Chapter 4
Chapter four
Sharma
The shutter slat digs a vertical line into my forehead.
I lean harder against it, letting the wood grain bite, using the sting to eclipse the throb between my thighs and the smell of him still slick on my skin.
Salt. Smoke. The wrongness of my surrender.
Outside, the ocean turns beaten copper. Wave after wave catches the dying light and swallows it, greedy, mindless.
My arms cross tighter. Fingers dig into my own biceps until the muscle whines.
The pressure is the only embrace I'm receiving tonight.
One breath. Two. The third snags on the memory of his lips at my throat.
Thank God he didn't bite. That he left me that choice, despite the knot locking us tight, and the rawness of his voice in my ear—feral, broken, claiming—
No.
My nails cut crescents into my skin. I should have brought a backup vial from the safe in my apartment.
Should have carried it in my purse. Why didn't I?
I'm smarter than this. More organized, always prepared.
Could it be that I wished for it? Had the suppressants already failed every time I caught even a whisper of his scent when I visited Viv?
Shit, was that why I held on so long to a foolish nickname that was never said without a teasing laugh?
All because I was confused about being what I am.
What I've always been destined to be—his.
The shell path crunches. Roan. His gait is unmistakable even from behind—confidence measured in decibels, each step the rhythm of a man who has spent a lifetime collecting yeses like frequent-flyer miles.
No hesitation. No variance. My spine straightens.
My gut reacts like Pavlov's dog. Rolling over, whimpering… Begging.
The linen shift-dress I threw on sticks to the sweat coating my back. I should have showered. Should have scrubbed every trace of his sweat from my skin. Should have run while my legs still obeyed me.
"Don't," I say to the glass when he enters. I don't dare turn around and see the same ridiculous smile he left with.
"Don't what?" His voice fills the room, low and controlled, but underneath it runs a current I now know too well—feral, the thing he leashes behind his teeth because civilized men keep their monsters on choke chains.
"Don't say whatever you came here to say." Behind me, his image grows larger. Broad shoulders block the last of the daylight. He doesn't touch me. Yet. The space between us compresses with the residue of what we did.
"It was a mistake," I say. My voice, sanded raw by screams I didn't know I owned until two hours ago. "What happened. It shouldn't have. And it changes nothing."
The reflection freezes. Then sharpens into focus, coiled.
Roan pivots me with one hand at my elbow.
Not rough. Certain. His jaw works, a tight slide of bone beneath tanned skin.
Those eyes—the ones that usually spark with amusement and worse ideas—now storm, dark, unmade.
The blue-green has shifted, the pupils blown wide and swallowing the color until only a thin ring remains, locked on my mouth like he's measuring the distance he could close in one move. His hair is damp from his shower.
"Explain." One word. Dropped like a brick through glass.
I wrench my arm free. No.
He crowds closer, heat pouring off him in waves that press against my skin before his body does.
I feel the pull low in my stomach, the same traitorous hunger that had me arching under him earlier, chasing the stretch of his cock and the weight of his chest pinning mine.
My fingers twitch at my sides, remembering the hard plane of his torso under my fingers, the way the muscles there had flexed when he drove deeper.
"Explain," he repeats, advancing one step. The floorboard beneath his right foot creaks, a dry splintering warning. "Why do you think that? How could you think that? After?"
My chin lifts. My nostrils flare. The heat in my chest migrates upward, threatening my composure. "Succumbing to biological urges doesn't equal a bond. It was physical. A reaction." I swallow. "My suppressants are fading. That's all this is. Was."
He leans in, palms slamming down on either side of my hips. The glass shudders in its frame. Not touching me. Caging me. His scent wraps tighter, and the urge to lean forward, to press my breasts against the solid wall of his chest, crawls up my spine like a live wire. I hold still.
"Your suppressants failed because we belong together."
His words are ragged, broken at the edges without his usual finesse. Unguarded. He steps closer, and his scent envelops me—smoke and salt and something darker, alpha, and right. My backbone straightens until the vertebrae threaten to separate.
"Chemistry isn't destiny," I say. Each word clips itself short, audited, filed. I enunciate like I'm presenting to a hostile board. "It's a trick of receptors and hormones. A misfire. A bad batch of biology. It happens sometimes, you know?"
"Bullshit." He crowds me, growling. "You think I don't know my own body? My own instinct?" His eyes narrow, focus sharpening to a needlepoint that scrapes my nerve endings bare. "You're mine, Sharma. You've been mine since before you presented. Since before I knew what the word meant."
The urge to duck under his arm bolts through my thighs, electric, traitorous. I suppress it. Plant my feet wider. "You don't own me."
"I will." His voice drops, grating, sure. "That's not a threat. It's… It just is what it is. We didn't choose it, and we don't get to change it either."
"There is no bond." I shove his chest. Muscle gives beneath my hands, hot, resilient, familiar in a way that nauseates me.
He doesn't budge. His nostrils flare. Stillness settles over him—the terrible calm before glass shatters.
He studies my face with an intensity that should belong in a hostile takeover, dissecting leverage points, hunting for the line where resistance cracks.
"What are you so afraid of?" he asks.
The low-dose question nearly undoes me. He leans in, close enough that his exhale gusts against my mouth. I want to bite his lower lip until it bleeds. I also want to bolt past him and swim until my legs give out. Swim until this terrible, insatiable hunger is left behind on a distant shore.
"Why won't you accept it?" he demands. "It's blatantly obvious. To both of us."
I pull in a breath. It shudders. The memories slip through then, silent and seismic, nights I buried under textbooks and distance.
I am sixteen again, presenting as an omega at school, hiding in Vivian's upstairs bedroom while I cry into her pillow so no one will hear.
My voice drops. "Do you know how many nights I went home broken? "
Roan goes rigid. The storm in his eyes banks.
Suspended as his eyes zero in on me. "Not from school," I continue.
The words measure themselves out, each one a brick laid in a wall I thought I'd finished years ago.
"From you. Your teasing. Your careless, arrogant cruelty—" My throat locks.
I swallow around a sharpness that hasn't moved in a decade.
"You made me feel insufficient. Invisible.
Beneath your notice. I was a teen, Roan.
A child trying to find my way in a body that wouldn't stop growing, and you made me hate every curve. "
His jaw tightens until the bone threatens to snap. A vein throbs at his temple. His hands flatten against the window ledge, fingers spreading wide, tendons standing rigid beneath the skin. "I didn't mean to hurt you," he says, softly. "I was stupid and immature. I had no idea—I didn't know—"
"You didn't know it was wrong? Or you didn't know I was your mate?
Neither one changes anything." I push off the ledge, forcing him back a step.
My hands shake. I hide them at my sides, fingers curling into tight fists.
"You don't get to erase sixteen years of humiliation because my scent finally caught up to you.
Trust isn't a switch you flip with a good knot and an apology you haven't even given yet. "
"I didn't know," he repeats, quieter. The stillness around him fractures. He lifts one hand, reaching, palm up, a gesture too close to pleading for an alpha of his stature. "Sharma, if I had known—if I'd understood what I was doing—"
I step back. My heel hits the chair leg.
"I can't trust you. And I never will. You want to know what I'm afraid of?
" My voice rises, cracks, steels itself again.
"I'm afraid of becoming the girl who cried in her bathroom because a Vaughn boy looked through her like she was glass.
I'm afraid that version of me is still in here, waiting for you to find her and finish the job. "
The confession hangs in the air, ugly and bare.
His face shifts, stricken. For a heartbeat, the arrogant marketing veneer peels away entirely, and underneath stands a man who watched his father die of grief, who made a sacred pact against ever becoming weak, and who is now staring at the wreckage of that pact in the form of a woman he broke before he ever touched.
The impulse to comfort him rises in my gut, bitter as swallowed seawater.
I almost reach out. My fingers uncurl. Then I fist them again.
"I hope so."
My brows furrow. "Hope?"
"I hope I can find that girl. Because all I want to do is make her feel better.
My alpha is dying inside, fucking dying that I can't heal my mate.
All I want to do is take care of you. You want an apology.
Here it is. I'm so fucking sorry. I would get down on my knees and fucking beg if it would make a difference.
Because you are my everything. I know that's because your aroma is my biggest weakness.
But it is more than that. It's who you've become despite the damage.
That girl who lets her inner strength triumph over her inner demons.
I want that girl with everything in me. If you'll let me have her… unconditionally."
"I can't…"
"What about the sex?" The question lashes out, desperate, cutting. "The way we burned through that mattress? The way you screamed my name when I hit that spot inside you? That's us. That's connection."
I shake my head. "Great sex is just great sex, Roan. Endorphins. Friction. Technique." My voice trembles on the last word. I hate it.
"Maybe." He crowds me again, not touching, but close enough that the heat of him radiates against my bare arms. "But it's still real. You can't fake that. You can't engineer that in a lab."
I drag my fingers through my hair, pulling hard enough to sting my scalp.
"Here's my offer. We can be bedmates for this trip.
Temporary. Physical. No more knots. No marks.
No public displays. When we step on the plane to go back, it ends.
We return to work, and you stay on your side of the building.
That's the best I can offer. That's the only thing on the table. "
Roan's head snaps back like I've struck him. For a long moment, neither of us moves. His chest heaves, controlled, measured, but his eyes—they go wild. "You want to reduce this to a vacation fuck?"
"I want to survive you without letting you destroy what's left of my heart." The admission slips out. I clamp my mouth shut, but it's too late.
The fan above clicks. The waves outside drag at the shore, relentless, indifferent.
Then he steps into me. Not touching. Invading.
His voice drops to a register that resonates in my pelvic floor, dark and absolute.
"I won't be your bed-buddy, Sharma." My name grates out, claimed, furious.
"I will find a way to change your mind. I will own you. Body and soul."
I hold his gaze. My heart races, but my spine doesn't bend.
"Maybe," I say. The finality settles over me, heavy as wet sand. "But only my body. My soul will remain mine. You altered my path once, permanently, when I was too young to defend it. I won't give you the chance to do it again."
"That's the thing about chances in life, Sharma. Nobody ever gives you one. You have to take them." The door doesn't slam when he leaves. It closes with a soft stillness that is even more unsettling.
After he's gone, I look at the table. I didn't even notice that he'd brought me food.
A tray piled high with enough to feed me for a week.
That's what alphas do, my traitorous mind whispers.
They take care of their omegas. I drop to my knees.
My legs are heavy with the realization that I don't want his food. I just want him.
I don't make it back to the bed. I pull the sheets down, wrap the comforter that still carries his scent around me, and cry in my nest.