Chapter 3
Lily sitson the edge of Alice”s desk just before lunch, so close that Alice must scoot away from her computer to see her friend”s face.
Alice sniffs the air. There’s something like the scent of a Christmas candle flooding her senses. “Are you wearing a new perfume? Why do you smell so good?”
“No?” Lily ducks her nose to her shoulder and sniffs. “If anything, I smell like I just ran a 5k. I just got out of that design meeting,” Lily says, then lowers her voice. “Absolute hell.”
“I thought that was this morning?” Alice asks and squints at her clock. It’s noon.
“It was.”
Alice grimaces. “What made the meeting need to be three hours long?”
“Two words: live designing.”
Alice groans. She’s all too familiar with having to make revisions on the fly in a conference room full of stakeholders. It’s a unique kind of frustrating hell that often leaves drafts less cohesive than they started.
“Logan was being a nightmare,” Lily whispers.
“His favorite thing to be.”
“Caleb was great though, really sharp.”
This information startles Alice, who has been diligently trying to forget that he exists and is in the same building as her. No wonder she hadn’t seen him around this morning shooting her probing glances as he walked by or sending unapproachable Slack messages from his desk.
“Was he a jerk? Like, did he say anything rude?”
“I’ve literally never seen him be rude.” Lily pulls open Alice’s drawer and snags a bag of fruit snacks. “I still think you’re seeing things, but who knows, maybe he saves it all for you.”
The office is big, but not big enough that Caleb and Grant don’t choose that time to walk by, each offering their polite hellos as they do.
Lily pushes off the desk. “Why are they both way hotter in person?”
Alice doesn’t dignify that question with an answer. To herself, she had noticed that indeed they were both hotter than she expected. They’re the hottest-men-she’s-ever-seen-in-real-life kind of hot. This attraction is probably born from the fact that one or both of them are Alphas and not from true personal preference. She’s not really attracted to either of them, she just thinks she is. It’s not real. It’s her biology tricking her into believing otherwise.
Lily walks back to her desk, leaving the lingering scent of the perfume or body lotion that Alice is determined to get from her later. She is about to dive back in on her project when a sea of email pings go off on the floor at once, not unlike an Amber Alert, but this one notifies that there are free sandwiches in the building lobby for their enjoyment.
Alice would guess that it’s a celebration of Thing 1 and Thing 2 joining the corporate office, but the email doesn’t mention that part. Logan’s favoritism is clear, but he’s not going to broadcast it after he got in trouble with HR the last time.
Based on the picture Logan’s assistant shares of the cafeteria table, it’s a shit ton of sandwiches, enough for everyone to eat two. Alice idly wonders if she’ll be able to keep a couple hidden in the fridge for her to eat tonight when she will most likely have to stay until seven again.
As soon as she steps out of the stairwell ten minutes later, Alice is assaulted with the smell of toasted bread. Her dizziness at this is just another reminder that her heat suppressants are barely holding on. The deodorizers have been less effective, too, not lasting the whole eight hours on most days. She keeps smelling her scent on the bus ride home and can only pray that there are no Alphas on board.
Before Caleb and Grant got here, it didn”t really matter if she perfumed at work because no Beta has a sense of smell strong enough to recognize it. As long as she steered clear of the Omegas on floor three, everyone would be none the wiser. Not like if she was in her hometown and every eligible Alpha in city limits would be knocking on her door trying to “protect her”. . . Please, she knows what that means.
But now there’s at least one, potentially two, Alphas on her floor to sniff around if she’s not careful. The best way to be careful would be to stay the hell away from them at all costs.
Alice pastes a smile on her face and joins the party that’s formed, decidedly not noticing Caleb and Grant immediately. If she did notice them, she’d see them laughing about something with Scott and Logan, and how all of their faces lit up with grins, making it impossible for her to get a soda from the drinks table behind them without seeing her.
Maybe she’d have Lily grab her one instead.
Alice reaches for the first two half subs she sees, one with roast beef, the other a turkey club, and makes sure to grab two of the little containers of sweet sandwich sauce for her to drench them in. She could drink this stuff, it”s so good, an honest innovation.
She’s about to make her break for the elevator to eat in peace at her desk when Logan calls out her name while, you guessed it, snapping his fingers. Logan is the single loudest man she’s ever met, so there’s no pretending she didn’t hear him.
Alice turns to the group and nods, but it’s obvious that they’re waiting for her to come over to them. She takes a massive breath before joining their testosterone circle.
“Thanks for lunch,” she says in greeting. “This is my favorite place.”
“I can see that!” Logan jokes with a pointed look at her hands overflowing with her selections. “Great work on the incentives program proposal, it feels good to have that done ahead of schedule.”
“Thanks,” Alice says, then processes what he just said. Her brows draw together. “Wait, ahead of schedule, how? It was due today.”
Logan purses his lips and looks towards the ceiling before nodding, “Right, I forgot to tell you. Turns out they don’t need it until Friday.”
In her periphery, Alice swears she sees Caleb tense up. She wants to scream at the news that Logan so conveniently forgot to tell her that the project he pawned off on her with a last-minute deadline actually wasn’t as urgent as he said it was. Instead, she lets out a breathy little laugh, one too unhinged to sound genuine. Logan lacks any remorse or empathy; he knew she was staying late to finish his project that wasn’t actually due today and he said nothing.
Alice pulls her lips into a closed-mouth smile. “Cool.”
She needs to get a grip on her frustration with her boss, and needs to keep her emotions in a steady place—make sure nothing sets her off. Logan says something to Scott and Grant, starting a conversation that effectively dismisses her.
She squeezes her free fist until her fingernails bite into her skin, distracting her barely. When she turns to finally acknowledge Caleb, he is staring at her with a startled look across his face. Not the composed, smiling, corporate dream boat he was just moments ago.
“Enjoy your sandwich,” she says.
“Alice,” Caleb says. There’s that voice again. “Are you feeling well?”
Grant turns away from Scott and Logan after overhearing the question, and his face now mirrors Caleb’s concern. She squeezes her eyes shut for a second and nods.
“I just, um—I missed breakfast. I should go eat this before I pass out or something.”
“Do you want a soda? Maybe some water?” Grant asks.
Are they always this helpful and worried? Her neck flames.
“Sparkling water, thanks. That’s nice of you.”
Grant grabs a chilled bottle from behind him, loosening the cap before handing it to her. The condensation drips over her fingers, it’s soothing on her skin which is rivaling the temperature of the very sun at this point. She takes a sip and the fizz burns down her throat.
With the sandwiches in one hand, and the cold beverage in the other, Alice offers a smile before trying to extricate herself from the men so she can be alone somewhere cool, maybe the newly snowy roof or a corner in the ice locker that is the parking garage beneath the building. This is when someone puts a hand on her back in an attempt to squeeze past Alice for a soda.
“Excuse me,” they say, but the touch still startles her. She practically jumps out of her skin, which makes her stumble. She finds herself pressed against Caleb’s chest as he steadies her.
That’s when she smells it. Caleb’s scent.
It’s what she smelled on Lily, the scent like a heater clicking on through dusty vents on Christmas morning. The pine tree in the living room with something sweet baking in the oven. It’s comforting and warm, all the way to her spine. It tickles over her brain and zips through her, and… Oh God, no, no, no.
Alice sees when Caleb smells her scent too. His pupils blow wide. A puzzle piece has slid into place; there’s a string that she wasn’t aware of that’s just pulled taught between them. It’s so right. Her heart is fluttering, tumbling, soaring at the realization while her mind is firing alarms to take it back, right now, quickly, so they can forget immediately what they’ve just learned.
She should have never come down for sandwiches, no matter how hungry she was, because now she knows something she can”t unknow.
She knows like the truth was cooked into her blood, the very materials of it making up her bones.
Caleb Everett isn’t just an Alpha. He’s her fucking scent match.