Page 58 of Bad Girl

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“The way both you and Tris have been treated.” I watched those brown eyes harden, his jaw flexing. “I obviously know that this is common, but somehow, it becomes more immediate when it happens to someone you know. My great-grandfather was one of the alphas that helped push the original anti-discrimination bill that afforded omegas some rights, so I guess I’m shocked at how little has changed.”

I snorted, something eminently unladylike and unsuitable for an omega, but somehow I felt emboldened. Crying like that, it lowered my defences, made it easier for him, for all of them, to get in.

“Nothing will change, James, not until alphas take responsibility for themselves. Betas like omegas well enough, but they’ve never claimed to turn into slavering beasts at one sniff of us. You do. We take suppressants or use enhancements, depending on what an alpha wants, to either keep down our natural reactions for fear of making you rampant and losing control, or exaggerate them so you can enjoy us more fully. You rule the whole damn world. There is more money, more land, more guns, more everything in the hands of alphas across the world than any other designation, but for some reason, your instincts are so strong, so vital, they can’t be contained.”

My smile was bitter, vicious, and I was aware dimly that James wasn’t the right person to be lashing out at, but perhaps I could blame my weak omega nature for that.

“All the measures to ‘protect’ us take away our autonomy, our freedom, our choices. We are chattels, precious but without self-determination. We are what you decide we are, because whatever the hell it is that makes you an alpha apparently can’t tolerate anything else.”

For a second, I felt real fear. I’d just read the riot act to the man my whole family was invested in me mating, and his response? He just blinked, and I wondered what he was bloody thinking, but I needn’t worry. Like any alpha, he’d tell me soon enough.

“I…I feel like I’m not innocent of anything you describe. The thought of you walking out into the world, especially looking like that…” His eyes raked up and down my body. “I’ve been to school with too many idiots who see an unescorted omega as fair game, even more so if she doesn’t have a family name to protect her. That’s what I want to do, what beats inside me, drowning out everything else. I know what being a Chadwick says to people, that if I gave the two of you my name, there’d be so many more freedoms you’d be allowed. That’s not right.”

I watched him frown, shake his head.

“That shouldn’t be the way it is, but…” When he looked up at me, I felt his gaze as an almost physical thing, and then the cruel, delicious reality of being an omega in the presence of an alpha hit me. “Do I want to control you? No. But your pleasure?” His tongue swiped across his lips. “Tristan insists that he determine who touches you tonight, but in some ways, that fits well with what I need right now. I need to see the two of you beyond pain or so damn deep in it, it becomes a kind of pleasure you’ve never experienced. I know that makes me a bad man, an alpha who won’t rein in his impulses, exactly as you say. One who would love to see the two of you drop some aphrodisiacs, burn with the power of your heat, and then transmute all that pain into tying yourselves tighter to each other, knowing you ache for Len and I to take over.”

He cast his dark spell over me, and right as I was sinking deep, a little whine about to escape my lips, he packed all that smouldering alpha back behind a cool façade.

“I was born to a kind of power, and I want to use that to make things better, otherwise why become an artist? The creative impulse, it doesn’t seek to replicate what is, but what could be. Perhaps that’s why I’m pulled so hard towards the two of you. Maybe the four of us can create something so beautiful, so new, the world will stand still to gaze upon us.”

I smiled then and felt actual pleasure for once. Somehow, it felt safe here, in his car, to do so.

“But I find myself considering what I said before, and if that felt like yet another load of alpha bullshit—”

I had my belt off and leant across the centre console of the car, pressing my lips to his in what would normally be construed as a platonic kiss. Close-mouthed, it silenced him and the tangent he was about to go on. Then his strong hand moved, tangling his fingers in the long, perfectly coiffed curls I’d worked so hard on, and I didn’t care.

“Talk to me,” he said, our lips only millimetres apart. “If I’m coming on too strong or too bossy.”

“See, that there is the difference,” I said. “At the risk of contradicting myself, I have no desire to suppress what I am. I am an omega, and I want to submit to a worthy alpha. I want him to boss me around, order me to do the things I so desperately need to, but when the omega recedes, there’s just Kit and just James.” I pulled back slightly so I could look into his eyes. “I need someone who’ll recognise that I’m a person, fully formed and perfect as I am, with needs and wants and dreams, just like you have, and that together, we work on making them possible.”

“Oh, Miss Greyson.” His fingers stroked the shell of my ear. “Your father has no idea. He thinks he has the perfec

t mould to force you into, but all you need to be is exactly yourself to capture me.”

A little nipping kiss to punctuate the conversation, and then he pulled away, putting his hands on the wheel.

“We are going to be hopelessly late to the opening.”

I grinned in the darkness, my hand sliding across the gap between us to rest on the top of his muscular thigh, and he shot me one last smouldering look before pulling the car away from the curb.

Chapter 24

“My goodness, who is this fetching creature?”

A man saw us the moment we walked in the door of the gallery, breaking off his conversation and striding over to greet James.

“Philip, you’ve outdone yourself,” James said, glancing at the walls.

“Eh, I already hate every single piece and would cheerfully take the paintings out the back, douse them with petrol, and set them on fire as some kind of performance artwork about the rabid consumerism in the fine arts.” The man sucked in a breath after that rant, then smiled as he stared down at me. “Especially when nature seeks to outdo me at every turn. Who are you, sweetheart? This face…”

Philip was tall, with a dishevelled mop of dark curls that were way too long and soulful light brown eyes that seemed to see everything. He was dressed in a ragged white T-shirt splattered with paint and well-worn jeans hanging low on pleasingly narrow hips, but for all his raffish artist exterior, this boy knew what he was doing. He was as much an artwork as the paintings on the wall.

But when he reached out to touch my jaw, the intense growl from James had us both turning his way.

“Ohhh…” Philip said, then grinned. “I thought she looked familiar. This is her.”

“Phil, for fuck’s sake—”


Tags: Sam Hall Fantasy