Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
PAXTON
My fiancée’s warm laugh drags me from the bathroom where I’m cautiously examining a nasty bruise on my hip from a blocked shot the night before.
I pull up the gray sweats and tug a plain black Henley over my head, effectively hiding all the aching parts of my body, before padding down the hallway toward the living room.
The sun is bright through the windows of the temporary apartment, flooding the large open space.
Billie laughs again, and I follow the sound like a bloodhound on a scent.
My body tightens at just the idea of following a scent.
My own scent bursts out from me, the cypress heavily tinged with frustration.
I breathe through the loss of control, soaking in Billie’s beautiful black hair where it falls over her shoulder and the subtle curves of her body where they’re pressing against the slip of a dress she’s wearing.
Damn it. It’s been three days since I walked up those club stairs to grab Billie’s coat and purse and found my brother making out with my scent match.
My brother—the known fuckboy of the entire league who is photographed with his tongue down a random person’s throat every few days it seems—with his hands and lips all over the Omega built for me, whose very existence calls for me and urges me to take her and claim her.
Had it been rude to interrupt them? Absolutely.
But I couldn’t just ignore them. It took everything in me to not pummel Rhett into that damn booth.
Carefully extracting Carys with that half-truth was essentially a life-saving maneuver for my brother.
Not that he knows that. No one can. It changes nothing about my engagement that my scent match is here, the daughter of my assistant coach.
I palm Billie’s hip and kiss the top of her head in silent greeting. She leans back into me and offers me a small, soft smile.
“How are you feeling?” she asks in a quiet murmur that shoots straight down my spine.
My dick twitches, and I press tighter into her, hiding it from the video chat she has pulled up on her phone.
“Bruised,” I admit. Her lips tighten at the corners with worry. “But it’ll be fine. I’ll have one of the physios help me stretch it out after morning skate tomorrow.”
Billie nods, returning to the vegetables she’s chopping. “I’m making bean salad dip for lunch. You’re feeling up to the meeting this afternoon?”
“Absolutely,” I agree with ease, even though I’d much rather drag her back to bed and then sleep again.
I’d managed to forget the last year or two just how much the physical plays hurt.
The Reign aren’t quite as aggressive on the forecheck, and I’d grown accustomed to making it out of most games relatively unscathed—to hockey standards, at least. The Scorpions play hard and physical, and my body’s struggling to adapt.
I chance a glance at the screen and then wish I hadn’t.
Carys’s hair is pulled back into a messy bun that sits perched atop her head, strands of hair falling around her face and down her neck, like she can’t be bothered to fix them.
Shadows darken her under eyes. Her hands are scraped and scratched as she spins a rose upside down several times, then cuts the stem and adds it to something just off screen.
Her shoulders are tight, and her lips are thin.
Despite a happy light in her eyes, there’s a fragility to her countenance.
It calls to me even through the phone screen.
“Are we touring places, or just meeting at her office?” I ask to distract myself.
Houses. Realtors. Furniture. Leases. Anything to keep the blonde Omega from encroaching any further into my head right now.
“Just meeting at her office. She’ll compile options while you’re gone next week for us to tour once you’re back,” Billie says, dumping the vegetables into a glass bowl.
She turns her attention back to Carys. “And then I’m still going over to help you.
I told you yesterday I’d help get your admin stuff sorted. ”
The words hold no room for disagreement.
I squeeze her hip. I’ve heard her use that tone before every time someone has tried to turn down help Billie knows they need.
She may be quiet and slow to open up to others, but Billie is loyal—fiercely so.
My stomach twists at her attaching so thoroughly to Carys.
That had been my hope, of course. Billie deserves to have a friend out here, someone she clicks with and understands.
Someone like Marley back in LA. But now knowing that Carys is my scent match?
Knowing that every time Billie’s come home with that faint perfume of orchids on her clothes and hair I’ve had to swallow down the feral urge to take and claim?
It’s only a matter of time before my control snaps like a damn thread pulled too tight and my secret will get out. I press my lips to Billie’s hair again, breathing in her sweet peach scent and the vanilla of her shampoo, willing it to be enough to satisfy those primal desires.
I’ve loved Billie since that night her friends convinced her to bar hop on her twenty-first birthday and she ended up handing me my ass in shuffleboard in front of my teammates.
She’d been flirting and giggling and tipsy, so much so I was half-convinced she wouldn’t remember me come the morning.
When she’d called two days later to see about coffee?
I was the luckiest bastard in that entire bar that night.
She was enough for me then. She’s enough for me now.
“You really don’t have to,” Carys argues, though it lacks the fire of a true disagreement. “I was going to ask Marilyn about helping me put up a job listing for some help with the office-type stuff in the next couple weeks. Probably after Thanksgiving.”
Billie shakes her head, dislodging my lips. I kiss behind her ear instead, grinning against her skin when goosebumps race down her neck.
“I have all the same experience as some random stranger you’ll find,” she says.
She chops another pepper without missing a beat.
“And it’s not like I’m hurting for time.
Let me help. It’ll keep you from drowning and will give me a job here without having to navigate the Tennessee teaching certification requirements. ”
There’s a long pause.
Carys’s reply is muted, all that exhaustion in her body there in her voice, too. “All right. I could use the help.”
Billie laughs, and I give that happy sound to the urges, too, even as I pull away from her and grab the chips and a set of plates from the cabinet.
CARYS
“Crap. These roses have mold on them, too.”
Tears line my lashes, but I quickly blink them away. Everything about this order has been a complete disaster, and I’m at my wit’s end at the moment. Billie sighs and then she’s standing beside me, squeezing my elbow in unspoken, unwavering support.
“I’ll make a note that this supplier is having quality issues,” she says. “We can order from them again when it’s not a time-bounded event in the spring and see if they’ve improved.”
It’s the third batch of stems from them that’s been molded since Halloween nearly two weeks ago.
I drop the unusable O’Hara stems in the trash and dump out the bucket of water.
Billie grabs the bleach spray without a word and disinfects the bucket.
I focus on the rest of the flowers and greenery for this order, quietly counting what’s left.
And then again when it’s short. And then a third time in futile hope maybe another dozen roses that can be reflexed have shown up in the last three minutes.
I tip my head back, breathing carefully in through my nose, trying to keep from completely dissolving into tears.
My scent pulses out from me, breaking through the low-grade lotion I’ve taken to using in the shop when Billie is here, too.
I’ve never appreciated working with a Beta as much as the last week.
I don’t have to constantly worry about my lotion failing, and I’ve been able to tuck away the heavyweight options for when I’m out and about rather than working in relative seclusion.
“Do you have the business card on you?” Billie’s voice is softer now. “I can drive over to that wholesaler on the other side of town and pick up whatever they have available. It might not be the exact white rose, but they’ll have something that will work.”
“Yeah,” I mutter. I brush the tears away from under my lashes and blow out a breath. “Yeah, let me grab both of them. You’ll want to double check that they’re good for reflexing. Not all roses are good for that.”
The cards are tucked in my wallet. I cross the back room and pull my purse from where it’s stashed beside Billie’s and pull the entire wallet out from it, handing it to Billie without bothering to pull the two specific cards.
“I’ll send a text when I’m on my way back.
Work on the bridesmaid bouquets in the meantime since those roses are fine,” she says as she drapes her own bag on her shoulder, my pink and glittery wallet disappearing into its depths.
She pulls her phone off the work table and taps on it, her brows furrowing for a moment.
The music from the small speaker cuts off.
“Rhett should be by soon with lunch. He offered to grab it, and I gave him a couple different options so you didn’t get overwhelmed with too many decisions. ”
Relief rushes through me at her thoughtfulness, and I can’t help but give her a grateful smile.
And then my stomach flips, and my scent strengthens, betraying the need I’ve kept thinly veiled in the time since Halloween.
I’ve done everything in my power to avoid the hockey team.
I can’t be trusted around Rhett right now, especially given just how angry Dad will be when he finds out I’m interested in one of them.
Being a one-time fling for the team’s playboy is the last thing I really want, no matter what my Omega urges encourage otherwise.
It hasn’t stopped my body from rebelling and being the neediest it’s ever been, though.
Billie frowns but doesn’t comment, tucking her phone in her bag and grabbing her keys. “You want me to grab anything else while I’m out?”
I shake my head, not trusting my voice.
“We’re still going to the game tonight, right?” she asks. “We have enough time in the morning to finish the centerpieces if we can get the bouquets squared away tonight.”
I pull the buckets from the cooler full of the bouquet flowers Billie had helped me prep yesterday. “Yeah, absolutely. Dad made sure we have tickets rink side in case you’d rather be there instead of the suite.”
Billie loves being right up against the glass, preferably in the corners where the guys get checked against the boards the most. She’s surprisingly loud given how quiet she is in daily interactions. Loud and violent. She loves the restrained violence of the Scorpions’s aggressive fore check.
Billie tilts her head and then shrugs. “We’ll see how we’re both feeling when we get there. Not sure either of us are going to be interested in being crammed in like sardines with fans.”
Relief flashes through me like a sheet of lightning, and I know Billie sees it. She gives a softer smile and then squeezes my hand.
“I’ll be back in a few hours, and we’ll make sure this order gets delivered on time.”
Once she disappears out the back, the heavy steel door closing heavily behind her, I carefully reapply my lotion and turn on the purifier I purchased after I’d nearly given a hockey player my virginity in a club two weeks ago.
I’m entirely uninterested in drowning in the orchid perfume for longer than necessary right now.
Then I settle into the work of building the four bridesmaid bouquets, carefully arranging them and letting my mind quiet with the flow of the work.