Chapter 1
In true Manic Monday form,Alice Walton”s morning bus is late. Again.
She stands in her tennis shoes, one hand drafting an email on her phone, the other stuffed in her coat digging around for her bus pass. She knows she should keep it in her wallet so it doesn’t get lost in the abyss that is her winter jacket’s pockets, but she can only expect so much of her organization. She finds the pass as the bus pulls up—seven minutes late, mind you—stowed between three receipts, a tube of lip balm, and a hair tie. She fist-bumps the bus driver on the way in.
When she’s finally squeezed into her seat beside the grumpy morning commuters, she sends off two emails and chimes in on the marketing team’s group chat about a new investor report. Then there’s the onslaught of texts from her mother.
Mom
I didn’t mean to upset you.
I just meant that it might be good for you to spend the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas at home. Why have a flexible job if you never take advantage of it?
We just miss you, sweetheart!
Alice diligently tries not to let her eyes roll into her skull at that last one. She doesn’t doubt that her family misses her, but she’s under no guise that this is the only reason they want her to spend an extended period of time in her hometown.
Mom
And who knows what could happen? Lots of eligible Alphas here to help you through your first heat.
Ah, bingo. She doesn’t even pretend like she’s not trying to set Alice up with anywhere from one to three Alphas to mate with. Her mother has made her beliefs known regarding her youngest daughter’s abysmal relationship status.
Alice
There are Alphas in Boston, too.
Not that Alice seeks them out. Ever.
Alice
Too busy to come home right now. Plus, I’m not going into heat anytime soon.
The last part is more of a manifestation than a truth.
Winter is only getting colder, but Alice feels constantly that she can’t cool down. Every symptom is getting worse, the itchiness in her skin, the need . . . It’s all a constant reminder of the inevitable.
She hates it.
Alice
I’ll be home for a few days for Christmas, though!
While she waits to see if her assurances will be enough to dissuade her mom from pushing further on the subject, Alice jots out a response to her team’s Slack message, but of course, her mom is just getting started:
Mom
You just have so many wonderful qualities.
Any Alpha would be so lucky to have you, they’d be fighting to court you if you gave them half the chance.
Alice Walton
And what’s my best quality, my empty womb?
As soon as Alice hits send on the message, she realizes that in switching back and forth between messengers, she’s accidentally sent that to the work marketing chat.
“Shit shit shit,” Alice quickly tries to unsend the message, but Scott sends a baby emoji and she knows the damage is already done. She deletes it anyway after smacking her palm against her forehead five times, much to the concern of the stranger squished in the seat next to hers.
Alice Walton
Please disregard if you saw my previous message.
The bus’ robotic voice intones the name of Alice’s stop just as her phone lights up with an incoming call from her mother that she promptly declines. Three more texts from her mom fill the screen as she descends from the bus onto the sidewalk, all of which are about her daughter’s heat, and how using the suppressants and deodorizers after age twenty-five is not only bad for her health, but a ticking time bomb that will lead to Alice going into heat in public where she’s not safe.
She’s heard this all before, even as recently as last month from her Omega doctor when she was getting her prescriptions refilled. The doctor was not discreet in handing Alice brochures to five different heat clinics in the city. They’ve been sitting crumpled in the bottom of Alice’s purse ever since.
Alice would love to tell her mom that this is reasonably none of her business and that she has enough grandbabies already with how many Alice’s older siblings have created, but she sighs and types something softer out instead.
Alice
Headed into work. Love you, Mom. Tell dads I love them too.
Her mom means well, her whole family does. She recognizes that they all just want Alice to be happy. Her parents have been sickly, head-over-heels in love for almost four decades now. When all of their kids had been designated as Alphas or Omegas, they were thrilled that their children could experience the deep commitment, love, and comfort of a pack.
Her older siblings all got the memo. The two Omegas paired off before their twenty-second birthdays, the two Alphas a little later, now mated to 1-3 someones, and love to point out how woefully behind Alice is. It would be easier if she”d been designated as an Alpha. For an Alpha, twenty-six is a totally reasonable age to not still have a pack or an Omega. Nobody would bat an eye.
As the building elevator glides towards her floor, Alice repeats in her mind that her family means well—they really do, they are nice and kind and they do mean well—until she’s mostly calm enough to face her coworkers.
Alice can’t talk to any of her work friends about this since not a single one of them knows she’s an Omega. Of the whole company, there’s one happily mated Alpha on the executive team and two Omegas on the third floor who work in customer relations, but Alice keeps her distance from all of them.
Labyrinth Solutions is composed almost exclusively of Betas and she works hard to appear as one of them. Her mom would cry if she knew she’d been hiding her true self, but it”s easier this way. That revelation would only bring more paperwork and gentle, knowing expressions than Alice cares to deal with.
That’s the thing about being an Omega; it’s novel, and everyone looks at you like you might go into heat at any moment. It would be mortifying enough to know that, by knowing she was an Omega, Mark from accounting would also be hyper-aware of her biology and would probably believe that she wants to have absolutely feral, ungodly sex with Alphas to create a minimum of 4.5 babies.
Horrifying.
On the list of attributes she wants her colleagues to know about her, sexual needs is not one of them.
Alice makes a pit stop in the bathroom to change into a shirt that she hasn’t already sweated through and forces herself to face her reflection instead of avoiding it like the plague. Her concealer covers the smudges of gray under her eyes well enough and the flush on her cheeks could reasonably be from the cold.
Her neck is only going to keep getting hotter as the day goes on, though, so she pulls her frizzy red hair into a twist and clips it into place. She frees a few strands to frame her face in a way that she hopes looks intentionally messy instead of messy messy. Surveying herself in the mirror one last time, she nods. Despite how she feels, she looks fine, maybe even put together.
Healthy.
It will pass. The suppressants and her vibrator will hold out and she will be back to her average sweaty self in no time at all. These bouts are getting longer and more frequent, but they can’t last forever. This is what she tells herself at least.
Alice psychs herself up a moment longer before pushing away from the counter, pulling her shoulders back, and heading into the office.
Alice has already eaten a granola bar and plans to skip lunch in favor of staying at her desk and downing two more when Lily, her closest friend and the senior graphic designer on her team, stops by her desk looking like she’s going to explode with a secret.
“What happened?” Alice asks, her voice low.
“He’s here,” Lily says, as if Alice should know who she means. After a few more seconds of no reaction, Lily elaborates, “Caleb Everett.”
Alice can’t help but grimace at this news.
“Did you forget?”
“I tried to block out the idea of him coming to the office for as long as possible, so yes.”
Lily laughs too loud at this, but nobody bats an eye as a tenant of Lily’s personality is that she is always laughing too loud at things. Alice adores this about her. Lily is endearing and impossible to dislike, unlike Caleb fucking Everett, the bane of Alice’s existence since he started at the company three months ago.
“Why couldn’t he stay in Kansas?” Alice groans.
“Ohio.”
“Same thing, basically. Middle America.” Alice looks around, aware that she’d been so focused for hours that she hadn’t noticed the general buzz of everyone. Someone new, the sweetheart of the Quality Assurance and Compliance Department.
Caleb’s been working in his position for the last three months from Kansas—Ohio, whatever—until he could relocate closer to the Boston office. Everyone’s excitement about him joining in person is undue. At least in Alice’s opinion.
“They put him in the empty desk next to Scott,” Lily reports. Alice scrunches her nose but can’t help the way her head immediately turns in that direction. The desk is vacant, but she does see a new monitor on the tabletop next to one of the company water bottles. “I’m sure Logan will bring him by on his parade of introductions.”
“I hope not,” Alice grumbles, but when you speak of the Devil, he will appear, and sure enough, their boss rounds the corner with a tall, brown-haired man behind him. Alice recognizes him straight away from his email and LinkedIn photo; strong jaw, smooth hair, and teeth so nice they would scare a Victorian child. He’s taller than she thought, only because she’d let herself imagine he was a small, frail man with a big ego.
And, wait. Is Caleb Everett. . . hot?
Alice squints at Caleb trying to find ways in which he’s not aesthetically the ideal specimen of a man, only to look decidedly away when his eyes latch onto hers.
“Ah! There they are.” Logan snaps his fingers—the man is always snapping, he’s obsessed with snapping, it has to be his favorite thing. “Here, we have our illustrious Alice, and brilliant Lily.”
“I wanted to be the brilliant one,” Alice murmurs, and Lily’s elbow thuds into her arm.
“So good to meet you in person,” Lily shakes Caleb’s hand like she’s priming a pump. “Glad you finally came to your senses and moved to the city.”
“I imagine it wasn’t easy leaving all of those corn fields,” Alice says. The full weight of Caleb’s stare returns to her and Alice’s breath hitches at the force of his undivided attention. She notes that his eyes are darker brown than fresh coffee, and also that her hands are now damp.
“Pumpkins,” he corrects while offering his palm. Did his nostrils just flare? They did, Alice is certain. “My family grows pumpkins.”
She recognizes his voice from months of Zoom calls but it’s richer in person, solid. Alice wipes her palm on her pants as innocuously as she can manage with him staring at her all angry-bull-like, then brings her hand to meet his, only because everyone’s watching and it would be rude not to. As soon as her skin touches his, though, she recognizes something about him. It’s a primal recognition, one that makes her hair stand on end and neck flush.
He’s an Alpha.
His hand lingers a moment too long as his own expression shows him trying to piece together what she is. He shouldn’t be able to scent her, at least not with all of the scent blockers and deodorizers she’s on.
Ideally, he will conclude she’s a Beta with a suspicious biological pull toward him. Running into an Alpha in the workplace, rare as it may be, is exactly why she goes through the pain of hiding she”s an Omega in the first place.
“A family of pumpkin farmers? Are you kidding? I love pumpkins!” Lily says. It breaks the moment between them and Alice pulls her hand away before letting it drop lifelessly at her side. Her skin tingles where it touched his.
“Definitely my favorite gourd,” Alice looks away from Caleb’s probing gaze. Anywhere else.
“Where’s Grant?” Lily asks. “You didn’t travel together?”
“We did,” Caleb clears his throat.
“Grant got dragged into a training with legal,” Logan chimes in. “Everyone wants a piece of the new guys.”
Alice had almost forgotten about Grant moving to the office as well. The Thing 2 to Caleb’s Thing 1. When Caleb was hired to manage the QA department, he was a package deal with the much friendlier legal and compliance expert Grant Jones.
They came from the same company and have added a load of value, both individually and together, since starting. If only Caleb could be as perfectly pleasant as his counterpart.
Lily has speculated that the two are boyfriends, but Alice isn’t so sure about that idea. For one thing, Grant is nice and cool, and Caleb fucking sucks.
“How’s that onboarding slide deck coming?” Logan asks Alice with his eyebrows waggling.
Alice shrugs. “Oh, you know. . . tedious. But just fine.”
She deserves honor and accolades for not violently rolling her eyes when Logan pretends to look sympathetic—as if the slide deck wasn’t one of his tasks he’d pawned off to her after procrastinating it for five weeks.
“Glad to hear it,” Logan snaps his fingers again and grins, but Caleb doesn’t. He’s too busy looking at Alice like he knows her, or at least knows something about her. “We’ll let you get back to it then.”
Caleb doesn’t say goodbye when they walk away, but the look he gives simmers on Alice’s skin. With all the deodorizers and scent blockers she wears, there’s no way he can tell she’s an Omega. Still, he’s noticed her. There’s no avoiding him like she could if he was in another department; they collaborate weekly, if not daily.
Shit.