Think, Hazel. You’ve worked undercover operations. You’ve maintained cover in worse situations than a bookshop. What’s the play?
I’m still trying to assemble an alternative when I hear a voice.
Behind me.
Close.
So close that the burnt vanilla of his scent arrives simultaneously with the first syllable, the warm cardamom and espresso notes wrapping around me with the familiar, grounding weight that my Omega physiology has started to recognize asAlaric is here and you are safe.
“And then he slides his fingers past the silk fabric,” Alaric reads, his voice low, measured, pitched at the intimate volume of a man who is speaking for an audience of one, “gliding the glistening?—”
My eyes widen.
I look down at the page I’m holding open.
The page I’d randomly landed on while pretending to read.
Page forty-three.
Which is, as it turns out, the beginning of a scene that is?—
Oh God.
My entire face detonates.
The blush isn’t a blush—it’s a thermal event. A full-spectrum, capillary-flooding, visible-from-space flush that starts at my collarbone and reaches the tips of my ears in approximately one point five seconds, my body’s circulatory system apparently deciding that the appropriate response to having an explicit passage read aloud by a six-foot-three detective in a public bookshop is to redirect all available blood to the surface of my face.
Alaric tries to continue.
My hand flies backward.
Covers his mouth.
The palm landing on his lips with the urgent, silencing precision of a woman who will commit actual violence if the next word of that sentence becomes audible in a space occupied by other human beings.
“SHHH!”
The hush comes out at a volume that defeats its own purpose—loud enough to carry, sharp enough to draw attention, the desperate vocalization of a woman whose dignity is under siege and whose tactical training has been completely overridden by mortification.
I look up.
He’s towering over me.
Because Alaric always towers over me—the height difference is structural, unavoidable, the kind of vertical disparity that makes every interaction a lesson in perspective. But from this angle—my head tilted back, my hand on his mouth, his dark eyes looking down at me with the warm, knowing, devastatingly amused expression of a man who knows exactly what he just did—the towering feels intentional.
He’s smirking.
I can feel it.
Behind my palm. The curve of his lips pressing against the flat of my hand with the specific, unavoidable shape of a man who is deeply, thoroughly, professionally entertained.
I remove my hand.
“Nice read?” he says, the smirk fully visible now—the refined, one-corner curve that is uniquely Alaric, carrying equal parts amusement and something darker beneath. “Didn’t know you were into foreplay.”
“I’m not—” I start.
The wordstuttering.
