Chapter 6 #3
The question hung between us. Stillwater was the pack house we'd spent the last year building for three people.
Its rooms carried Denil's operational precision, Miner's calm, and my tendency to fill every surface with something warm or useful.
I could walk it from memory: the great room with its stone fireplace, the white kitchen, the water-facing deck, the guest house with its sage-green island, where we'd lived while finishing the main build.
I knew every sightline and temperature zone, every chair Denil would claim, every corner where Miner would retreat to read.
I had designed it for the pack we already were.
I had not designed it for an omega with auburn hair who minimized her own needs and made jokes about climate control while her body rioted.
"We don't know enough about her," Miner said.
"We know she has opinions about textures, the protein bar, the electrolyte packet.
We know she runs hot when she's stressed.
We know what she sounds like when she lets go.
Beyond that," he said with a small shrug, "we know almost nothing about the woman outside this room. "
"Then we learn," I said.
"We learn," Miner agreed.
The knot throbbed. I breathed through it.
Nitsa shifted against me, her thigh tightening around my hip, and the sensation went straight through me, hot, immediate, a pulse of want so sharp it made my jaw clench.
I held still. Didn't move, didn't adjust, just breathed and waited for the tension to ease.
When it did, when she settled with a small sigh that wasn't quite a word, the want ebbed back to something I could sit with.
Until she woke, my job was to hold still. No fixing, teasing, asking, or solving. I could learn her warmth on my chest, the rhythm of her breathing, the slow release of tension when she felt safe. I could notice now, so when she was ready to tell me what she needed, I wouldn't miss it.
The app reduced this to a response, a heat case, a transaction.
My own instincts reduced her to a need I could answer, a problem I could solve.
Nitsa was a woman with auburn hair asleep on my chest. Her scent, honeysuckle and green things, warm and slightly wild, had woven through the room until I could no longer tell where she ended and the air began.
Miner watched us from his chair, blue-gray eyes resting on my hand at the base of Nitsa's spine.
He'd loved Denil and me for years without making an announcement of it.
Now he was giving Nitsa that same quiet attention after two days, most of them spent in circumstances that would make anyone retreat.
It was the most Miner thing I'd ever seen.
I felt her wake.
Her breathing caught. One hitch broke the deep rhythm of sleep, and her body tightened between one heartbeat and the next. Her thighs clenched around my hips. Fingers that had rested open against my chest curled into my skin, and her belly pressed to mine as her muscles engaged.
Her scent flared, fast and complete, like waking had thrown the doors open on it.
Honeysuckle rolled off her skin, warm and wild and twice as strong, straight into the animal part of my brain.
My head went foggy. Patience, noticing, every plan I'd been proud of burned off in one breath.
Rut remained, blunt and graceless, an alpha with his omega's heat in his lungs and his knot already locked inside her.
The need to grind into her until she broke apart again came with the certainty I'd crawl over broken glass to do it.
I fisted the sheet and held on, letting it crest until I could ride it instead of letting it ride me.
Her eyes opened, warm brown and slightly unfocused, pupils still wide from sleep and the fading heat haze. She blinked twice. Her gaze found my face, then tracked down our bodies to the knot still holding us together.
"Morning," I said. My voice came out rough. I hadn't spoken above a murmur in at least an hour.
She didn't answer immediately. A vertical line appeared between her eyebrows as her gaze dropped between us. Her lips parted, closed, then parted again.
"Your knot is still—" she started.
"Inside you," I finished. "Yeah."
I rolled my hips slowly. The knot dragged against her walls and pressed forward again. A low, rough sound broke out of me, and she clenched so hard my vision went white at the edges.
"Fuck," I breathed. "Nitsa."
Her eyes went wide. That unfocused warmth sharpened into something electric. Her thighs tightened around me, the small sound she made somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and I was done. So done. I'd held still for forty minutes and my body was finished with restraint.
I ground up into her, harder than I meant to. The knot pressed deep and full, pulling a moan from both of us. Her nails dug into my chest as her back arched. Morning light caught the flush climbing her throat, and I thought I might die.
"Hey," I managed. My voice was wrecked. I tipped my chin toward the chair. "Miner's right there. Can he come closer? Love on your clit while you wake up?"
She turned her head toward him and smiled. "Yes."