Thirty-Five
STEEL
Her arms around me let go but my brain is slow to process because it still feels like she’s holding me together.
I’m dealing with the fallout of my brother keeping secrets in the form of the actual, physical reason of why Maverick is threatening to go too. In case I was thick as a lump of concrete, my Alpha is going off his head and has been since I saw her that she is the piece of the puzzle we’ve been desperately missing.
The response from my Alpha was instant. He wanted her. But she’s fucking King’s. And apparently my brother’s, and Mav’s although that doesn’t seem to be an issue to them. Which is another surprise on its own.
Sucker punch after sucker punch and I’m not ignoring how wickedly good her scent is, I’m just trying to see this from all angles because how in the living shit can she be here at exactly the same time as us? That sure is some bullshit.
I was gonna go, too. I wasn’t lying when I told her I’d leave. Of course, Mother Nature throws even more reasons in front of me all but screaming in my face that this Omega is what I need, what I’ve been desperate for.
The calm of the day gets blown out of the water in seconds, and not only because of the bubble-gum smelling Omega hovering behind me. Nah, the weather makes itself known too; squalling, howling winds whipping across the valley bring the noise of a jet engine with it.
I crowd over her.
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
“And I said we’re good. I wasn’t shitting you either. Looks like we’ve got things to talk about, huh?”
As quickly as the weather flips, her mood does too. “You think?” she fucking sasses back.
But it’s not rude and bitchy, it really is pretty entertaining. I can see how she’d work for Tyson too—her bright, sunny confidence would be like a fucking drug for him after all the bullshit we’ve been through. Maverick would be chasing her hard as well; she’s stunning with her mop of blonde curls, her beauty is deep in her too, it resonates from the inside out and my slow ass brain puts what Maverick said to me together with who she is.
“You’re Tristan Cameron.”
She goes to answer but another gust of wind hits with such force she stumbles backwards, and I rush forward, the both of us nearly tripping over her feet.
“Killer! You have three seconds to get your ass inside…”
Her eyes flare comically wide, and her scent becomes even more poignant. Once she turns back to me, after waving him off, her eyes are dancing with excitement.
“I am.” She jumps right back to where we were before he interrupted us. “Now the other thing you need to know, besides all the other BS happening which we still need to talk about, is my heat is coming. Really soon. Which means I’m going to be up and down like a yo-yo, so I apologise now. I took a couple of suppressors.”
“You’ll be good then?”
She looks at me like I’ve grown a set of horns out the top of my head. “It was working but now it seems it’s not.”
And in not saying what is obvious to her, I get the confirmation she’s going through something similar to me.
“It happens, you know.” She takes a big breath knowing we’ve only got a few moments left alone.
“Yeah? What?”
“It’s like getting Yahtzee or a Royal Flush. But finding a pack of compatible Alphas is not as rare as people make it out to be. Statistically, once you match with one or two, the others are bound to happen.”
“How do you explain King?”
“Oh, he won’t ever pack me.”
And like the wind blasting the icy drop over the lake, my mood darkens just as fiercely. She even takes a few steps back, raising her hands trying to temper the beast.
“Say again.” I tip my head to the side in case I mis-heard what she said.
“He won’t pack me.”
“What a gutless prick,” falls from my lips as I answer her stupidly before I check where he is.
