2. Chapter 2 #2
The orgasm hits me like a freight train.
My knot swells in my fist, harder, thicker, pulsing, and I roar.
The sound that tears out of me isn't human.
It's pure Alpha, raw and primal, echoing off the bathroom walls loud enough that the whole penthouse probably heard it.
Cum erupts from my cock in thick, white ropes, splattering against the tile wall, washing away in the cold water.
But my knot doesn't go down.
That's the thing about a true scent-match. A single orgasm doesn't satisfy the knot. It demands more. It demands her. The biological imperative is clear - find the omega, mount the omega, knot the omega, breed the omega. Until that happens, the knot will stay swollen, aching, and unsatisfied.
I keep stroking. Slower now, my grip tightening around the swollen base, riding the aftershocks. My cum coats my hand, milky white against my skin, and I watch it wash away down the drain.
It's not enough, but I already knew it wouldn't be.
I lean against the shower wall, chest heaving, water pouring over me, and close my eyes.
Her scent is still in my nose, in my blood, in my bones.
It's going to be there all night, haunting me, torturing me, reminding me that the cure for this ache is lying in a bed twenty feet away, probably just as sleepless, just as desperate.
I could go to her.
The thought is a whisper, dark and tempting.
I could walk down that hallway, knock on her door, and when she opens it, when she sees me standing there, still hard, still knotted, still out of my mind with need, she'd let me in.
I can smell the want on her. She felt it too.
The match is real, which means her body is aching just as badly as mine.
But that's not how this works.
She's not a hire. She's not a transaction.
She's a person, a small-town girl with wide eyes and a thrift-store wardrobe who took a job caring for a child because she needed the money.
She didn't sign up to be mounted by three men on her first night.
She deserves better than an Alpha who can't keep his knot in his pants.
I turn off the shower and the silence is deafening.
I grab a towel and dry off slowly, every movement deliberate, forcing myself back into the skin of JD Blaine, CEO, billionaire, and the man who controls everything. Not the feral foster kid who wants to drag an omega into his bed and breed her until neither of them can walk.
My cock is still half-hard. My knot has diminished slightly but hasn't fully retracted, and I know it's going to be a long fucking night.
I pull on a pair of loose sweatpants, nothing else, because my skin feels too hot, too tight for fabric, and walk back into my bedroom. The connecting wall, the one between my room and hers, is thin enough that I can hear movement on the other side.
A soft sound. A gasp. Then silence.
She's awake. She's in there, and she heard me in the shower. She heard the roar. She knows what I was doing.
My knot pulses again.
Fuck.
I sit on the edge of my bed and drop my head into my hands. My cock is hardening again, the fabric of my sweatpants tenting obscenely, and I press the heel of my hand against it, trying to force it down.
It doesn't work. It never works. Not with a true match.
Through the wall, I hear her shift again.
A soft, breathy sound that might be a whimper.
And her scent, God, her scent, seeps through the cracks in the drywall, honey and vanilla and fresh slick, and I know she's touching herself.
I know she's lying in that bed, just as desperate as I was, her fingers between her thighs, chasing a release that won't come.
Because her body knows what mine knows. Hands aren't enough. Fingers aren't enough. The match demands a knot. It demands a bond. It demands the heat of another body, the grip of a mate, the claim of teeth on skin.
I press my forehead against the connecting wall and close my eyes.
"Sleep, Willow," I whisper, too quiet for her to hear. "Just sleep."
But I don't take my own advice.
I sit there in the dark, hard and aching, my knot throbbing in time with my heartbeat, listening to the soft sounds of an omega in heat, false heat, scent-match heat, the biological trigger of a true bond, coming from the other side of the wall.
Before the elevator, before the scent, before my world split open, Deklan and I sat in his office while Knox paced.
"She's from nowhere," Deklan had said, scrolling through her file on his tablet.
His voice was flat, dismissive, the way it always is when he's trying to pretend he doesn't care about something.
"Millbrook. Population two thousand. No formal credentials.
She babysat for neighbors and did one semester of community college. "
"She has good references," I said.
"Good. Not great." He looked at me over his glasses. "We're billionaires, JD. We could hire anyone."
"We need someone who'll actually stay." I leaned forward. "Lily has had three nannies in six months. She needs stability. Someone who isn't going to quit when things get hard."
"And you think a small-town omega with no experience is going to handle three Alphas and a grieving toddler?"
I hadn't had an answer then. I'd just trusted the agency.
They'd never steered us wrong before, though we'd never used their scent-matching service for something like this.
We'd used it once before, for recreational purposes.
The woman they sent was compatible, sure.
She was fine. Adequate. We shared her for a few months before she moved on, and it was... fine.
Everything was always fine.
And then Willow walked out of that elevator, and the word "fine" disintegrated.
Because this isn't fine. This isn't adequate. This is a nuclear goddamned detonation. This is every cell in my body rearranging itself around a single focal point, a twenty-three-year-old omega with a drawl and a duffel bag, and I don't know how to survive it.
I don't know how to survive her.
At three in the morning, I finally give up on sleep.
I walk to the kitchen in the dark, not bothering with lights. I know this penthouse blind, every corner, every piece of furniture, every window. I built this place from nothing, just like everything else in my life.
I pull a bottle of water from the fridge and drink half of it in one go. My throat is raw, from the growling, from the silence, from swallowing every sound I wanted to make while I listened to her breathe through the wall.
"You're up."