Chapter 26 #3
Because if the watcher is connected to the person targeting me—if they’re reporting back to someone who considers my happiness an offense and my new pack a provocation—then seeing me like this, pressed against an Alpha who is touching me with an intimacy that my former pack never displayed, is fuel.
Is rage. Is the kind of emotional accelerant that makes careful people careless.
The strategy is brilliant.
The strategy is also making it very difficult to maintain the analytical detachment I’d like to pretend I’m maintaining.
“It’s warm today,” he whispers.
Against my ear. The words landing on the sensitive skin below my earlobe with a warmth that has nothing to do with the October weather and everything to do with the proximity of a mouth that has learned, over the last several days, exactly where I’m sensitive and is deploying that knowledge with surgical precision.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to go out on the yacht?” he continues, his voice low, unhurried, carrying the conversational cadence of a man who is making plans while his hand is doing something that contradicts the casualness of his tone entirely. “Sail a bit. Just us on the water. No one watching.”
His fingers press.
Through the fabric. Against the warmth that has been building since his arm hooked around my waist and hasn’t stopped building since.
“Hmm?”
The sound is an invitation. A question that doesn’t need an answer and demands one anyway.
“Then at the end of the week,” he adds, his thumb tracing a path along my inner thigh that my nerve endings follow like a lit fuse, “we’ll go to that new bar that opened up. Let loose. Have fun.”
His lips brush my ear.
“Would our Omega like that?”
I am crimson.
Beyond crimson. Operating in a spectrum of red that dermatology has not yet named.
My face is burning. My neck is burning. The heat is everywhere—in my cheeks, in the skin beneath his mouth, between my thighs where his fingers are doing something that is theoretically tactical and is practically rendering my cognitive function inoperable.
His fingers taunt.
The pressure shifting. Adjusting. The deliberate, devastating micro-movements of a man who understands anatomy and is using that understanding to generate a response that serves dual purposes: making me look like a woman who is thoroughly, convincingly consumed by her Alpha’s attention, and making me actually be that woman because the line between performance and reality dissolved approximately thirty seconds ago.
A shiver runs through me.
Full-body. Visible. The kind that travels from the base of my skull to the arches of my feet and leaves every nerve ending it passes vibrating like a plucked string.
“Y-Yes,” I manage.
The stutter is genuine. Not performed. Not the strategic vocal hesitation that I sometimes deploy to make suspects feel confident.
The real, involuntary, syllable-splitting stutter of a woman whose mouth is attempting to form words while her body is processing stimulus that makes word-formation a secondary priority.
I look up.
At him.
And whatever expression I’m making—whatever combination of flushed skin and dilated pupils and parted lips and the specific, unmistakable face of a woman who is aroused and not hiding it—has an effect.
Alaric blushes.
Alaric blushes.
Alaric Venezuela. Thirty-eight. Former metropolitan detective. Man who maintains emotional composure the way other people maintain houseplants—with constant, meticulous, never-let-it-die attention. This man is blushing.
The color rises on his sharp cheekbones with the slow, involuntary warmth of a man whose body has overridden his control for the first time in this interaction.
His dark eyes darken further. His jaw tightens.
And beneath his breath—so quiet that only an Omega’s scent receptors could detect it—he curses.
Then he kisses me.
Long.
Hard.
Not the gentle, redirecting brush from the elevator.
This is the other Alaric—the one beneath the control, the one that the burnt vanilla has been hinting at for days.
His mouth meets mine with a pressure that is both claim and confession, his hand tightening between my thighs as the kiss deepens, my back arching against his chest, the book in my hand forgotten because the only text I’m reading now is the language of his mouth and it is explicit and it is eloquent and it is doing things to my nervous system that the book on page forty-three could only aspire to describe.
We’re breathless.
When we break.
Staring at each other. His forehead near mine.
My face tilted up. His hand still where it is.
The air between us charged with the specific, volatile chemistry of two people who have crossed a line and are standing on the other side of it looking back at the line and having no interest whatsoever in returning.
“Ugh, where’s that new fiction release?!”
The voice shatters the moment like a glass dropped on tile.
Both of us look over.
A girl—young, mid-twenties, Omega by the scent signature that arrives with her proximity, wearing an expression of theatrical frustration that suggests the bookshop has personally offended her—is stomping down the adjacent aisle with the purposeful, irritated energy of a customer on a mission that is not going well.
She rounds the corner.
Sees us.
Stops.
“Yo! MOVE, dude.” She directs this at Alaric with the undiluted authority of a woman who considers this section her territory and does not appreciate obstruction. “Ugh. What’s with men being in places that are clearly for us Omegas to enjoy? You’re not even read—”
“SHHH!”
The shush comes from somewhere behind the shelves—another customer, invisible but audible, delivering the librarian’s universal rebuke with the sharp, practiced precision of a person who takes bookshop acoustics seriously.
And then: rushed footsteps.
Not from the girl. Not from the invisible shusher.
From somewhere further back—the quick, retreating rhythm of shoes on hardwood, moving away from our location with the hurried, caught-in-the-act pace of someone who has been disrupted from their position and is relocating before the commotion draws more attention.
The watcher.
The girl’s arrival flushed them out. Her loud, unapologetic entrance into the aisle broke whatever sightline they were maintaining, and the shushing exchange created enough ambient attention to make continued observation risky.
They’re leaving.
The girl huffs.
“You shouldn’t let sketchy men like that in this place,” she declares to the invisible shusher, her voice carrying the self-righteous volume of a woman who considers herself the voice of reason and the shusher a collaborator with the enemy. “Yet you’re shushing me!”
She stomps past us.
Disappears around the next corner.
The aisle is empty again.
Alaric smirks.
And I have to hold myself from gasping when he presses his fingers against me—one final, deliberate, devastating press that makes my hips jolt and my breath catch and my grip on the book tighten to the point where the spine protests.
He pulls his hand away.
The withdrawal is smooth. Controlled. The same deliberate, unhurried precision with which he does everything—the investigation, the kiss, the touch, the exit.
He kisses my cheek. The contact is warm.
Brief. Carrying the afterglow of everything that preceded it and the promise of everything that hasn’t happened yet.
“We’ll finish this later, yes?” he says.
And then.
He lifts his hand.
The hand that was between my thighs.
And I watch—with my mouth open and my face on fire and my brain short-circuiting across every available synapse—as Alaric Venezuela, detective, investigator, man of refinement and control and tailored coats, brings his fingers to his lips.
And licks them clean.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
His tongue tracing his index and middle finger with the unhurried, appreciative thoroughness of a man who is tasting something he considers exceptional and wants the experience catalogued at full resolution.
His dark eyes are on mine while he does it.
I gawk.
The expression is beyond gawking. It’s the complete, structural failure of my facial composure—every muscle in my face surrendering to the input it’s been asked to process, producing an expression that I am certain has never been produced on my face before and that I hope to God was not witnessed by any other customer on this floor.
He begins walking away.
Taking my cart with him. The wire basket with its fifteen books rolling beside him as he strides toward the elevator with the unhurried, confident gait of a man who has just done what he did and considers the aftermath someone else’s problem.
He’s already reaching the elevator.
“Bring that book too,” he calls back.
His voice casual.
Warm.
As if he didn’t just ruin me in a fiction aisle and walk away licking his fingers.
I stand there.
In the aisle.
Completely red. My cheeks burning. My thighs burning. The space between them burning with the residual heat of a touch that was simultaneously tactical and devastating and that I will be thinking about for the foreseeable future.
I curse under my breath.
Try to compose myself.
The composure comes in pieces—straightening my dress, smoothing my hair, blinking until the blush recedes from critical to merely obvious, adjusting my expression from a man just fingered me in a bookshop and then licked his hand in front of me to something that could pass for normal in a public setting.
I look down at the book in my hand.
The burgundy cover. The gold foil. The woman with the three men.
Page forty-three.
I close it.
Hold it against my chest.
And walk toward the elevator with the book pressed to my body like a keepsake—which, I realize with a flush that I cannot prevent, is exactly what it’s going to be.
A keepsake.
Not because of the story inside it.
Because of the story that happened while I was holding it.