“Would our Omega like that?”
I am crimson.
Beyond crimson. Operating in a spectrum of red that dermatology has not yet named. My face is burning. My neckis burning. The heat is everywhere—in my cheeks, in the skin beneath his mouth, between my thighs where his fingers are doing something that is theoretically tactical and is practically rendering my cognitive function inoperable.
His fingers taunt.
The pressure shifting. Adjusting. The deliberate, devastating micro-movements of a man who understands anatomy and is using that understanding to generate a response that serves dual purposes: making me look like a woman who is thoroughly, convincingly consumed by her Alpha’s attention, and making me actually be that woman because the line between performance and reality dissolved approximately thirty seconds ago.
A shiver runs through me.
Full-body. Visible. The kind that travels from the base of my skull to the arches of my feet and leaves every nerve ending it passes vibrating like a plucked string.
“Y-Yes,” I manage.
The stutter is genuine. Not performed. Not the strategic vocal hesitation that I sometimes deploy to make suspects feel confident. The real, involuntary, syllable-splitting stutter of a woman whose mouth is attempting to form words while her body is processing stimulus that makes word-formation a secondary priority.
I look up.
At him.
And whatever expression I’m making—whatever combination of flushed skin and dilated pupils and parted lips and the specific, unmistakable face of a woman who is aroused and not hiding it—has an effect.
Alaric blushes.
Alaric blushes.
Alaric Venezuela. Thirty-eight. Former metropolitan detective. Man who maintains emotional composure the wayother people maintain houseplants—with constant, meticulous, never-let-it-die attention. This man is blushing.
The color rises on his sharp cheekbones with the slow, involuntary warmth of a man whose body has overridden his control for the first time in this interaction. His dark eyes darken further. His jaw tightens. And beneath his breath—so quiet that only an Omega’s scent receptors could detect it—he curses.
Then he kisses me.
Long.
Hard.
Not the gentle, redirecting brush from the elevator. This is the other Alaric—the one beneath the control, the one that the burnt vanilla has been hinting at for days. His mouth meets mine with a pressure that is both claim and confession, his hand tightening between my thighs as the kiss deepens, my back arching against his chest, the book in my hand forgotten because the only text I’m reading now is the language of his mouth and it is explicit and it is eloquent and it is doing things to my nervous system that the book on page forty-three could only aspire to describe.
We’re breathless.
When we break.
Staring at each other. His forehead near mine. My face tilted up. His hand still where it is. The air between us charged with the specific, volatile chemistry of two people who have crossed a line and are standing on the other side of it looking back at the line and having no interest whatsoever in returning.
“Ugh, where’s that new fiction release?!”
The voice shatters the moment like a glass dropped on tile.
Both of us look over.
A girl—young, mid-twenties, Omega by the scent signature that arrives with her proximity, wearing an expression of theatrical frustration that suggests the bookshop has personallyoffended her—is stomping down the adjacent aisle with the purposeful, irritated energy of a customer on a mission that is not going well.
She rounds the corner.
Sees us.
Stops.
