Chapter Six – Pheromone Party #2
She doesn’t look up, staring at her hands for a while, her whole body tense until she blurts out, “I’m not going to be a stay-at-home wife and mom like other nyras. I have a career. One I worked hard for. And I’m not open to giving that up.”
She takes a shaky breath. “I made that perfectly clear when the Matching Center first called about our match. Then again, when the meeting was rescheduled. I can’t believe they let you come here and scent me without telling you my only condition, even after I repeated it so many times.”
She finally looks up. “I know you had different expectations.”
So this is what Commander Eneas meant by unusual circumstances .
I’m so relieved I could cry. She was so nervous I thought she was about to tell us something far worse. I feel my body slowly relax.
“You think that would send us running?” Shane laughs, breaking the tension. “You wouldn’t get rid of us even if this was a real problem, which it’s not. I know nyras don’t usually work, but if you want to, why would we even care?”
"The only expectation we had was to find you. We don’t care about anything else," Jay says softly.
"And you’re the first nyra we’ve spent more than ten minutes with," Shane adds, chuckling. "We didn’t exactly have a lot of reference points to form expectations."
She narrows her eyes at him, surprised. "Are you serious?"
"Well… not totally," I admit. "My mother was a nyra. I spent a lot of time with her as a kid. She was the housewife type, and I think that’s part of why she ended up so screwed. Honestly, I’m glad you’re not like her."
She studies me, head tilted, like she’s trying to decide if she believes me. But I’m being completely honest.
Aegis-nyra bonds can’t be undone, so my mom would always be bonded to my fathers, always need them when she went into heat. But if she’d had a life outside our house, like most human women, I think she would’ve been happier.
I never thought about it before, but seeing Jo with Alice, and even with the nurse, I realize my mom could have had friends. Someone in her life besides my dads and their new mate.
Maybe she could’ve had a job that paid enough for her to get her own place, so she wouldn’t have been stuck living with my dads after her house became Lydia’s house.
Shane isn’t completely right, though. For all the years I dreamed about finding our nyra, I had built some expectations, and it never once crossed my mind that she would leave our home every day for work. That she would have a life beyond us, full of people I don’t know. Coworkers. Friends.
And even though now, after knowing Johane, I’m truly glad she would never be as vulnerable as my mother was, the thought of her being out in the world without the protection of a pack, exposed to strangers, still makes something in me coil tight, my instincts scream against it. But I shove it down. Deep.
She shifts her gaze, studying me first, then Shane, then Jay.
“I’ve heard so many times that aegis are possessive and controlling. That if I bonded with a pack, chances were I’d end up locked inside a pack house.”
Shane squints, confused. “Are your fathers like that?”
I want to know too. Aegis can be intense, yeah.
I remember how my fathers used to follow Lydia everywhere, but from my memories, they didn’t strike me as controlling, just protective.
So something must have happened to her to make her believe her aegis would lock her inside a house against her will.
But she just looks at us, eyes still wide with fear.
I look straight into her eyes, trying to make her see that I mean every word.
“We’re not perfect. I won’t pretend we are.
I know we’ll mess up. One day, somehow, we will.
But this is a promise I can make to you.
And it’s an easy one. No matter what, we will never take away your freedom.
Never lock you up. Never force you into a life you don’t want. ”
She stares into my eyes, searching. And I think she believes me, because I can see her whole body relax.
And then her scent changes. The floral perfume of lilies turns heady, spiced. The shift hits me like a truck, and I choke on nothing.
My cock is rock hard so fast I go lightheaded.
At the end of the bed, Jay — calm, unshakable Jay — looks like he’s just been hit with an electric current, his expression frozen in panic. And for the first time in my life, I see a flush creeping over Shane’s tanned skin.
And then Jo bursts into laughter, so hard she can barely breathe. The tray in her lap nearly slips, but Shane catches it before her dinner spills. The three of us remain rigid, eyes locked anywhere but on each other.
It takes a while for her to manage to stop laughing long enough to speak.
“Oh my god, the look on your faces!” She pants between breaths, wiping away tears of mirth.
“I’m sorry. I guess that’s my fault. Looks like it’s going to take a while to get used to this whole pheromone party we’ve got going on. ”
Jay clears his throat. “Pheromone party?”
“Seems like some books about aegis-nyra bonds might do you guys some good,” she says, still grinning. “It happened just now. I got… uh… very excited about the way you reacted to my career. I think the scent of my… happiness… might have hit you a little too hard.”
She doesn’t look the least bit embarrassed. Her eyes gleam with light and mischief, like she’s enjoying just how much she already has us wrapped around her fingers.
My cock is aching, the bulge in my pants impossible to miss. She looks like she’s about to start laughing again, and I need to do something before I combust. I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind to change the subject. “So, what do you do? You said you work at a hospital?”
“I’m a doctor,” she replies, her tone proud. “Just graduated from med school last year. Busted my ass to get into the residency at Joseph Monson Hospital, and it would suck to have to drop out and go through the selection process all over again somewhere else.”
She looks at me, excited. “But Joseph Monson is in Bridgeport. It’s pretty close to Great Sky, so I think it won’t be hard for us to find a place that works for everybody.”
My brain short-circuits.
Every doctor I’ve ever met was human, and I’ve met a lot of them.
I was raised among physicians, psychologists, biologists.
All human. If you aren’t human, your career options are limited.
Aegis go into the military, law enforcement, cage fighting, or private security. And nyras… Well, nyras stay home.
And this one became a doctor.
It’s so incredible and unexpected I don’t even know what to say. I have never been treated as an equal by a human doctor. They always spoke about me like I wasn’t even in the room, or worse, like I was too dumb to understand what they were saying about my own body.
And now, in front of me, is someone of my species who has reached the same position as them.
“How… how did you become a doctor?” Shane’s voice tells me he’s as much in awe as I am.
“I went to med school, just like everybody else,” she says, then adds, “But I know what you mean. I didn’t have the same upbringing as most nyras.
I was basically raised as a human, so when I finished high school, it felt natural to go to college.
And once I finished that, I saw no reason not to go to med school and become a doctor like I wanted. So I did.”
“High school?” I blurt.
“Yep. I wasn’t homeschooled like a nyra. I’ve been going to human schools since preschool.” She looks at our puzzled expressions and continues, “My biological father took off when I was a baby, and my mother married a human after that. He raised me like his own.”
I’m so confused.
First — father, singular? Like… only one?
Second, I’ve never heard of an aegis walking away from his nyra. Even my dads, head over heels for Lydia, were there for my mother through every one of her heats.
And Jo’s mother not only had a single mate like a human, but carried on without him… and then found another.
I’ve seen plenty of relationships between human women and aegis, my own brothers are proof of that. And we’ve hooked up with our fair share of human women ourselves. But I’ve never heard of a nyra getting involved with a human man.
I have so many questions, I don’t even know where to start.
My brothers must be just as stunned, because we all stare at each other in silence.
Jo sighs audibly and breaks it. “My father was a solitary aegis.”