Her peppermint against my cedarwood. Her fresh grass against my graphite. Her cherry blossom against my amber.The notes intertwine in the sealed room's atmosphere, weaving together into a combined fragrance that makes my pulse hammer in locations my cardiovascular system normally does not acknowledge.
She huffs.
A single exhale. Sharp. Loaded with everything that just happened and everything that is about to happen, and the thin, electrified wire of tension strung between our bodies like a tripwire waiting for the slightest disturbance.
"Damn."
She runs one hand through her destroyed hair, pushing wet strands off her forehead with fingers that are trembling. Not from fear. From the specific vibration of a body that has been running on adrenaline for twenty minutes and is now standing still in a locked room with an Alpha whose scent is doing things to her chemistry that the trembling confirms even if her mouth never will.
"I'd dare say I could fuck you right now." Her voice is raw, stripped of pretense, delivered with the blunt honesty of a woman who has never learned to package her thoughts in socially acceptable wrapping. "But that would be completely unhinged, wouldn't it?"
I blink.
Once.
Twice.
Every structured, rational, carefully curated thought in my brain evacuates the premises like office workers during a fire drill. My internal monologue, the constant narration that has kept me disciplined and invisible and safely categorized asharmlessfor twenty-three years, goes completely and absolutely silent.
Replaced by a single, primal frequency that does not deal in words.
I speak my mind.
For the first time in twenty-three years, I speak my actual, unfiltered, unedited mind.
"Nothing's unhinged with me, Wildcard." The whisper exits my throat on a breath rather than a voice, barely audible, intimate in a way I have never been with another person. The nickname materializes from somewhere I did not know I was storing it, born from the chaos she introduced to my life three days ago and the havoc she is wreaking on my restraint right now. I hold her gaze, and the green of her irises expands in my vision until it is the only color in the world. "Or is it Sage?"
The look that passes between us does not belong in a bedroom with a locked door and two people who have known each other for a combined total of thirty-five minutes across three encounters, two of which involved physical collision.
It is heated. Concentrated. The visual equivalent of two live wires stripped of their insulation and held close enough for the arc to bridge the gap. Her green eyes against my green eyes. Her accelerated breathing against mine. Her scent climbing in intensity with every heartbeat, the cherry blossom blooming through the peppermint and the grass with an urgency that makes my blood feel carbonated.
Three seconds.
That is how long the look holds.
Three seconds of charged silence where the distance between us is an active, physical force being compressed by the combined weight of everything we are not saying and everything our pheromones are screaming.
Then she moves.
She crashes into me like an Omega in heat. Her body colliding with mine with the same velocity that knocked me flat on a forest trail three days ago, her hands fisting the front of my shirt, her mouth finding mine with an accuracy that suggests shehas been calculating this trajectory since the moment she turned her head in the living room and discovered my face inches from hers.
Our lips crush each other like magnets.
CHAPTER 5
Strange Stalker Nerd
~SAGE~
Ido not know what the fuck possessed me.
That is the only coherent thought my brain manages to produce while the rest of my cognitive function is being consumed by the fact that I am currently climbing this man like a feral cat scaling a tree to escape a flood.
My legs are hooked around his waist, ankles locked behind his lower back, thighs clamped against his hips with a grip strength that my skating coach would applaud and my therapist would have questions about. My hands are fisted in the front of his fitted black shirt, knuckles white, the fabric bunching between my fingers as I haul myself closer, higher, deeper into the kiss.
And he is holding me.
Both arms wrapped beneath my thighs, palms flat against the backs of my legs, supporting my entire weight like I am made of paper rather than one hundred and forty-five pounds of muscle, hockey conditioning, and poor impulse control. He is not straining. Not adjusting his grip. Not doing the staggered shufflethat most men perform when they suddenly find themselves carrying a grown woman who launched herself at them with zero warning and the aerodynamic elegance of a thrown brick.
