Secret Omega (Alpha Meets Omega Book 2)
Page 6
Once he got home, he breathed a sigh of relief and left the car parked in the driveway, making a note to retrieve the spare garage door opener from the kitchen drawer. He looked at his phone as he walked in and noted it was Barron. He called him back, afraid something was wrong.
“No. Everything is fine. I just wanted to make sure you made it home okay.”
“Yes, Mom. I’m good.”
“Funny. Very funny. Okay. I’ll pick you up at the usual time in the morning then?”
“Yep. See you then.”
“See ya.”
Thad ended the call and went on in the house. The Alpha Meets Omega notification was flashing, but he ignored it. He even considered just dropping his membership but decided against it. Instead, he opened the app and went to her profile, looking at her face for a moment. The rut was passed, but there was a longing there still. He wondered if that would pass in time or if he would always feel drawn to her; if he would always feel like something was missing when she wasn’t nearby.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jaycee
Jaycee felt out of sorts as she went about the workday, trying hard to get everything in order like Nasteau required. She wanted to quit every other hour of the day, but she was as stubborn as she was smart. It was hard enough feeling like a fish out of water in this city, but now she had Thad on her mind at awkward moments. He infested her brain like some sort of worm, burrowing in deep to reside in the dark recesses of her mind.
It came and went, the thought of him. Sometimes, she could focus for a while without her thoughts drifting off in his direction, but today was not one of those days. Her mind kept flashing back to that first night together and how he had made her feel, what she had experienced with him.
She had been no match for the power he held over her when they were together. He was like a drug, an addiction. Her body had been his to control, responding to his every touch, his every command. It was a stark contrast to her usual calm and collected manner. With him, she had become some wild creature of the night, letting her inner wolf take over.
She could still remember it, the way he growled as he leaned over her, resting his weight on his elbows, and running his tongue across her lips, demanding she let him in. His kiss was hungry, sending electricity humming along her nerve endings even as he entered her, the pulse of his cock seeming to throb in unison with her beating heart.
The way she had moaned into his mouth as he fucked her in long, deep thrusts, pulling almost completely free of her before plunging to the hilt again. She had never wanted it to end. She had wanted to be consumed by it every hour of every day for the rest of her life. The way his knot had formed, making them one entity, not letting them divide until it subsided. The way it pushed outward, splitting her open as he slammed into her forcefully.
There was nothing gentle about what they had done, and she hadn’t wanted it to be. When it came to him, she wasn’t sure if she was even capable of taking it nice and slow, being gentle. Telling him to leave had been the hardest thing she had ever done. Her body screamed to have his lips on hers, to have his hands on her breasts, his thumb teasing her clit until she could hardly stand it anymore. Even when she was sending him away, her body was begging for his.
All she could think about was how much passion had passed between them. The way their heated lips had felt on one another. Even his voice had somehow mesmerized her as he spoke, both soothing and scintillating at the same time.
He had stopped her from speaking by slipping a finger in her mouth for her to suckle, letting her tug on it greedily while he watched, with his gaze full of obvious desire. All of it had happened while he was still knotted inside her, fucking her like the animals they were, fused together.
“You belong to me now,” he growled, removing his finger from her mouth, and holding on to her breasts as he see sawed his hips to and fro to bury himself to the fullest inside her. The friction on her clit was almost unbearable, causing her to gasp aloud with pleasure. “Say it. Say you’re mine.”
Her body screamed at her to tell him what he wanted to hear, to give in to him, but her mind resisted, trying its best to keep control, to not hand it all over to this stranger she now found herself beholden to in the most intimate way. He was relentless, taunting her with each thrust of his cock.
“If you say it, I will stop teasing you. I will let you come.”
In her heightened state of arousal, she found herself giving in, giving him what he wanted – maybe even what she wanted.
“I’m yours,” she gasped, and it seemed to be exactly what he needed to hear, but he wasn’t quite there yet.
“Tell me you’re my forever. Tell me you’ll want this forever,” he said, slamming into her again, letting her feel his powerful cock spreading her open like only he could.
Her heart was pounding out of her chest as she told him what he wanted to hear. He leaned down and kissed her, letting his lips drift down her neck and across her clavicle, sinking his teeth lightly into her skin. His thrusts sped up, hitting her g-spot hard and fast until she was exploding again.
“You feel so good. Keep telling me how much you want this,” he moaned, pumping her harder as his knot had swelled, locking them together again. His teeth sank harder into her shoulder as he blasted his load deep inside her. She screamed aloud as he quivered and shook with his release. It felt like her whole body was on fire, every nerve ending singing as he filled her full of his seed.
She had been claimed as his mate forever. It didn’t matter if she wanted it, if she was ready for it. It was beyond the both of him. She had gone into heat and it had sent him into rut in response. It was a misconception that her kind’s monthly menstrual cycle was synonymous with being in heat. They were two different things.
If she had possessed any way of knowing that she would go into heat, she would have never accepted a date with him. It had never happened to her before − the way his scent drove her to spiral out of control. They had fucked over and over, primal couplings that left them both exhausted and sore. They came together, over and over again, until neither had anything left to give, or so she thought, but she knew, had she not sent him away when she woke up, they would have only started over again, giving themselves to one another until they both dropped.
Each time they fucked, his knot grew bigger and the sex more animated. In between the wild sex, he was gentle with her, holding her and kissing her with a passion unmatched by anyone she’d ever been with. There was a mix of so many emotions. She felt relieved to have found someone so perfect. She felt ecstatic and proud. Mostly, she felt satisfied. Satisfied beyond anything she had ever felt in her life.
If only she could have just accepted it and been happy with it. Instead, she had pushed him away. She couldn’t handle what he was offering her. She couldn’t control herself around him. The only way she knew how to deal with keeping her own identity was to stay as far away from him as possible and that had been much harder than she had wanted to admit even to herself.
The thoughts were still clear in her mind, the memories of what she’d experienced with him. Even keeping him at a distance, they still whirled about her head and crept into her dreams, his body filling her vision at night when she was alone and touched herself. Why she had agreed to go out with him again was beyond her.
She wasn’t in any danger of going into heat again so soon, but they were past that now. He’d established himself as her true mate and that is what he would always be, whether she allowed him to touch her or not. She would always belong to him in a way she could never belong to another Alpha.
Could she go on and live a decent life with someone else? Yes, it was possible. Omegas lost their mates all the time, to disease, accident, age. They remarried, started new families, but no one would ever be what their true mate had been to them. To deny the Alpha you were meant for was like giving up the most intense passion you could ever hope to find.
It was like losing your first love after years of marriage and
never finding another love like his. Anyone else that came along would always be second best. You could be content with someone else, but they would never be as great as what you had before. They would never be your greatest love because you only get one.
She was still lost in her thoughts when a loud noise sent her flying forward from her seat. She jerked her head up to find herself looking at the angry face of Gary Nasteau. He was holding some papers in his hand. He walked over and dropped them on her desk with a loud thud.
“I need these correlated and put into booklets within the hour. The rest are in the conference room. I have clients coming. That is, if you can tear yourself out of whatever trance you’ve been in for the past half-hour.”
“I’ll get them done,” she replied, ignoring the rest of his comment.
“See that you do. It would be unfortunate if you fail. I really don’t have time for incompetence.”
Jaycee watched him walk away, making a sour face. She looked down at the pages he had put on her desk. There were only three sets of what looked to be about twenty books. Why he hadn’t asked that they be correlated and bound by the print department was beyond her, but he seemed to get off on making even the simplest of tasks more difficult.
She picked up the stack, walked to the conference room, and groaned. There, stacked up all across the desk, was about a hundred more stacks in the same amount, some crisscrossed on top of one another due to having run out of space. She took a deep breath and began, working in small batches until she was able to get all the books built and stapled by the industrial stapler meant for heavy duty stacks like this.
She was finishing the last stack when he strolled in with his clients, looking at her accusingly. She quickly laid the booklets all around the table in front of chairs and asked if he needed anything else before she went.
“Not right now,” he snapped, waving his hand dismissively.
This was going to be a very long internship. Nasteau was a miserable old man and hellbent on making sure everyone around him was as miserable as he was. There was a part of her that wanted to quit, to just walk away, but she wasn’t the kind to just give in to defeat. Instead, she doubled down on trying to please him.
Of course, it didn’t seem to be making a dent in his ice cold, spiteful exterior, and she found herself once again wondering what he would do if she suddenly shifted and showed him just exactly who he was dealing with. He’d shit his pants if she came at him as a wolf.
It went without saying that she couldn’t do that, wouldn’t do that. Still, she thought about it from time to time; what it would feel like to put him in his place. Instead, she just reminded herself that this was only six weeks. There was little chance of him hiring her as a permanent assistant. It was like Val had said, her job here was not to impress him, but to make sure other people knew her name.
There was no pleasing Gary Nasteau and to try would most likely drive a person mad. He was bitter and selfish. In fact, she’d go so far as to say he hated women if the treatment of herself and others was any indication of his true feelings toward them. She wondered what had happened in his life that had made him this way.
Was it a failure of parenting or had someone hurt him long after he had become an adult? It was something she always found interesting about humans. Until now, she’d only had limited exposure to their kind when doing business with them through her pack’s farms. Being on the receiving end of the vitriol, on an everyday basis, was quite a unique experience.
It was not the way of her pack. They didn’t eat their own. Everyone worked together as a team, a family. That was the hardest part of leaving them. They may be simple farmers with no other ambition than raising a good crop to take to market, but they understood the value of holding one another up, of supporting their community.
She doubted that was something most people could ever find in a place like NIH. And who even stood a chance of it if men like Nasteau were in charge of molding the new members of staff. She was an intern. In any other setting, her boss would be her mentor. That is what she thought she had come here for, but Nasteau had no interested in being a teacher. He didn’t even have an interest in training an assistant.
Her sole purpose here for him was to fetch whatever he needed for him. It was disgusting and she was already sick of it, but it was a means to an end. If she could just keep him happy enough to climb the ladder, then she was golden. She’d find a better placement once her time was up.
In the meantime, she would just have to continue imagining what she’d like to do to him in her mind, without actually acting upon it. That was the trick, not to cross any lines. Living among humans where she had to keep her abilities hidden was a lot harder than she expected.
In Carnation, she could change freely in a substantial portion of the town. It was all either wolf shifters or shifter friendlies who weren’t shocked by the metamorphosis, which could be oddly beautiful, but also brutal in the way portions of the body shifted and folded, exposing blood and tissue beneath the skin and then reforming moments later.
She glanced at the clock and realized it was just after five. Nasteau was still in his meeting, so she took the opportunity to slip out and go home. It wasn’t like she was leaving early or anything, at least not by a normal person’s standards, but no doubt, Nasteau would be displeased that she didn’t wait on him to finish. It was just too bad, as his meetings sometimes went on for hours, and she wasn’t planning on sitting around with her thumb up her ass while they waffled on about golf scores and mistresses.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Thad
Though he had known she worked in the building for Nasteau, he hadn’t expected her to be in the meeting. It had been hard to keep his eyes off her and he hadn’t missed that she made every effort to not look in his direction any more than necessary. He’d wanted to talk to her afterward, but Nasteau had descended on her too quickly, barking orders in a condescending tone. It had angered him, not just for her but for everyone that had to put up with that miserable old bastard’s attitude.
It seemed like it took an eternity for Saturday to arrive, despite having had a busy week. He had even joined the pack for a night run over on Blake Island, something they got together for every month. Hopefully, he could do it one day with her, but it didn’t seem likely if she intended to remain stubborn. Still, he was determined to bring her around without using the power of their natural attraction against her. The way he saw it, he had a few weeks left before she went in heat again.
It wasn’t a lot of time to win her over, but at least he could make an impression that would make her want to reconsider. He threw on a pair of khaki pants and a sports jacket over his button down and checked himself in the mirror before heading out to the car. He hadn’t driven it since he brought it home, but he sucked up any qualms he might have about it and got behind the wheel, opening the garage door, and backing out.
The drive was uneventful, but he still felt a bit uneasy as he arrived. It was all forgotten when she opened the door. He hoped that what she was wearing was indicative of her commitment to really giving this a shot. Though she was petite, her legs looked incredibly long as they peered out from under the above-the-knee-length, body-con, black dress that clung to her every curve. Nude heels brought her closer to his height, though she was still diminutive compared to him.
“You look amazing. Are you ready to go?”
“I am,” she said, skirting past him and turning to lock the door.
Thad found himself admiring the view from behind just as much as he had the front, quickly looking away when she began to spin back around toward him. They were quickly on their way to the car.
“New ride?” she asked as they approached.
“Yes. I just got it last week.”
“It’s very nice.”
He nodded and opened the door for her to have a seat, jogging around to the driver’s side and slipping behind the wheel. Despite the bit of anxiety that remained about driving, it felt good to
be out on the road again. It felt even better to have her leaning against the cool leather seat beside him.
“I found a new Italian place I thought we might try,” he told her.
“Sounds good,” she said.
He pointed the car in the direction of the restaurant and changed the topic a bit.
“You seemed surprised to see me at the meeting with Nasteau.”
“Yes. I didn’t know you were on Hutchins’ team.”
“I’m not. We’re bankrolling it, so I was there as a consultant.”
“You were very quiet.”
“It was pretty much a done deal. All they needed to know was that they weren’t changing anything that would upset their funding from us.”
“I see.”
“Nasteau, he’s not a very pleasant person and he’s been known to screw people over in his deals.”
“How so?”
“Puts clauses in the contract at the last minute that cause people like me to withdraw funding. The buyer either has to default on the contract or tries to make the payments through other means. They fail, he profits.”
“That’s awful. Why do that instead of just making sure the deal is solid and making the profit off the sale of the building?”
“It has to do with earnest money and paying to free themselves of the contract rather than getting taken to the cleaners for all their assets in a full default. It’s catching up with him, though. Word has gotten around and so, you have people like me attending meetings with buyers to make sure they don’t get screwed over.”
“Wow. I had no idea. I mean, I knew he was demanding and mean spirited, but had no idea that he was that big of a jerk. Doesn’t seem like it’s in his best interests, long term.”
“It’s not. He doesn’t care. He’s on his way out, planning on selling it by the end of the year. Get what you can from him and be prepared to take the experience with you.”