered with the warm breath of a woman sharing a secret she found more funny than concerning. “But are you gonna chicken out because you’re a wimp?”
I had to swallow.
The lump in my throat was composed of approximately equal parts arousal, self-preservation instinct, and the specific, heady vertigo that her closeness produced—her scent, at this distance, bypassing my olfactory system entirely and delivering its payload directly to the reptilian sector of my brain where designation-level imperatives lived.
She was so close. Her lips at my ear. Her body warm above mine.
Her aroma making me dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with the blood redistribution my body was performing in favor of the organ currently straining against the fabric between us and everything to do with the biochemical reality of an Omega in heat whose scent chemistry was compatible.
Genuinely, molecularly, pack-level compatible.
The kind of match that the body recognized before the mind caught up.
And she smells so fucking good it’s driving me to a place I’ve never been. Not the standard, oh-an-Omega-in-heat level of appealing. A deeper channel. A frequency I didn’t know my receivers were tuned to until she broadcast on it.
She pulled back just far enough to face me.
Her thumb traced a slow, deliberate path down my bottom lip—the pad dragging across the sensitive skin with a pressure that was less touch and more inscription, as if she were writing her name on my mouth in a language my body could read and my brain was still learning.
Her storm-gray eyes held mine. Commanding. Patient. The gaze of a woman who had positioned herself exactly where she wanted to be and was now waiting to see if the man beneath her had the spine to stay in the game.
I’m desperate to taste her. To kiss her.
To know what that red-lipstick mouth—long since smeared across Luka’s jaw and collar hours ago—tastes like when it’s pressed against mine with the same intensity I watched her deploy at that bar.
I want her to ride me like she rode Luka for what had to be hours—the sounds, Christ, the sounds that had come through the walls, the rhythmic, escalating, competitive cadence of two athletes whose bodies operated at peak performance and who fucked the way they trained: with stamina, with precision, with the relentless, I-will-outlast-you mentality of people who did not know how to half-ass anything.
“I won’t chicken out,” I said.
The words were breathless. Rough at the edges.
Carrying a vulnerability that the playboy version of me would have smoothed over with a grin and a deflection but that the version pinned to this bed by this woman’s thighs and this woman’s scent and this woman’s thumb on his lip didn’t have the resources to disguise.
She leaned in. Closer. Our lips brushing again—that torturous, barely-there contact that was less kiss and more dare.
“But you’re gonna have to prevent the murder from happening,” I murmured against her mouth, “if you want me to last long enough to give you what you deserve.”
She grinned against my lips. The movement was tactile—I felt the shape of her smile more than I saw it, the curve of her mouth shifting against mine with a warmth that was both playful and predatory.
“What I deserve, hmm?”
She sucked on my bottom lip.
A single, slow, deliberately devastating pull that drew my lower lip between hers and held it—the suction gentle but firm, the pressure just enough to send a cascade of sensation from my mouth to my chest to my abdomen to the aching, desperate, straining length that was currently being denied every form of contact it was requesting.
The move was practiced. Confident. The specific, calibrated action of a woman who understood that the anticipation was the weapon and the delivery was the mercy, and she was in no rush to grant the latter.
I had to breathe.
Deliberately. Consciously. The way you breathed when your body had forgotten how to do it automatically and required manual intervention.
Because fuck—just the kiss, just that single, targeted, lip-claiming gesture was driving my body to a state of readiness that I’d never reached this quickly with any Omega, in any context, under any level of arousal.
This was simply the beginning. The overture.
The first measure of a composition whose later movements I could only imagine, and the imagination alone was producing physiological effects that my professional athletic conditioning was not equipped to manage.
I’ve never had this experience with an Omega.
Never had the opening act make me feel like the main event might genuinely exceed my capacity.
And she’s TAUNTING me. Taking her time. Enjoying my unraveling the way a conductor enjoys the crescendo—because she’s the one controlling the tempo, and she knows it, and I’m thriving on it.
Even if it may lead to my early demise at the hands of a six-foot-two goaltender whose territorial expression has escalated from “murder” to “war crime.”
“You’re being patient, Octavia.”
I said her name slowly. Deliberately. Each syllable pronounced with the specific, vocal intention of a man who understood that names, spoken at the right frequency and the right speed, functioned as recall signals—pulling the attention of the person they belonged to from wherever it had drifted and focusing it, for one sharp, clarifying moment, on the man who’d spoken them.
It worked. Her smile shifted. The predatory, in-control grin softening by a degree into a different expression—curious, intrigued, the look of a woman who had been mid-performance and had just been surprised by something in the audience she hadn’t expected.
She took the lead in kissing me.
Slowly. The tempo downshifted from the urgent, heat-driven intensity of the preceding minutes into a different register entirely.
Exploratory. The kiss of a woman who was encountering a new partner and had decided—despite the hormonal current pulling her toward speed and satisfaction—that this particular introduction warranted patience.
Her lips moved against mine with a tenderness that I hadn’t anticipated and wasn’t prepared for.
Not the hungry, consuming, Luka-caliber kisses I’d heard through the walls, but a quieter, more searching contact that asked questions instead of making demands.
My hand found the small of her back. The skin was warm—heat-warm, fever-warm, carrying the elevated temperature of a body in full biological mobilization—and smooth beneath my palm.
I trailed upward, slowly, my fingers mapping the landscape of her spine with the same careful, unhurried attention she’d given the kiss.
And I felt it—the shiver. Subtle, involuntary, traveling through her body from the point of contact outward like a ripple through still water.
She shivered at my touch.
Which means this is unfamiliar territory for her, too. New. Uncharted. She’s exploring me the way I’m exploring her—cautiously, with the heightened awareness of two people who don’t know each other’s rhythms yet but are discovering, in real time, that the rhythms might be compatible.
And maybe that’s why she’s taking it slow.
Not because the heat is ebbing—I can feel it in her skin, in the urgency of her scent, in the slick that’s rendering my composure a war zone—but because I’m new to her and she wants the time to explore.
To learn. To build the map before she navigates the territory at full speed.
“I’m gonna die of an aneurysm at this rate.”
Luka’s voice cut through the room from the beanbag with the strained, barely-controlled energy of a man whose patience had been stretched to its structural limit and was now producing sounds that indicated imminent failure.
The growl was gone—replaced by a different kind of distress.
The vocal equivalent of a goaltender watching the puck cross the line in slow motion: aware, suffering, unable to intervene.
Octavia broke the kiss. Giggled—the sound bright, mischievous, carrying the delighted, heat-loosened energy of a woman who understood exactly what she was doing to both men in this room and was deriving a truly indecent amount of pleasure from the chaos.
She cocked her head toward Luka. The movement was playful, regal—the tilt of a queen acknowledging a subject who had spoken out of turn but whose petition she was willing to consider.
“Then why not come and join us?” Her voice dropped.
Lower. Warmer. Threaded with a frequency that I watched travel across the room and land on Luka’s body like a physical impact—his shoulders tightening, his jaw clenching, his hands gripping the sides of the beanbag as if preventing himself from launching out of it. “Or do you need more rest, Daddy?”
Daddy.
I watched Luka’s body respond to the word the way a circuit responded to a power surge.