Page 5 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

Damien stared at me. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Are you going into heat?” He said it too fast and far too loud. Two men by the doors turned their heads. My face went as hot as a furnace. “If it’s a true heat, you need to get to the clinic.”

“Thank you, Dr. West. I’d planned to wander the streets composing poetry.” Damien was a beta but I still wanted him to be there when I went to the clinic. To keep the alphas in line.

“I’m serious.”

“First time today.”

He reached for my arm. I stepped back fast enough that my heel hit the curb, and the movement sent a low pulse between my thighs. My breath caught before I could stop it.

“Let me take you.” His face changed from irritation to concern, and somehow that was worse.

My body had reached a conclusion my heart was still catching up with. Damien wasn’t safe for this. Not because he’d hurt me. He simply wasn’t mine, and the thing waking under my skin knew it with humiliating certainty.

“No.”

“Don’t be stubborn.”

“I’m not being stubborn. I’m exercising my right to choose.”

“You’re shaking.”

“That’s from the effort of not using this textbook to hit you over the head.” I pressed the book flat to his chest and let go. “There. A happy ending for one of us.”

“Marli.”

I turned and strode away before he could produce anything that sounded like an apology that would work. Pride is a magnificent thing.

That pride carried me past the athletic center doors, past hockey players pretending not to look or smell, past the bus stop where a woman gripped two grocery bags.

“Oh God.” I bent at the spine, and pressed my hand against a tree. The bark was wet and rough under my palm, and my breath came out shallow as heat rolled through my pelvis with a promise of pleasure. But tears stung my eyes. I had nowhere to go.

“No,” I whispered, and then hated myself for sounding pathetic and whispering to a tree.

My phone buzzed.

Damien.

I declined it. It buzzed again, and I declined that too, and then it rang a third time. This time Nina’s name was on the screen.

“Hi,” I answered.

“Are you at the clinic?” she said. “Damien tried to call me.”

“No, I’m at a tree.”

“You’re at a what?”

“There’s a tree on the path near the bus stop. It’s holding me up.”

“Marli. You need to get to a heat clinic.”

“You need to be pre-registered.”

“You have time to register, come home, and have a cold shower. You might be able to stop it. Just overload on suppressants.”