He has to angle slightly through the hallway, shoulders almost too wide for the space. Brown hair, long and wavy, falling to his shoulders. A short beard the same color. He moves. Like someone who learned a long time ago to be deliberate about how he takes up space because he takes up so much of it.
Then they're in the room and I can see him properly and my brain goes briefly, completely blank.
He's the most physically imposing person I've ever seen. Not just tall but massive in every dimension. Shoulders like architecture, arms that look carved from something denser than ordinary muscle. His face could have been beautiful once—strong jaw, broad cheekbones, something classical in the structure of it—but the scars run through all of it. Diagonal. Jagged. Raised and pale against his tan skin. One crosses from his jaw up through his lips and over his nose. Another cuts across his cheekbone and through his eyebrow almost to his hairline. Several others, overlapping, layered, the story of something I can only begin to imagine written permanently on his face.
He's utterly terrifying.
He stops a distance away and doesn't move.
Just lets me look.
Then his scent reaches me.
It’s raw and fresh and overwhelming in the best way, nothing like the diluted version I've been getting from the shirts. This is the real thing. Burnt wood and that deep layered something underneath it and it hits me directly in the place where anxiety lives and silences it completely.
My shoulders drop and my hands loosen against my thighs. The breath I take is the deepest I've taken all day.
I watch his nostrils flare.
He breathes in.
His muscles loosen, the wariness draining from around his eyes, and he looks like a man who has been holding something rigid for a very long time and has just been given permission to put it down
The corner of his mouth moves just slightly. Like he's fighting a smile and not entirely winning.
He moves toward the armchair across from me.
It happens fast. He's large and he moves quickly. My body reacts before my brain can catch up with what Arden told me. I flinch back into the couch cushions. Just slightly, just for a second.
But he sees it and stops immediately.
His expression changes into one of pain before he shuts it down.
"Vee," Arden says. "Meet Rhys."
I swallow. "Hi." It comes out smaller than I intend.
Rhys looks at me for a long moment.
Then he does something I don't expect.
He kneels.
Right there on the hardwood floor in front of the armchair, this enormous, terrifying, scarred alpha folds himself down onto one knee and then sits back on his heels so that his eyeline drops below mine.
Making himself smaller.
For me.
I have never in my life had an alpha kneel for me. Not once. Not for any reason. I don't know what to do with my face or my hands or the thing happening in my chest right now.
We look at each other.
His eyes are a deep warm brown. Expressive in a way the rest of him isn't, or maybe in a way the rest of him can't be anymore. There's so much in them. Patience. Wariness. Something that wants to be hope but hasn't decided yet whether it's allowed.
The silence stretches.
Then he lifts one arm and extends his hand toward me, palm up.
