“She say anything else?” Malik asks, leaning forward slightly. His vanilla ice-cream scent spikes with interest, and I see his deep brown eyes go even deeper brown.
I hesitate. I shouldn’t tell them. It feels like a violation of Sierra’s privacy to share what I heard, what I smelled, what I know she was doing when I knocked.
But we’re pack. And they can probably smell it on me, anyway. The lingering scent of her slick, the way my own scent has gone thick with rut response.
“It’s getting worse,” I say finally, choosing my words carefully. “The heat. I could... I could smell it through the door.”
The silence that follows is deafening.
Dax stops pacing. Malik’s hands tighten on the cushions. Cole turns away from the window completely, eyes locked on me.
“And?” Dax prompts, voice dropping an octave.
I swallow hard. “And I’m pretty sure she was... trying to take care of it. When I knocked.”
The growl that rumbles through the room comes from all three of them simultaneously. Low and deep and so alpha-aggressive that my own rut responds, wanting to join in, wanting to add my voice to the claim.
“Fuck,” Cole says, running both hands through his hair. “Fuck, that’s...”
“Hot,” Malik finishes bluntly. “That’s incredibly hot, and we all need to get ourselves under control immediately.”
But none of us moves. We’re all standing there, frozen by the mental image of Sierra in her nest, hands between her thighs, trying to soothe the heat that’s clearly driving her crazy.
I’ve spent too long learning to read Sierra from a distance.Catching her tells in stolen glances at industry mixers, decoding her reactions. It started as a professional necessity. Knowing what pissed her off or made her smirk gave me an edge when we were bidding for the same venues, the same clients.
But somewhere along the way, it became more than strategy. I started noticing things that had nothing to do with business. The way her laugh cuts through a room when she’s genuinely amused. How she taps her pen against her clipboard when she’s impatient. The fact that she always steals a sugar packet from the coffee bar at events but never uses it. Just tucks it into her pocket like some kind of weird trophy.
And now I’m noticing things I definitely shouldn’t be noticing. Like the exact timbre of her voice when she’s aroused. The scent of her slick. The way her breath catches when a wave of heat goes through her.
“She booked this place for her heat week,” Dax says slowly, like he’s working through a puzzle. “So, she obviously came prepared. Which means...”
“Toys,” Cole supplies. “She’s got toys in there.”
The word hangs in the air like a grenade.
My brain immediately supplies an extremely vivid image of Sierra with a vibrator, or a dildo, or, God help me, something with a knot that she can work inside herself when the heat gets too intense.
Based on the way everyone’s scents just spiked, they’re all thinking the same thing.
“Stop it,” I tell myself as much as them. “We need to stop thinking about this.”
“Kind of hard not to,” Malik says dryly, “when she’s down the hall right now probably using one.”
Dax makes a sound that’s half-growl, half-groan. He resumes pacing, more agitated now. “This is bad. This is really bad. How are we supposed to last a week like this?”
I don’t answer immediately because the truth is lodged somewhere between my brain and my mouth. The truth is that Iwant to help her. Every fiber of my being is screaming at me to go back down that hall and offer myself as a solution to her suffering.
But I can’t.
Not because it would be wrong, though crossing that line with a business rival definitely complicates things. But because if I help her, if I knot her, if I give her what her body is begging for... she’ll know.
She’ll feel it in the way I touch her. Hear it in the way I say her name. See it in my eyes when I look at her afterward.
And then everything I’ve been carefully hiding? All the observations I’ve noted in silence? All the feelings I’ve pretended don’t exist? They will all be laid bare.
And I don’t know if I can survive her rejection after that.
“By remembering that she’s our…responsibility,” I finally say, though the word tastes wrong in my mouth, but it’s the only one that fits. “And that she trusted us enough to be here during her heat. We’re not going to violate that trust.”
