And then…
Maddox.
The blush that climbed my neck and cheeks was immediate, involuntary, and approximately the temperature of a stovetop burner set to high. Because I hadabsolutelyfucked Maddox Hale. The enforcer. The man I’d met twelve hours before my heat began, who had sprinted across campus in full hockey gear to claim me as his Omega, and who had apparently parlayed that introduction into a level of physical intimacy that involved—my brain helpfully supplied fragments—his broad hands gripping my hips, his deep voice rumbling against the back of my neck, and the specific, devastating discovery that defensive enforcers possessed a stamina-to-gentleness ratio that should have been physiologically impossible.
He was… thorough. And careful. And the contradiction between the size of him and the tenderness of his touch was the kind of thing that rewired your preferences in real time.
And Renzo.
I didn’t recall riding him. The memory was fragmented there—a gap in the timeline where the heat’s intensity had peaked and the conscious recording function had been temporarily suspended. But I haddefinitelysucked him off. That memory was vivid. The clean-zesty-mint of his scent concentrating at close range, the way his hips had movedbeneath me, the breathless, delighted sounds he’d made that were less Alpha-dominant and moreoverwhelmed-in-the-best-possible-way, as if being on the receiving end was a novelty he intended to request permanently.
Andfuck—the man could suck nipples like he was competing for a gold medal in the event. An Olympic-caliber performance of oral attention that had treated my breasts like they were the final element of a championship routine, with technical execution and artistic impression scores that would have cleared a 9.8 from the strictest judge on the panel. The memory alone was enough to make my nipples tighten beneath the sheets, which was mortifying and involuntary and a strong indicator that my body had already filed Renzo Viteri underrepeat access recommended.
My entire face was on fire.
I groaned—a low, muffled,what-have-I-donevocalization that I directed into the mattress by pressing my face into it—and covered my cheeks with both hands as if physical contact could prevent the blood from continuing its enthusiastic migration to my epidermis.
I just did the most unhinged things with a group of men I barely know.
I know their SCENTS better than their surnames.
I can catalogue the molecular composition of Renzo’s pheromone profile to five decimal places but I don’t know his middle name or his hometown or whether he prefers coffee or tea.
This is fine. I’m fine. Everything is completely fine.
And Kael.
The memory of his arrival surfaced—not the heat-distorted, sensation-based kind, but a sharp, clear, high-definition recollection that my brain had preserved with archival-quality fidelity because Kael Sørensen’s miserableface in a doorway at four in the morning was apparently the kind of data my mind considered worth cataloguing at full resolution.
His annoyed expression. The bloodshot eyes. The wrinkled sweats. And my response: brushing him off. Choosing the shower with Renzo over the confrontation with the man whose frosted-pine signature had been seeping through the ventilation system all night, whose scent my sleeping body had been tracking with the devoted, compass-needle persistence of an Omega biology that hadn’t received the memo that the conscious mind was not on speaking terms with this particular Alpha.
The shower with Renzo was divine, by the way.
That memory was clearer than it had any right to be—steam-softened, water-warm, carrying the specific, intimate clarity of an experience that had happened after the heat’s peak had subsided and my awareness had resurfaced enough to record with fidelity. Renzo in the shower. The hot water streaming over both of us. His green hair darkened to emerald, slicked back from his face, revealing the sharp architecture of his cheekbones and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. His hands lathering soap along my shoulders with a tenderness that was less foreplay and morecare—the unhurried, genuine attention of a man who was washing a woman’s body because she needed to be clean, not because he was angling for round two.
And then he’d knelt.
Not in the desperate, begging way that Luka had knelt on a frat house floor twenty-four hours earlier. In the quiet, deliberate,this-is-for-youway of a man who had identified a need and was addressing it without being asked. His mouth finding the space between my thighs while the watercascaded over his shoulders and the steam turned the tiny ensuite bathroom into a cloud, and the sounds I’d made had probably been audible on adjacent floors because Renzo Viteri’s tongue was not merely good at what it did—it wasdevastating. The man ate like I was the finest dessert he’d ever encountered and he intended to savor every component before requesting the recipe.
Okay. OKAY. Moving on. Moving aggressively on before my face melts off my skull.
I moved my hands from my face. Stared at the ceiling—a standard, plaster, non-judgmental ceiling that offered no opinions about the sexual archaeology I was conducting beneath it—and took a breath.
Then I looked left.
Maddox.
He was sleeping on his back. The default posture of a man whose frame was too broad to comfortably sleep in any other configuration—the shoulders requiring lateral real estate that side-sleeping couldn’t accommodate, the chest rising and falling with the deep, measured rhythm of a body in genuine rest. His arm was beneath me. The right one, extended under the pillow my head was resting on, the forearm disappearing beneath my shoulders in a position he’d assumed at some point during the night and had maintained through the duration of his unconsciousness.
The poor man probably has arm paralysis. That limb hasn’t had circulation in hours. He’s going to wake up with pins and needles that last until next Tuesday and he won’t be able to grip a hockey stick for the morning session.
Guilt aside, he looked good in sleep. The severity that his waking expression carried—the enforcer’s default composure, the guarded stillness, the jaw that always seemed to bebracing for an impact that hadn’t arrived yet—had softened. His dark-blue hair was mussed against the pillow, the jet-black highlights catching the faint, ambient light filtering through the curtains. His features, relaxed, were handsome in a way that his conscious face obscured—the strong brow less stern, the jaw less set, the mouth?—
His mouth is slightly open. Like a man who fell asleep mid-thought and forgot to close the hardware. It’s oddly endearing for someone whose waking presence communicates “I could bench-press your car.”
His scent was muted in sleep. The dark cedar still present—always present, the resinous, old-growth foundation that was as permanent as the man himself—but the charred-ember warmth and the storm-air electricity had banked to their resting states, producing a gentler, more ambient version of his signature. Cozy. If a six-foot-three defensive enforcer could be described ascozy, Maddox Hale in sleep was the evidence.
I turned my head right.
