CHAPTER 6
Lucky Panties
~SAGE~
Steam follows me through the bathroom door like an uninvited entourage, curling around my ankles and dissipating into the cooler air of the bedroom.
My hair is a damp knot on top of my skull. My skin is flushed from water that was probably too hot for too long. And the faded black t-shirt I pulled from the chair barely qualifies as clothing, hanging off my frame in a silhouette that is less "casual loungewear" and more "person who grabbed the nearest fabric rectangle and prayed for coverage."
He is exactly where I left him.
Standing in the center of my bedroom with his arms crossed, his ginger hair still wrecked from my earlier assault, his green eyes aimed at me with an attentiveness that makes the shower's residual warmth feel tepid by comparison.
"Why are you helping me?"
The question exits my mouth before I am fully through the doorway, launched with the directness of a woman who does not have the bandwidth for preamble when her entire afternoonhas consisted of being threatened by geriatric Alphas, kissed by a man she barely knows, interrogated by proxy through a bathroom door, and showered while acutely aware that said man was standing fifteen feet from her naked body separated by a piece of wood she forgot to lock.
He does not answer immediately.
Instead, his eyes travel.
Not quickly. Not with the darting, furtive glances that men use when they are trying to check someone out without getting caught. This is deliberate. Unhurried. A slow, measured assessment that begins at my face, drops to my collarbone where the oversized neckline has slipped to expose one shoulder, continues down the length of the t-shirt to the hem where it ends at mid-thigh, and then continues further. Down my bare legs. To my feet, still damp from the shower, leaving faint prints on the hardwood.
And then back up.
Cataloguing. Evaluating. The focused inventory of a man whose brain processes visual information the way a scanner processes documents: line by line, detail by detail, missing nothing.
He is checking me out.
This freckled, glass-less, allegedly-a-nobody Alpha is standing in my bedroom running his eyes over my body like he is reading the scouting report on a player he has not yet decided whether to draft.
The discomfort blooms in my chest with the prickling heat of being perceived by someone whose perception actually registers. I am accustomed to being overlooked. Being assessed is a different animal entirely, and the fact that his gaze carries neither the predatory entitlement of the Alpha downstairs nor the clinical detachment of a coach evaluating athletic potential makes it worse. This gaze is curious. Attentive. The gaze ofsomeone who is genuinely looking at me rather than looking through me to the designation printed on my ID.
"What?" I plant one hand on my hip, tilting my chin with the defensive belligerence of a woman whose emotional armor is currently represented by a t-shirt and wet hair. "Never seen an Omega in a t-shirt dress?"
He arches an eyebrow.
One slow, precise lift of ginger brow that communicates amusement and contradiction in a single muscular movement.
"That is totally not a t-shirt dress." His voice is dry. Observational. The cadence of a man reporting a factual discrepancy rather than making a social commentary. "Especially when I can see your lucky panties."
My brain requires a full second to process the sentence.
"Lucky panties?" I repeat, the words arriving in my mouth as a question before my body provides the answer.
I look down.
The t-shirt, the faded black crew neck that I grabbed in haste from the bathroom cabinet because it was the closest garment to my hand and my priority was speed rather than tailoring, is not performing the coverage duties I assigned it. The hem, which I estimated would fall to mid-thigh based on its oversized proportions, has in fact settled approximately four inches higher than anticipated due to the combination of the fabric's age-related shrinkage and the fact that my hips, conditioned through years of skating squats and defensive lunges, are wider than the shirt was designed to accommodate.
The result is visible.
Extremely, undeniably, catastrophically visible.
Green four-leaf clover print underwear. My lucky pair. The ones I wear on game days and tryout mornings and any occasion requiring supernatural assistance from the patron saint of Irish iconography printed on cotton blend fabric. They are bright.They are festive. They feature clovers of varying sizes distributed across a kelly green background with the cheerful density of a St. Patrick's Day parade float.
And they are on full display below the traitorous hem of a shirt that has chosen this specific moment to abandon its structural responsibilities.
The blush detonates.
