Chapter 25 Sleepless And Smitten
Sleepless And Smitten
~JULIAN~
Ican't sleep.
I've been lying here for an hour—maybe more, time has lost all meaning in this particular hell—staring at the ceiling of my guest room at Tank's house and willing unconsciousness to take me.
The house is quiet. The fire has burned down to embers in the living room. Tank's snoring rumbles faintly through the walls, a sound I've learned to tune out over years of proximity. Everything is peaceful and calm and perfectly conducive to sleep.
Except for the woman in my bed.
I have a modeling shoot in the morning. An important one—the Valentine's campaign that's going to determine whether Dolce & Gabbana renews my contract or drops me entirely.
I need to look rested. I need to look like I haven't been awake all night being slowly driven insane by an Omega who decided invading my personal space was a fun way to end the evening.
Fuck.
Rosemarie's scent is everywhere.
It fills the room like an invisible fog, wrapping around me, seeping into my sheets, invading every breath I take whether I want it to or not.
Cinnamon sugar and roasted coffee and dark vanilla and soft amber—layered and complex, a scent that tells a story if you know how to read it.
A combination that shouldn't work, that should be too sweet or too complex or too something, but instead is absolutely, devastatingly perfect.
Are Omegas supposed to smell this delicately good?
Is this normal? Or is she specifically designed by some cruel universe to torment me personally?
Because it feels personal. It feels targeted.
It feels like the cosmos looked at my entire carefully constructed existence and decided to throw a wrench directly into the center of it.
She's sleeping on her designated side of the bed—the right side, as promised, maintaining the exact boundaries I insisted upon—curled into a loose ball with my stolen silk shirt riding up to reveal a sliver of her hip.
The moonlight catches that exposed skin, turning it silver-pale, and I have to actively force myself not to stare.
Her breathing is slow and even, completely at peace, while I lie here rigid and sleepless and absolutely fucked.
The moonlight filters through Tank's basic curtains—the man could afford blackout drapes, this is a conscious choice he's made and I've complained about it multiple times—and illuminates her features in soft silver.
The curve of her cheek. The dark fan of her lashes against her skin.
The way her lips are slightly parted, soft and tempting.
The gentle rise and fall of her chest as she breathes.
She's taunting me. Simply by existing. By breathing. By smelling like everything I didn't know I wanted and had convinced myself I didn't need.
I turn away, facing the wall instead. Maybe if I can't see her, the scent will be less potent. Maybe if I put my back to her, my brain will stop cataloging every detail of her presence. Maybe I can achieve some semblance of rational thought.
It doesn't work.
If anything, it's worse. Now I can't see her, but I can still smell her, still hear every soft exhale, still feel the slight dip of the mattress where her weight rests.
My imagination fills in the blanks with far too much enthusiasm—painting pictures of what she looks like right now, what she would feel like if I reached across the distance between us, what sounds she might make if I—
Stop. Stop it. You are not going down that path.
This is a dying cause. I'm going to lie here awake until dawn, show up to my shoot looking like death warmed over, and lose the contract that's keeping my career afloat. All because one small Omega decided to invade my bedroom and my senses and apparently my entire mental capacity.
I flip onto my back again, staring at the ceiling. Tank's guest room ceiling has a water stain in one corner that looks vaguely like a bird. I've studied it extensively over the past hour. We are becoming intimate acquaintances.
Why don't I want to get close to her?
The question surfaces unbidden, and I force myself to actually consider it instead of shoving it down like I normally would. Is it really a defense mechanism, this distance I maintain? Is it genuine distrust? Or is it something worse—something I don't want to examine too closely?
Maybe I'm afraid she'll disappear. Like all the others. Like everyone who's ever gotten close enough to matter.
My former fiancée left. My family cut me off.
Every Omega who's shown interest in our pack has eventually revealed ulterior motives—money, status, the thrill of dating the "Late Alphas" as some kind of novelty experience.
They always leave once they get what they want, or once they realize we're not willing to give it.
But Rosemarie doesn't seem like the type.
The thought is surprising—both because I'm thinking it and because it feels true.
She very well could have stayed in the guest room tonight.
That would have been the sensible choice, the appropriate choice for a temporary arrangement between strangers.
Anyone else would have viewed an invitation to Tank's house as an opportunity, a chance to embed themselves deeper into our lives and our bank accounts.
Instead, she burst into my room uninvited, stole my shirt, and fell asleep within minutes of her head hitting the pillow.
Not because she was trying to seduce me or establish some kind of claim.
Just because she wanted to. Just because she found it funny to invade my space and challenge my boundaries.
She's ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. And somehow that's... endearing.
Since she arrived, she's cooked meals for us—actual meals, not the pathetic attempts at food I produced tonight.
She cleans up after herself, never expecting anyone to serve her.
She maintains her job at the bakery, waking up early for shifts despite staying up late with us, never complaining, never asking for special treatment.
She's clearly not trying to ride our coattails.
And maybe that makes me angrier, in a way. Because I can't shoo her away. I can't point to evidence of manipulation or gold-digging behavior and use it as justification for keeping her at arm's length. She's just... genuine. Frustratingly, inconveniently, impossibly genuine.
I hate that I can't find anything wrong with her. I've been looking. I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the mask to slip, for the real Rosemarie to emerge and prove that she's just like everyone else. But it hasn't happened. Two weeks, and nothing.
I dare to admit—only to myself, only in the privacy of my own sleepless mind—that I enjoyed our date at the penthouse. More than enjoyed it. It was the first time in years that I've had someone in my space who didn't make me feel like the walls were closing in.
She wandered around my apartment touching things, examining my books, commenting on my lack of personal photos. Anyone else and I would have bristled, would have felt invaded. But she did it with such casual curiosity, such genuine interest, that I found myself relaxing instead of tensing.
And then she fell asleep on my couch.
I watched her for far too long before carrying her to my bedroom.
Longer than was appropriate, certainly. Longer than I'd ever admit to Tank or Elias, who would never let me live it down.
I stood there like an idiot, hovering over my own couch in my own penthouse, watching her chest rise and fall, memorizing the way her face softened in sleep, wondering what it would feel like to have someone trust me enough to be that vulnerable in my presence.
She'd fallen asleep mid-sentence, apparently.
One moment she was commenting on the lack of photographs on my walls, and the next she was out cold, her body finally succumbing to the exhaustion she carries but never acknowledges.
She works too hard. She doesn't rest enough.
She's running on coffee and determination and sheer stubborn will.
And then I carried her to bed and tucked her in like she was something precious. Like she was mine to protect. I pulled the covers up to her chin and brushed a strand of hair from her face and stood there like a lovesick teenager, watching her breathe.
How desperately I wanted to snuggle against her.
To wrap myself around her sleeping form and hold her close.
To pretend, just for a moment, that she actually belonged to me—to us—instead of being a temporary solution to a professional problem.
To pretend that I hadn't spent years building walls specifically designed to keep people like her out.
I didn't do it. I went to my own room, slept in my own bed, maintained appropriate boundaries like the coward I am. Because that's what sensible people do. That's what people who don't want to get hurt do. That's what Julian North does—control, distance, protection.
But god, I wanted to. I still want to. Even now, lying in this bed with her three feet away, I want to close that distance so badly my chest aches with it.
I think about her previous pack—the ones who burned down her reading space, who sent bounty hunters after her like she was property that had escaped rather than a person who had chosen freedom, who treated her as a commodity instead of a human being with needs and wants and dreams of her own.
How did they fuck up so spectacularly? How did they have someone like her—someone this genuine, this warm, this real—and manage to drive her away?
It's a shame, when I really think about it.
A tragedy, even. That she spent years with people who didn't see her value, didn't appreciate what they had, didn't understand that some things—some people—are worth infinitely more than business deals and social status and whatever the fuck they thought they'd gain by forcing her into misery.
But their monumental loss could be our unexpected gain.