“How about my tits have gone up at least a size, maybe more, and apparently, I’m so damn sensitive now, I can come from nipple play alone.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Silence, actual silence, coming down the phone line let me know how much of her attention I had. “Really?”
“Really.”
Trying to keep things clinical, I filled her in on our morning’s hijinks—the changes in my body, this need for ‘tending.’ I admit, now I was sitting down and focussing, I was beginning to feel a little…antsy. But hey, I was throwing axes with the guy I’d spent my teenage years fantasising over so…
“So they’re going to need to tend to you on a regular basis until you… Shit, when was your last period?”
“What?” I asked.
“When was your last period? They’re talking about things escalating, and I’d be willing to bet ovulation is gonna be what pushes you over the edge. C’mon, Riles, you’ve read the theories about omega’s heats. The first one comes not long after he or she chooses their mate, and then at three-month intervals until—”
“They have kids,” I said. “But that’s not what’s happening here.”
“Isn’t it? We need to get you into the lab, take some swabs. Breasts can increase up to twenty-five percent during sex if a girl’s having a good time, but that increased blood flow is a temporary thing. What if this is part of what an omega goes through, your latent genes pumping more and more blood to all your good bits—”
“Keeping me in a state of continual sexual arousal.”
I whispered that last bit, turning around to see Fen chatting to the guy at the bar.
“But is this permanent? Will your body go through a second puberty, laying down fatty and fibrous tissue, increasing your milk ducts in preparation…”
Her voice trailed away. No, not really, just my ability to listen to it. Was this what was happening? Was I changing? Was a secret part of me switching on, changing me, making me into—
“Well, well, what do we have here?”
My eyes jerked around to see some of the guys making all the noise down in the other lanes had come over, clustering around my table. The speaker, a massive blond dude that made Thor look like a little freaking baby, leaned over, putting his arms on the end of my table, probably to draw attention to his freakishly large biceps. Candy was still talking excitedly, but I wasn’t hearing it, because as I took a deep breath in, I was hit with something I shouldn’t have been able to smell.
I knew my pack’s scents because even though I was a beta, I wasn’t anosmic, but all of a sudden, I got a glimpse into what alphas and omegas experience. I was hit by this rich, dense scent. Part wood, part smoke, and was that an earthy, peaty undertone? Kinda like the way Scotch tastes. My mouth filled with saliva then, something I quickly swallowed as my heart began to race.
Run. There was that pulsing instinct again.Run!she insisted, deep inside me, but I dug my fingers into the wooden tabletop, hanging on for dear life.
“And what’s a pretty like you doing sitting here all on her own?” Thor dude asked. “I’m Mark, and this is my pack.” He held out a hand then, something I just stared at, like I was an alien that had no understanding of social rituals at all, while somehow, I understood this all too well.
Don’t touch him. That beat strong and true inside me.Don’t let him touch you.
So I pulled away, wanting to put as much distance between him and me as I could without actually running, because I knew what this was and what that would do.
He was an alpha, though what the fuck they were doing in the city, I didn’t know. His scent, his pack’s scent, filled my lungs, choking me, and he was looking at me like I’d just announced it was steak and blow job day and I was the one about to administer them.
Like I was an omega.
“Shake hands now,” he said in a deceptively friendly voice, the thread of command almost disguised by the tone, and my hand twitched in response. “You don’t want to be rude.”
But I did, I really did. I wanted to use said hands to flip the guy off, tell him to back the fuck off to his lanes, and leave me the fuck alone, but my lips didn’t move and my hand just did as it was told, sliding slowly across the tabletop. He watched it come closer with a satisfied smile, the guys around him rumbling in appreciation.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Fen’s voice was like a welcome splash of water on my face, breaking Mark’s hold on me, allowing me to jerk my hand back. I cradled it against my chest like a wounded bird, but as Fen shoved himself between the other alphas and me, I found my shaking hands grabbing my phone.
“…so maybe it’s a wholesale shift in your endocrine system—”
“Candy,” I croaked out. “I need you to listen. Meet me at the lab. We’ll be there soon.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll just send the guys home and be there in fifteen?”
Guys? Of course she had guys.