“I’m a bit curious. Do all the pack omegas live in the one building? Aren’t there any mated omegas here?”
He looked at me worriedly, obviously wondering where I was going with this.
“We all live together, alpha. The omegas, I mean.”
“Even the mated ones?”
“Oh, no, we don’t have any that are mated. There used to be one… our Alpha had a mate but he disappeared. I don’t know what happened to him. He used to live with him, but then one day he was just gone.”
“It’s unusual,” I mused, “not to have any mated pairs in a pack, especially stuck away in the middle of nowhere like this.”
“We’ve only been here a few months,” the omega told me. His voice dropped and he said sadly, “but anyway, if they want an omega they just come and take one from the house.”
He was staring down at the timber doorstep, and I wasn’t sure if it was from embarrassment or because he was suddenly worried he’d said too much.
“Are you happy here?” I asked gently.
“I-I have to get back now,” he stammered. A second later he was running down the path, almost tripping over in his haste to get away.
Clearly, my questions had made him uncomfortable.
I was disappointed. How was I going to find my omega, when every omega I met ran away from me before I could gain their trust?
Chapter 07
TOSCA
I couldn’t seem to get the scent of the mysterious helpful alpha out of my nose. Or maybe traces of him still clung to my skin despite the dip I’d taken in the creek. Whatever, his scent just seemed to follow me around everywhere I went, sometimes distractingly faint, other times surprisingly strong. It was alluring, exciting, it made my skin flush and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Or maybe it was just my imagination. Maybe those days and nights we’d spent together so intimately had somehow imprinted him on my brain. I wished I’d been brave enough to try and keep him, but he was too magnificent, and though he’d been kind to me and helped me through my heat, it probably wasn’t anything more than he would have done for any omega in distress. I was too small, too thin, too nondescript to catch the eye of an alpha like that. He could have anyone he wanted.
But for now, I could hold my head up and be proud that I’d had such a fine alpha take me through my first heat. I couldn’t help the smile that danced across my lips at the memory.
As much as it sucked that I didn’t stand a chance with the handsome alpha, there were advantages to being quiet and insignificant, and one was that no-one noticed when I snuck back into the compound. Of course they didn’t, because they wouldn’t have even noticed I’d been gone. The betas barely noticed me at the best of times. The one person who did pay attention, was Owen.
“Where’ve you been?” he whispered to me when we had a quiet moment together. “You were gone for three days!”
“I had my heat,” I said quietly.
“Oooh! That was your first, wasn’t it? Are you okay?” he asked anxiously. “Who took you through it? Was it one of the nicer guys?”
I realized then that he didn’t know I’d completely left the pack for the duration of my heat. Now that I thought about it, it made sense that he wouldn’t know, because if I’d stayed in the pack I would have been kept in a cabin separately until it was over and he wouldn’t have seen me the entire time. Though he might have heard my cries. Sometimes the wails of the omegas sequestered away in the sex cabins were pitiful, and we could hear them from the omega house. On those occasions, I pulled the bedcovers over my head and plugged my ears with wax to keep out the frightening sounds. I wondered how much I should tell him.
I bit my lip. It was Owen, I could trust him. He was my best friend. And I was itching to tellsomeone.
“I snuck away and hid in a cave the whole time,” I told him. “After what you told me about the betas… I couldn’t bear the thought of… of doingthatwiththem.”
“But… but… but you must have been in agony…” protested Owen. “You shouldn’t try handling a heat on your own… you might have died!”
“I wasn’t on my own!” I smirked, a silly grin taking possession of my face. I wasn’t going to give up the information easily though. No, he had to ask for it. I was holding onto my little secret for as long as I could resist the temptation to spill it.
Owen looked bewildered.
“Who? How?” his confusion was endearing.
Oh! I couldn’t stop myself. I had to share this.
“I had the most handsome alpha take me through it,” I said dreamily. “He was amazing.” A long sigh slipped out of me, as I stood there goofily smiling at the memory.
