She played me.
Let me lead. Let me check on her. Let me open the gate and ask if she was okayand feel like the experienced rider guiding the novice through unfamiliar terrain.
And then she showed me who she actually is.
Not the damaged Omega who needs protection.
Not the hospitalized patient who needs monitoring.
Not the woman with six months who needs saving.
A cowgirl who rides like the wind owes her money.
And I’m so getting payback.
CHAPTER 22
Blueberry And Oreo
~HAZEL~
“Room for dessert?”
Oakley asks this with his arm already along my shoulders—not draped, not possessive, butsettled. The weight of his forearm resting against the booth’s vinyl backrest with the casual, unforced comfort of a man who put it there an hour ago and hasn’t moved it because neither of us wanted him to. His fingers brush the bare skin of my shoulder where the crop top’s neckline doesn’t reach, the contact producing a low-grade, persistent electricity that I have stopped trying to ignore and have started quietly cataloguing asthis is what it feels like when someone touches you because they want to and you want them to.
He’s holding the laminated dessert menu in his other hand, tilted so I can see it too, his head angled toward the list with the focused interest of a man who takes dessert selection seriously.
And I am relaxed.
Extremely relaxed.
Which is odd for me. Odd in the way that seeing yourself in a mirror wearing someone else’s clothes is odd—the reflection is recognizably you, but the context is wrong. Or not wrong.Different. Hazel Martinez does not do relaxed. Hazel Martinez does vigilant, strategic, alert, prepared, and occasionally exhausted-pretending-to-be-calm. Relaxed is a state that requires the specific combination of safety, comfort, and the absence of threat that my nervous system has not reliably experienced since?—
Since when?
Since the academy library at two a.m., when it was just me and Roman and the competitive silence of two people studying the same material and pretending they weren’t aware of each other’s breathing?
Maybe.
Maybe that was the last time I felt this particular flavor of calm. The specific, bone-level ease of a body that has decided the person beside it is safe and has adjusted its chemical output accordingly.
The diner helps.
The Pink Donut—which is, in fact, pink, and aggressively so, with the exterior painted a shade of bubblegum that would be garish in any other context but works perfectly against the Montana autumn landscape—is the kind of small-town establishment that has existed for decades and been owned by the same family for most of them. The interior is a time capsule of chrome fixtures, red vinyl booths, a checkered floor that has been mopped ten thousand times and still carries the ghost of every coffee spill, and a jukebox in the corner that someone has loaded with an eclectic mix of country, Motown, and the specific, nostalgic Americana that makes you feel like you’ve stepped into a place where nothing bad has ever happened and nothing bad is allowed.
It smells like griddle grease and fresh coffee and the particular, warm, yeasty perfume of baked goods that have been produced on-site by someone who has been making them long enough that the recipes exist in their hands rather than on paper.
And beneath all of it: the candied blood orange of Oakley’s scent. Close. Constant. Layered into the ambient atmosphere of the booth with the thoroughness of a man who has been sitting beside me for the last ninety minutes and whose chemistry has had ample time to saturate every surface within a three-foot radius.
The moment we’d walked in, he’d done something I didn’t expect.
Instead of sliding into the opposite side of the booth—the standard, face-to-face configuration that every restaurant date I’d ever been dragged to by my former pack had defaulted to—he’d slid in beside me. Same side. Shoulder to shoulder. His thigh parallel to mine beneath the table, the heat of his body radiating through the thin barrier of our respective clothing with a warmth that had nothing to do with the diner’s heating system.
“I like sitting next to my date,” he’d explained, settling in with the unhurried comfort of a man who had thought about this. “Not opposite. Sitting across from someone creates a power dynamic—you’re facing each other, like opponents. Like an interrogation. Especially with the Alpha-Omega thing.” He’d shrugged, the motion casual, the insight behind it anything but. “Sitting beside someone feels like equals. And I like the intimacy it gives. Being close enough to talk without the whole room hearing. Close enough to…”
He’d trailed off.
Smiled.
