7. Mary
Mary
Two days later, I woke up with my face pressed into a man’s wet chest and the disturbing thought that the wetness was my drool.
This wasn’t how I liked to begin mornings. I preferred my regret to begin with a discussion over a coffee.
The room was dim, with curtains drawn against the rain that ticked softly at the window, or maybe it was sleet. The light of the hotel lamp by the bed was low, and a tray sat on the desk with a covered plate, next to it was a jug of water, a bowl of fruit, and a tiny vase holding three white roses.
I blinked slowly and tried to identify my surroundings without moving.
The chest beneath my cheek belonged to Lincoln.
I knew that before I opened my eyes properly.
He smelled warmer than Hudson. Whiskey first, then blackberry, with rain turned soft under his skin.
The silver in his beard scratched lightly against the top of my head where he had tucked his chin over me, one heavy arm curved around my waist like a safety rail.
Behind me, Hudson’s hand rested low on my stomach.
Not possessive. Not pushing. Just there, broad and warm over the place where the cramps of my heat had spent two days trying to turn me inside out. Not that I remember much in my haze.
Hudson’s breath moved evenly against the back of my neck. His clean rain scent wrapped around me, and then the blackberry in his scent slipped through whenever I shifted.
My own scent had changed again. The frantic edge had faded, and the violet no longer crashed through the room like it had something to prove.
It lingered now, softer under the blackberry and rain, threaded with their scents.
Did that mean something? I remember the smell of violet, and the way it got stronger as my heat progressed.
My heat was subsiding, and so was the violet. Is that what happens to true scent matched alphas and omegas? I sniffed Lincoln lightly, checking for the smell. It was there but much lighter.
They are not scent matches, Mary. Your common sense has yet to reappear.
I lay very still and took inventory.
One sore throat from begging, being sassy and—did they both try to put their cocks down my throat at the same time?
No! You’re delirious.
One body tender in places I’d known would be tender and several places I’d never previously considered a dick to go. I rubbed the place between my tits.
Two alphas in bed with me. Did I have no dignity?
No, my dignity was probably hiding under the bed with one of my dildos.
I remembered bringing them over in a pouch under my arm. I remembered declaring I might wear out the alphas. I remembered Lincoln laughing so hard he had pressed his forehead against the doorframe, and Hudson taking the pouch from me with the utmost courtesy of a man accepting the challenge.
Then I remembered everything else. Or at least, some of it. I remembered them talking about breeding me.
Bloody alphas get so obsessed when an omega is in heat. Though, if they wanted me forever, maybe I could give them that.
My face heated. Unfortunately, so did the rest of me.
Lincoln’s arm tightened. “Don’t start without us.”
His voice was rough with sleep.
I lifted my head just enough to glare at him. “I was blushing, not initiating proceedings.”
His eyes opened. Gray. Lincoln’s eyes were gray, darker around the rim and soft in the lamplight. That seemed unfair. Men with a body and a smile like his didn’t also need eyes that looked like weather over stone.
“And you do blush so prettily,” he said.
I shook my head. “My head is telling me the heat is over, but my body hasn’t got the message.”
“That’s why your pupils are still blown and your slick is coating my leg. You want more of us.”
I froze.
His mouth curved.
I probably did.
Hudson’s hand moved up to my face. “Good morning, beautiful.”
I turned my head as much as I could. I smiled at him, his hair was mussed, jaw shadowed because days of heat had defeated even his clean-shaven discipline.
Silver marked his temples in the low light.
His green eyes settled on my face with an attention that made lying feel not only difficult but rude.
“Is it?” I asked, because if my heat was over, so were we. And I wasn’t sure I was ready for that.
“Yes.”
“Bold claim.”
“Your fever’s down.”
“Ah. And now you can throw me out.”
“Is that what you want?” Lincoln asked.
“How long are you in Boston?” I replied as I turned back to him.
Lincoln rubbed his thumb over my hip. “We have some business for a couple of days, and then we can come to New York.”
I closed my eyes. “New York.” Damn. I forgot I told that little white lie. Oh, and the age one too.
“Yeah, we can extend our trip and meet you there.”
“Lincoln,” Hudson said. “You’re being too forward.”
For a few breaths, nobody moved.
The sex had been easier than this, in a way.
Not emotionally easy, because nothing about being knotted by an alpha while another held you and told you to breathe could be considered casual unless one had suffered a head injury.
But the heat had given everything a meaning.
When the pain came, they answered. When my need rose, they met it.
My body demanded them, and theirs had been there, careful yet obscene in turns.
This was different.
Now I was being held by two men who had gone on touching me after I stopped being in a crisis. Two men who thought I was twenty-three years old, who was in Boston on business. Not a student and two years younger.
“How old are you?” I asked. Maybe they were younger than I thought.
Hudson’s brows lifted.
Lincoln laughed once, low in his chest. “There’s a romantic question.”
“I like to gather information. My sister will want to know all the details.”
Hudson shifted onto one elbow. The movement drew the sheet lower over his waist, which was unnecessary and damaging to my recovery. “Thirty-nine,” he said.
I looked at him.
Then at Lincoln.
“Forty,” Lincoln said.
“Fuck me.”
“We did,” Lincoln said. “Many times.”
“Don’t be smug. You’re old.”
Hudson’s expression remained calm, but his eyes warmed. “We’re not old.”
“You’re forty.”
“I’m forty,” Lincoln said. “He’s thirty-nine. Apparently that matters to him.”
“It matters because it’s true,” Hudson said.
“You have silver in your beard,” I told Lincoln.
He stroked his beard as if considering the legal strength of my argument. “You didn’t object to it yesterday when it was tickling your clit.”
In fact, I’d loved that beard tickling my thighs while his mouth was between them. Thinking back, I was sure I said something regrettable about sainthood. “I was medically compromised.”
Hudson’s thumb moved once over my stomach, a soothing stroke that made my thoughts trip. “You said you liked the silver. You also said you wanted us to put a baby in you.”
“No way.” My eyes widened. “I was delirious.”
“You were very articulate for an omega declaring delirium,” Lincoln said.
“Do you hear this?” I asked Hudson. “This is what happens when men reach an advanced age. They become impossible.”
“Advanced age,” Hudson repeated.
“Practically historical.”
“You’re twenty-three,” he said. “From where we’re standing, that’s young. But age wasn’t why you were here. Your heat was.”
Everything in me locked up before I could stop it. The lie was sitting between us now, and less funny in the daylight.
Lincoln’s arm loosened, not letting me go, just giving me space to choose it.
“Mary?” Lincoln said.
I swallowed.
I could have made another joke. I was excellent at that. Give me a collapsing life and three seconds’ notice, and I could produce a line sharp enough to distract from the damage.
But Hudson’s hand was on my stomach, Lincoln’s chest was warm beneath my cheek, and my body had stopped screaming long enough for my conscience to become audible.
“I’m not twenty-three.” There was no point in lying anymore.
Lincoln didn’t move.
Hudson’s face changed, but only by degrees. His eyes sharpened first. Then his mouth softened, which was worse.
“How old are you?” he asked.
I stared at the sheet. White cotton. With a ridiculous thread count.
“Twenty-one,” I said. “Barely.”
The room went quiet before Lincoln exhaled slowly through his nose. “You told the bartender you were twenty-three.”
“Yes.”
“You showed him your ID?”
My face burned. “It says twenty-three.”
Hudson sat up fully.
I hated that his warmth disappeared, and with it went the fragile little illusion that I could confess things while still being tucked safely between them.
“It’s fake?” he asked.
“It’s convincing. I’ve been using it since I was twenty.”
“Mary.” Lincoln’s hand stayed on my hip. “Are you twenty-one? Are you even legally old enough to drink?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” Hudson looked at me.
“I am,” I said. “I really am twenty-one. I said barely because I only turned twenty-one a few months ago, not because I’m currently smuggling myself into adulthood under cover of darkness.”
Some of the tension left Lincoln’s shoulders.
Not enough.
Lincoln shifted so he could see my face properly. “Mary. Look at me for a minute.”
I looked.
“The number isn’t the thing,” he said. “You knocked on two alphas door in pre-heat and we gave you what you needed. But I need to know if you’d have knocked with a clear head.”
“That’s an unfair question. Nobody has a clear head in pre-heat.”
“I’m asking for it anyway.”
I thought about the coin. About balancing it on my thumb, rigging the terms, and being disappointed when sanity took the first round. “I flipped a coin,” I said.
Lincoln shut his eyes.
“It came up tails.”
Hudson asked, “And heads was what?”
“The heat clinic. But…” I paused for a moment. If it had come up heads, I’d have flipped it again.” I made myself say the rest. “I’d have kept flipping until it told me what I wanted.”
Hudson let out a slow breath above me. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For telling us the truth twice inside five minutes,” he said. “You’re improving.”
Hudson rubbed a hand over his face. “Why lie about your age?”
“Because twenty-three sounded better, and I got used to using false ID.” I looked away and decided not to tell him that was all I had because everything about me, my name, my age, was a lie.
“And New York?” Hudson asked.
That was a stupid little lie. Another layer of the person I’d pretended to be, because the real me didn’t live in Boston. “Also a lie.”
Hudson’s gaze held mine. “You don’t work there.”
“No.”
“You aren’t in Boston on business.”
“No.”
“Then why are you here?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Because the answer wasn’t neat. Not just that I was a student but that I was here because my father had pushed me, and Boston had looked far enough away to breathe in.
Because I’d made myself into Marli and let Mary be a name on a passport.
Because my boyfriend had looked at me like I was clever and enough, right up until he didn’t.
Because I’d been lonely, and I had wanted to be chosen.
The words crowded my throat, too many and too honest.
“I’m...” I began.
A phone rang. It went through the room sharp and sudden, and it wasn’t mine. The phone vibrated across the bedside table beside the water bottles and the room-service receipt, lit faceup with a name I couldn’t read from where I lay.
Hudson looked at it. Lincoln looked at Hudson as he reached for the phone.