Page 24

“Mm.” She goes back to carving. “I’d go home and get some extra blankets if I were you.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you smell like an omega whose body finally got what it’s been waiting for,” she says. “Your heat’s coming early, baby. Very early. I’d say tomorrow. Maybe tonight.”

I stand there with my mouth open.

“Shoo,” says Mother Wren. “I have customers.”

* * *

She’s right.

By the time I get home, I’m warm. Not hot, just warm, like I walked too fast in the sun. My skin feels too tight. My hair feels too heavy. And everything, every single thing, smells like Rowan.

He’s out in the yard, splitting wood for the stove, and when I come through the gate, he stops mid-swing and turns around.

His nostrils flare.

He sets down the axe very carefully. Then he looks at me, and his eyes are almost black.

“Hattie,” he says. Low. Dangerous. Happy.

“Mother Wren says my heat’s coming early.”

“I know. I can smell it.” He takes one step toward me, then makes himself stop. I watch him do it. I watch his hands curl into fists at his sides. “What do you need?”

And that’s the thing that gets me. Not the way he’s looking at me. Not the way his whole body is straining toward me like it’s all he can do to stand still. It’s that he asks. Even now. What do I need.

“Blankets,” I hear myself say. “I need… all the blankets.”

He nods once and walks past me into the house.

I’ve never had a real nest before. Not a good one. My heats have always been me, alone, in a pile of whatever I could drag on the bed, too miserable to make it nice. But this time, my body knows exactly what it wants. I strip the bed and start over, piling and folding and arranging, and Rowan just… brings me things.

Every blanket in the house. Then the quilt from the chest at the foot of the bed, the one Grandma made for whenever I finally got married. Then pillows. Then the sheepskin from in front of the fire.

Then, without a word, he pulls his shirt off over his head and hands it to me.

I press it to my face and breathe him in, rain and wood and moss and him, and my knees almost go out from under me. I tuck it right in the middle of the nest, where I’ll be lying. Then I reach out without thinking, grab another one of his shirts off the hook by the door, and add that too.

He watches me do it, and something in his face goes completely soft.

By the time it’s dark, the nest is perfect. Deep and soft and round, every corner tucked in exactly right, piled in the middle of the new bed with the carved bees all along the headboard. It smells like honey and beeswax and Rowan and me. It’s the best nest I’ve ever made in my life.

And I’m burning up.

The warm turned into hot about an hour ago. Now it’s turning into something worse. Something deeper. A slow, heavy ache low in my belly that’s spreading out through my hips and down my thighs, and my skin is so sensitive that even my dress hurts. I tear it off. It doesn’t help one fucking bit.

I’m wet. I’m so wet I can feel slick running down the inside of my legs, soaking into the blankets, and the ache inside me is getting worse and worse, this terrible hollow emptiness that makes me want to cry. I’ve never needed to get fucked this bad in my whole life.

I’ve had a lot of heats. Never one like this.

Rowan is standing at the foot of the bed. He hasn’t touched me since the yard. He’s been bringing me water and blankets and keeping the fire going, and every time he gets close, he stops himself. His hands are shaking.

I curl up in the middle of my nest, naked and burning, and look up at him.

“Rowan,” I whisper. “It hurts.”