“Kael is frosted pine, cold steel, and aged whiskey.” The words were coming faster now—the hyperfocus locked in, the preheat amplification turning what would normally be a casual observation into a comprehensive olfactory dissertation delivered to a captive audience of four Alphas in a parked SUV. “The pine is the dominant note—frozen, crystallized, the kind of cold that feels structural rather than seasonal. The steel is clean, surgical, carrying a temperature that suggests it’s been stored rather than wielded. And the whiskey is the complexity—aged, patient, warm in a way the other notes aren’t, like it exists underneath as a contradiction the rest of the composition doesn’t want to admit.”
I was vaguely aware that the vehicle was no longermoving. That it had parked. That the engine had been turned off and the ambient vibration that had been running through the chassis had ceased, replaced by the silence of a Vermont night and the low, incredulous quiet of four men staring at a woman who had just performed an unsolicited scent autopsy on their entire pack while sitting in a puddle of her own preheat slick in a borrowed seat.
Luka’s arm tightened around my waist.
The movement was smooth, practiced—the specific, redirective maneuver of a man who had extensive experience with my tangential episodes and had developed a reliable technique for extracting me from them. He pulled me onto his lap. Easily. The goaltender’s strength making the repositioning feel less like a physical transfer and more like a gravitational shift, my body settling against his with the comfortable, familiar weight of a woman who had occupied this particular seat many times in a previous life and whose body remembered the coordinates even when her conscious mind was busy conducting olfactory research.
“You’re very talented at that,” he said, and his voice carried the warm, amused, gently redirective tone of a man praising a child’s artwork while simultaneously steering them toward the dinner table. His lips pressed against my temple. Brief. Grounding. “But should we go inside?”
I blinked. Three times. The rapid, recalibrating blinks of a woman whose awareness had just been recalled from a distant frequency and was reassembling its connection to the immediate present.
“Oh. Yeah.” A pause. “Okay.”
I heard one of them—Renzo, I thought, the clean-zesty-mint composition coming from the passenger side—murmur to Maddox in a tone that was amused andgenuinely curious in equal measure: “Does she do those tangents a lot?”
Luka opened the rear door.
The night air rushed in—cold, clean, frost-edged—and I shivered violently, the temperature differential between my overheated skin and the Vermont November hitting my nervous system like a bucket of ice water poured over a bonfire. Luka scooped me from his lap with the easy, one-motion lift of a man whose arm strength had been engineered for absorbing full-speed collisions and was now being deployed for the considerably more pleasant task of carrying an Omega across a gravel driveway.
I was trying to decide if I wanted to kiss his neck.
It was rightthere. Inches from my mouth. The column of his throat exposed by the open collar of his black shirt, the skin warm, carrying his scent at a concentration that the preheat amplification had turned from inviting toirresistible. The rain-soaked stone seemed to emanate directly from the pulse point beneath his jaw—the place where his heartbeat lived close to the surface and where, years ago, I’d learned that pressing my lips to that specific spot produced a full-body shiver in a six-foot-two goaltender who was otherwise unshakeable.
His neck. Definitely his neck. Or maybe his jaw. The jaw is good too. The jaw is excellent, actually—the angle where it meets the ear, that’s the spot that used to make him grip my hips so hard he left marks?—
Luka was responding to Renzo’s question while carrying me, his voice vibrating through his chest and into my body where I was curled against him.
“Yes. It’s a mix of staring into space while she catalogues the world’s wonders, or hyper fixating on a specific topicuntil she’s exhausted every available detail. Pretty random when it happens.” His arm adjusted beneath my knees, shifting my weight as he navigated what sounded like stone steps. “When she locks into a tangent, just bring her back to the main topic. Or distract her with something better.”
Something better.
I chose his neck.
My mouth found the column of his throat—the warm, scent-saturated skin where rain-soaked stone concentrated at its most potent—and pressed. Not a kiss. Not a bite. A press. Lips parted against his pulse point, my breath warm on his skin, the contact sending a shiver through his frame that I felt in the shift of his arms and the subtle hitch in his stride. His heartbeat kicked against my lips. His scent deepened at the point of contact—the clove note sharpening, the chocolate darkening, the whole composition responding to the proximity of an Omega’s mouth against an Alpha’s most exposed territory.
A deep voice reached my awareness from somewhere ahead of us. Kael. The frosted-pine-and-cold-steel authority of a man issuing logistics while his pack navigated the arrival of an Omega in preheat.
“We’re going to have to let coach know we’re unavailable.”
The mention of a coach tugged at a thread in my drifting consciousness.
Coach. Competition. Training schedule. The Winter Olympics pipeline that I qualified for twelve hours ago and that requires a level of physical preparedness that is going to be significantly compromised by spending the next two to three days in a hormonal hurricane with four Alphas in a house I haven’t seen yet.
The thought formed and dissolved, replaced by the morepressing concern of Luka’s pulse against my lips and the warm, spreading ache between my thighs that was escalating from suggestion to demand with the relentless, tide-like urgency of a biological system that had stopped asking and started telling.
Maddox’s cedar-and-embers rumble.
“I can handle the coach. But we don’t really have food or anything at your place.”
And then Renzo—the clean-zesty-mint, the missing-one-element, the green-haired Alpha whose scent composition I’d just dissected with the thoroughness of a doctoral thesis—answered with the casual efficiency of a man who had already anticipated the logistical requirements and addressed them before being asked.
“Already put in a delivery order. Should be here within the hour. Food, electrolytes, and water. She’ll need all of it.”
Efficient. Thoughtful. Already three steps ahead of the conversation.
I like clean zesty mint.
Luka chuckled.
