Pulling my arm back into the warm cocoon of blankets, I yawned and stretched, freezing when I realized that my entire body hurt. Not in theI was in a car wreckway but in the most deliciousfully used and completely ownedway I’d always imagined would result from a night of intense love making.
My memories caught up with the thought and I swallowed hard, closing my eyes to take a more intentional inventory of my body.
My legs felt rubbery, like I’d run a marathon. The muscles of my butt and lower back were sore in a way I knew from doing squats when Taylor dragged me to the gym. The skin on my neck felt raw and there was a pulsing pain on the back of my left shoulder. Hesitantly dragging the tip of my index finger over the painful area, I found a series of raised bumps and my finger came back with a faint smear of blood. Wincing, I drew the same hand slowly down my body, stopping to rub over the puffy, stinging rim of my asshole.
Even with my memory Swiss-cheesed by the false heat, there was no way to deny that I had sex the night before. What I didn’t know was who my partner had been. I was fairly certain I had been willing -eager might be more accurate- but who the hell had been in my apartment?
Groaning, I pushed up to sit with my back to the headboard and noticed the water and snack left for me by my phone. My mystery lover had been thoughtful, anyway.
It wasn’t until I forced myself out of bed and into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee that I saw my winter coat tossed over the arm of the couch and knew without a doubt who my nighttime visitor had been.
The dream Otto I’d been pining for wasn't actually a horny manifestation. Nope. The Alpha had been real and had once again rejected me, leaving without giving me another thought. The light I viewed the offering on the nightstand in shifted drastically and I went from happily sore to feeling dirty.
I made it to the bathroom in time to empty the contents of my stomach into the toilet and then decided to skip the coffee, instead climbing into the shower and setting the water to the hottest temperature I could stand to scrub the shame away.
There was a weird disconnect between my brain and my body after that.
Physically, I felt amazing despite the soreness. My heart rate was steady, my limbs felt loose and relaxed, and, after the initial vomiting, not only was my stomach not queasy, but I was also absolutely starving. At the clinic for the emergency appointment to investigate my false heat, Doctor Quail was jovial, encouraged by what he said was an impressive improvement in my physical wellbeing since my last appointment. An improvement, he assured me with a wink, which was a normal reaction to intimate contact with the baby’s sire.
Mentally, it was a completely different story, and it wasn’t helped by the doctor reminding me that contact with my Alpha would help us catch up to the ideal growth rates of other babies with the same gestational age.
Even as I forced myself to smile at the nurse gushing over how I was glowing, my mind was poking at the scatteredmemories from the night before, searching for clues about what I had donethistime to have Otto using me and then tossing me aside like a hooker.
Not like a hooker,my mind taunted me.He would have at least paid a hooker.
Which was why he left water and a snack by the bed, wasn’t it? As payment for services rendered?I argued with myself.
If so, I must have been even more pathetic than I could have imagined for him to only bother pulling a stale protein bar out of the fruit basket to assuage his conscience before fleeing from my apartment.
The room was quiet when I realized that both Doctor Quail and his nurse were watching me oddly.
“Sorry, I guess I was woolgathering. What did you say?”
“Pregnancy brain,” the nurse tittered with a friendly smile.
Doctor Quail nodded with a wide grin. “Nothing to worry about, son. We were just saying that you are showing marked improvement, so we can schedule your next appointment for six weeks instead of four.” He snapped his fingers suddenly. “Oh, and I nearly forgot that we have these for you.” Rifling through the folder in his hand, he drew out an accordion of photo paper and handed it to me. “Here’s the replacement ultrasound images we promised you.”
Mumbling my thanks, I tucked them into my pocket and left the clinic, careful to look both ways to ensure I didn’t have another unplanned collision with, well, anyone on my way to my afternoon shift at the coffee shop.
~*~
Otto
Within a few hours, the call to action morphed into sit and wait.
Mitch wasn’t home when Clark, Jackson, and I arrived at the apartment he shared with Dane Eades. The situation went from bad to worse when a local sheriff's deputy showed up and unintentionally alerted us that Mitch wasn’t just out, he was missing.
Hours passed and Clark called in favors from other shifter groups, launching a search which weirdly left me sitting in the shoebox apartment with a female wolf shifter from the Blood Valley pack. An empath with a little extra oomph, Leia Borrero pushed hard to keep me out of the action, insisting that the bad guys holding Mitch had a score to settle with me as well but not able explain what it was .
That left me weighing down a sofa in Dane and Mitch’s living room with entirely too much time on my hands to think and, naturally, my mind insisted on circling back to Dex.
Should I have left a note after all? In the moment, I was afraid he might freak out again, the way he had when we ran into each other -literally- outside the doctors’ offices, but it was hard to deny that he seemed eager for me when I knocked on his door.
Or had he simply been so deep in need that any dick would have done? When I arrived at Dex’s apartment and heard him call my name, I responded on instinct. Yes, I asked what kind of help he wanted but had he been clear-minded enough to know the answer for himself? Should I have called for medical help? Hell, should I have called his folks and given them the chance to weigh in on the right decision?
Another thought occurred to me, solidifying into a sour ball in my gut. Was Dex even in the right mind to consent when I knocked on his door? Did Dex hate me when he woke upafter our night together? An even worse thought sliced through my recriminations. If he had been too far gone, had I raped the Omega I had been in love with for over a decade?
The more I turned the questions over in my mind, the less clear the answers became.
