Their Lucky Knotty Charm (Bakedverse #4)

Prologue One Last Swig Of Courage

~MILA~

I am kissing a stranger.

Which, in my defense, is not something I planned to do tonight.

My tongue is currently making very poor executive decisions against the lips of a masked man I met forty-five minutes ago over a whiskey tasting display, and the single most coherent thought I can produce in this moment is that he tastes like the good stuff.

Not the rail whiskey I pour at Hannigan's on a Thursday when the regulars stop caring about quality.

The real thing. A twelve-year single malt with that particular warmth that starts at the back of your throat and unravels downward, slow and inevitable, like the universe itself is telling you to relax for once in your life.

This is the Jameson.

I took one shot of Jameson before walking through those doors tonight. One. That's it. That is the entire explanation for why my fingers are fisted in the lapels of a man I cannot fully see, and my brain has gone completely offline.

One shot, Mila. One.

Except that's not entirely true, and I know it, which is the more embarrassing part.

It's his scent.

That's the real culprit here.

It hits me even now, with my eyes closed and my better judgment somewhere on the floor near the emerald velvet draping of this shadowed alcove—cedarwood, deep and grounding, the kind of scent that makes you think of something solid. Something that stays.

Beneath it, worn leather, lived-in and warm, and then the whiskey underneath all of it, not cologne trying to approximate alcohol but the actual memory of it, like he's been breathing good whiskey for so long it's become part of his chemistry.

There's something else too, something I can't classify and have been trying to for forty-five minutes—a specific warmth.

Not a note. A feeling. The olfactory version of a door closing between you and everything that's been chasing you, and for one deeply irrational moment, my whole body believes it.

You are at an Omega selection mixer. You swore, on your abuela's memory and your own deeply wounded dignity, that you would never attend one of these things again after the last disaster. And you are currently kissing one of the Alphas. In an alcove. While wearing Elowen's heirloom gown.

Fifty thousand dollars.

That's why you're here. Remember the fifty thousand dollars. Remember the debt. Remember the collection agency that calls on Tuesday and Thursday mornings with the cheery relentlessness of someone who genuinely enjoys this.

I remember.

And I kiss him anyway…because he kissed me first and I am one shot of Jameson past making responsible choices, and the way his hands came up to frame my face when I leaned in—careful, unhurried, like I was something worth being careful with—did something extremely inconvenient to my chest that I refuse to examine in any meaningful way.

He kisses as if he genuinely means it.

That's the problem.

Not hungry, not performative, not the kind of kissing that's actually about the man's ego wearing an omega's face as a mirror. Deliberate. Present. Like he decided to do this and do it properly, and everything else can wait.

You can't afford to feel things about a masked Alpha at a Lucky Clover Society event, Castellanos. You can't afford it literally, and you cannot afford it emotionally.

You have negative reserves on both counts.

He pulls back just barely—a breath of distance, barely an inch—and I feel rather than see him looking at me in the low light.

The alcove is tucked behind a stone pillar wound with emerald velvet and clusters of white clover, and the candlelight from the main hall doesn't quite reach us here.

Enough to catch the sharp line of his jaw beneath the mask.

Enough to catch his eyes.

Gray-green.

That's what I notice first, back when he appeared beside me at the whiskey display with his Redbreast 21 and his completely unprompted and entirely correct opinion about ice.

Piercing and steady, the color of the sea two hours after a storm when the violence has cleared out but the depth hasn't gone anywhere. They look at me like they're reading something rather than simply seeing, and under normal circumstances, I would find that invasive.

These are not normal circumstances. These are Jameson circumstances.

His scent wraps around me again as I stay close, not quite stepping back, not quite staying in—hovering in the charged space between the decision I've already made and the one I keep pretending I haven't.

Cedar and leather and that whiskey warmth.

A blanket is what it is, which is the most embarrassing way I've ever internally described another person's scent, and I'm a bartender with a professional nose; I have better vocabulary than this, but there it is.

It feels like a blanket.

Like being let inside somewhere after too long in the cold.

I want to stay in it.

That's the worst part. Not the kissing, nor the yearning—it’s the wanting to stay.

That specific, domestic, dangerous ache of a person who's been running so long that the idea of standing still in someone's warmth has started to feel like the most radical thing imaginable.

Don't. Don't do that. You know exactly what that kind of wanting costs. You have the paperwork to prove it.

Filed under 'failed pack,' see also: everything that went wrong, everything you're still paying for, everything that is why you are at this event in the first place, trying to win fifty thousand dollars to pay off the debt those people left you.

The bell rings.

Big, resonant, brass—the kind of bell that has opinions about itself.

One long, ceremonious tone that bounces off the castle's stone walls and rolls through the corridors and lands directly in my stomach like an announcement: time's up.

The lock-in bell. The one that signals the end of the selection window, the close of the contest, the moment when the Lucky Clover Society will begin tallying whatever mystical criteria they use to decide which Omega's life gets to change tonight.

We both go still.

I pull back first.

The train.

Oh god. The train. The 12:15. The last train out of this part of town because Oakhaven is not a city, has never aspired to be a city, and its transit schedule was designed by someone who believed that nothing important happened after midnight, which—fair, usually, but not tonight—

I check the time on instinct, the way I always do when the panic arrives, and it's 12:03.

Twelve minutes.

The station is five minutes from here if you move, which means you have seven minutes of margin, which means you need to be moving right now—

I look back at him.

And that's the mistake.

He's watching me—he hasn't stopped watching me since the whiskey display, since I told him the ice was wrong and he looked at me like I'd said something interesting rather than something obvious, which is a reaction I am not used to and have no established defenses against.

His gray-green eyes are steady on my face, his scent still pooled around us in the alcove, and there is nothing in his expression that pressures me.

Nothing that demands. He just—waits. Patient and present and completely still in the way of a man who has learned that the best things come to those who don't chase them.

His dark auburn hair has a thread of silver at the temples that I clocked the moment he removed his outer jacket earlier in the evening.

Broad shoulders. A jaw that could cut glass and seems aware of this.

He wears his mask—deep mahogany with etched shamrocks along the border, ridiculous and perfect simultaneously—with the ease of someone who's equally comfortable either way, masked or unmasked, seen or unseen.

My honey whiskey and warm vanilla scent is absolutely betraying me right now.

I know it is. The lime zest that sharpens when I'm trying very hard not to feel things I'm feeling very intensely has probably turned this alcove into a broadcast, and there is nothing I can do about it except pretend this isn't happening with the commitment of a woman who has gotten very good at pretending.

This is not a fairytale.

This is a financial strategy.

You came here for fifty thousand dollars, not for gray-green eyes and cedarwood and the way this man kisses like he's decided you're worth the time. Those are two completely separate missions, and you have only ever been on one of them.

Cinderella got the glass slipper.

She got the prince who came to find her. She got the reunion, recognition, and the whole gleaming narrative conclusion. You are not Cinderella. Cinderella didn't have a 1 am shift at a bar in Oakridge Hollows and a collection agency that knows her first name.

"I have to go," I say.

He says nothing for a moment. Just looks at me with those sea-storm eyes, measuring something I can't identify.

Then, quietly—the same voice he used at the whiskey display, low and deliberate, every word placed like it was considered:

"Your name."

Not a question. A request shaped like a statement, which I have gathered is simply how he speaks.

Like information is something he receives rather than retrieves.

I stare at him.

Don't give him that. Names are—names are a thread. You pull on a name, and suddenly there's a whole person attached to it, and you cannot afford a whole person right now. You cannot afford the version of yourself that wants what his scent keeps promising.

Also you have eleven minutes.

I lean in instead.

One more. Just one more, because I'm slightly drunk and deeply stupid and he made me feel, for one forty-five-minute window in the middle of what has otherwise been an extraordinarily difficult year, like I was the most interesting person in the room rather than the most indebted.

Because his hands cupped my face like I was something careful-worthy and his scent made my entire nervous system go quiet for the first time in recent memory.

Because I'm a dreamer, and dreamers always take the last kiss.