Page 35 of Knot The Nanny We Planned

I sit on the bus bench and set my duffel bag beside me. The metal is cold through my jeans, and I shiver. The streetlight above me flickers. A taxi passes, splashing water from a puddle.

And then I smell it.

Pine.

Faint, so faint I almost miss it. But it's there. On me. On the shirt I'm wearing, not Deklan's shirt - I left that behind - but the long-sleeved shirt I changed into before I walked out. It was in my duffel bag, in the penthouse for two days, and the scent of the house has seeped into the fabric.

Pine. Smoke. Cedar.

All three of them. On me. In me. Woven into my clothes and my skin and my hair and my lungs. I've been breathing them for two days, and their scent has become part of me.

I press my face into my sleeve and inhale.

And the nesting urge hits me like a freight train.

It's not a thought. It's not a desire. It's a biological imperative, a primal, cellular demand that overrides every logical process in my brain. My omega instincts scream at me. Nest. Build. Gather. Make a home. My hands shake and my vision blurs. I can feel my body producing slick, the scent-match responding to the pine-smoke-cedar on my clothes, triggering arousal even now, even here, alone on a bus bench at 2:30 in the morning.

I want to nest. I want to gather their clothes, the shirts they wore, the sheets they slept on, the pillows that hold their scent, and build something. A place. A home. A promise.

But I left. I walked out. I chose safety over hope. And now I'm sitting on a cold bench, smelling them on my clothes, and my body is screaming at me for being the biggest fool who ever lived.

Go back, the instinct says.

I can't.

Go back. Build your nest. Let them hold you.

They'll let me go. They'll get bored. The match will fade.

You don't know that.

I know what happened to Serena.

You're not Serena.

How do I know that?

I don't. That's the thing. I don't know. I can't know. The future is unwritten, and the match is untested, and the only way to find out if it's real is to stay and risk everything. And I'm not brave enough.

I'm just not.

I sit on the bench, and I wait for the bus, and I breathe in pine-smoke-cedar and try not to cry. And I fail.

At 3:02 AM, a black SUV pulls up to the curb.

I don't look up because I don't need to. The scent that pours out when the driver's door opens is pine and smoke and Alpha and JD.

"Willow." His voice is a blade. Low and controlled, barely.

I look up.

He's standing in front of the SUV, and he looks like hell. His dark hair is disheveled, like he's been running his hands through it for hours. His eyes are black, fully black, no color left, the Alpha in him surging past every barrier he's built. He's wearing the same clothes from earlier, the suit pants, the unbuttoned shirt, the rolled sleeves, but the shirt is half untucked now, and his chest is heaving like he's been running.

Behind him, two more figures emerge from the SUV. Knox, golden hair wild, green eyes blazing, jaw tight. And Deklan, glasses absent, laptop nowhere in sight, his controlled facade cracked wide open.

They found me.

Of course they found me. I left my scent trail through the entire building, through the lobby, and across twenty blocks of city sidewalk. I might as well have left breadcrumbs.