by Kathryn Moon
And I had my own secret hopes when it came to a relationship with Lola.
Those were long game though.
I turned the water on, and it rushed to fill the giant basin as I hunted down a few things to throw in. Some aromatherapy oils for relaxation, my favorite dense bubble bath. I frowned at the water and wondered if Lola was a glitter bomb kind of girl. I didn’t mind being a little extra, especially when I was just chilling at home, but this seemed like a kind of somber day. I picked a deep blue bath bomb instead and then shook my head at myself.
Just throw the whole damn bath department in, Rake.
“Smells good.”
I jumped as Lola stepped up to the ledge at my side, bending and sticking one delicate, pale foot into the churning water. I swallowed my own tongue as I turned and watched her sink into the water, rounded hips devoured by greedy water. Not that I could blame it. I wanted to be the thing that was surrounding every inch of Lola’s naked skin. Her waist was tiny, but her tummy was slightly rounded and I wanted to hold her against my chest, feel her breasts pressed to me as she gasped for breath.
Get. Sex. Off. The mind.
Easier said than done for an omega, but I pushed myself away from the ledge of the tub and tore my eyes off Lola’s skin as I hurried to undress and join her in the water. Her gaze was shuttered as I sank into the water, and I tried not to worry about whether or not she was as interested in my body as I was in hers. When she immediately moved to curl into my side, I gave into the triumphant feeling in my chest, even if it was accompanied by an excruciating awareness of her skin against mine.
“Sorry. Is it okay if I…?” she asked, sneaking under my arm.
I wrapped it around her shoulders and pulled her flush against me. “Of course. I’m glad you came here.” Lola’s eyebrows raised, and I fumbled. “I missed you this week. I was trying to think of excuses to have you around again.”
Some of the hollow shock Lola’d been wearing since she’d woken from her nap was replaced by a pink blush over her cheeks.
“I should probably start pampering you then,” she said.
“How about this time it’s my turn?” I held my breath as Lola offered me a shy smile. We were up to our shoulders in bubbly water, the taps turning off automatically when it was full and the jets still running. I pulled Lola gently between my parted legs and then reached for the extendable shower head attachment.
She nodded and I switched it on, running warm water down over her head, carefully brushing her strands back, feeling her sigh and soften in front of me.
“You’re good at spoiling someone,” she said as I turned the water off and grabbed my shampoo from the ledge.
“Lollipop, I haven’t even started,” I said, the dark purr coming out in the words unintentionally.
It didn’t scare my girl off though. Instead, Lola relaxed into my chest, letting me work an oversized handful of shampoo into her blonde strands. I wondered if she felt the slight hardness of my cock against her back. She had to, didn’t she? She didn’t seem to mind. She hummed as I dug my fingers into the roots of her hair and then down the tight muscles of her neck.
Lola needed a massage. Could I give her one without getting a massive erection? Probably not if she was going to make those cute noises at the back of her throat.
Don’t think about sex.
Lola would make a good omega. A girl like this, sweet and a little vulnerable, talented too, was the kind of personality alpha packs would hand over their nuts for. It was acid in my stomach to know that someone had abused those qualities in her.
My pack wouldn’t.
For the first time since I’d met Leo—back when Odette had still held him pinned under her boot—I found myself wanting to encourage my alphas to take in a new pack member. I’d told Lola I hated it when betas came sniffing after my alphas, and here I was wanting to matchmake them with her. But I wanted her closer, not just stealing time with her while we waited for Leo to return.
I finished washing Lola’s hair, and she floated away from me. The hot water that took her place against me seeming cold by comparison.
She faced me, hair wet and plastered down her neck to her shoulders, lips smiling. Those were dark circles under her eyes. Ones she’d always taken care to cover around me before and I wanted to see erased.
“I have a crush on you,” I blurted out.
Lola’s smile bloomed, and a soapy hand reached up from the water to cover her face for a brief second before lowering again.
“I know. I have a crush on you too,” she said.
I grinned back at her and took the soapy hand, tugging her through the water. I leaned in, and Lola’s nose bumped against mine, our smiles too wide for the brief meeting to be considered a kiss. She settled, and her lips pulled softly at mine until my smile vanished with a low moan.
This girl. This fucking girl needed to be mine, one way or another.
Fifteen
Lola
“Lola,” Leo rasped in my ear.
I opened my eyes to find Leo crouching in front of me. I leaned into his touch as he pushed strands of hair out of my face.
After the bath with Rake—which left me in a dizzy, happy haze of soft kisses—and a lunch laid out by a mysterious fairy whom I suspected was Caleb, I fell back asleep, this time on the hammock with Rake while watching something in French. Apparently, it was Rake who was into the ‘artsy shit’ Leo had mentioned.
“Hey there, gorgeous,” he whispered.
“Hey. You’re home.”
He leaned in, and my eyes shut as he pressed a kiss to my forehead. “I’m home. Fuck, it’s good to see you. I’ve been so worried.”
“No, it’s… I’m fine, Leo, honestly. The text freaked me out just ‘cause…” I shook my head, and Rake stirred behind me.
“What times’it?” Rake mumbled.
“After eight,” Leo said, smiling at his omega. “You two wanna come upstairs with me? I brought pasta, and I won’t tell anyone if we eat it in bed.” My lips quirked at that, and Leo ducked down for a quick kiss. “Do you have your phone, gorgeous?”
“It’s on the table.”
“Would you let Wes look it over? He might be able to track down where the phone was when the text was sent.”
I frowned and pushed up on the hammock, Rake’s arm slipping from around my waist. “The police said—”
“The police have to use legal channels,” Leo said, picking up my phone from the table. “Wes doesn’t. But it’s up to you.”
He held my phone in his open palm and I picked it up, swiping it open and changing the lock settings. “So he won’t need the passcode.”
“Thank you,” Leo said with a sigh.
I combed my hair back with shaking fingers and shrugged. “Thank you. Thank Wes. I’m just… I’m okay. If it’s better that I go back to the apartment—”
“No!” Leo and Rake both said at the same moment.
“I want you here,” Rake said.
“So do I.”
“The others…” I started, and Leo shook his head.
“They…they’re all glad to have you here too, they’re just trying to stay out of your hair.”
“It’s their house, Leo,” I said, frowning. “They don’t have to hide from me.”
“Come on, let’s go upstairs. Eat carbs. We’re all being way too considerate, worrying about how everyone else is feeling. Time for some omega selfish self-care lessons,” Rake said.
He slid off the back side of the hammock and Leo caught me as it swung in the other direction, pulling me to my feet. “Take the elevator up, I’ll be there in a minute.”
“There’s an elevator?” I said, gaping at them both.
Rake shook his head at Leo. “Babe, we were trying not to spook her.”
“The house is six stories, seven with the garden floor, of course there’s an elevator,” Leo defended with a baffled smile. “I take it you haven’t mentioned the pool?”
“Leo!”
; “Oh, Jesus,” I said, covering my eyes.
“You are such a troll,” Rake said to Leo, trying to stifle his laughter as he came and wrapped an arm around me. “Come on, Lola, he’s just real estate bragging now.”
I hadn’t seen the elevator because it was at the back of the house, but it was a beautiful old cage elevator with soft dark velvet paneled walls. It was a small and romantic space trimmed in gold, and Rake and I fit comfortably inside, but it could probably have fit five at a squeeze. It was full of the scents of the pack, but after spending the day in the house I was starting to get used to them, almost as if they were background noise.
“Wes is good, and I don’t think he’s ever met anybody who doesn’t owe him at least one favor. He’ll track the asshole down,” Rake said, hand stroking my back absently.
“I don’t want to find him, I just want to know he can’t find me,” I said.
Rake’s fingers squeezed gently on my side as the elevator slowed and settled to a stop. As soon as Rake opened the elevator gate, I gasped.
“So this floor is an addition that Leo and Matthieu came up with. They like their open spaces.”
There were two dividing walls running down the hall on either side of us, but the wall opposite us was entirely glass, and the ceiling overhead was made of thick glass bricks, letting in light but warping the view.
“Matthieu’s side is to the left, Leo has the right side.” Rake held my hand in his as he pulled me down to the doorway that led to Leo’s suite. The space was surrounded by floor to ceiling windows, some curtained and others hanging open to reveal a balcony around the outside of the building, dense with greenery.
“Leo came up with this place?” I asked.
“He found the property. Matthieu and Caleb picked out an architect to redesign the space with Caleb’s input. Caleb wanted to be sure it didn’t feel like one of those sterile contemporary lofts everyone has.”
‘Everyone’ they knew at least. I hoped Leo hadn’t told any of them about my shoebox—cardboard walls included—apartment.
“Bed’s this way.”
Rake’s bed had been massive, which I guess made sense as the omega, but I was surprised to find that Leo’s was equally so. The mattress would fit Rake, Leo, and I with plenty of room to spare. For the first time since Leo had mentioned his pack being open to outside relationships, I wondered what those relationships looked like. Was Rake used to sharing with Leo and his alphas? Did they regularly bring in beta girls like me to play around with?
Not like you, that’s for sure.
I couldn’t imagine it. If Leo had been looking for easy sex to share with his pack, he would’ve run the other way after getting to know me.
The bed was on a platform in front of a windowed wall with wood slat shutters that were angled, striping the sheets with sunlight. Rake crossed to the bed, crawling on his knees to the center and then flopping face down. I smiled at his sprawled form and joined him, kneeling just out of reach.
“How did you meet your pack?” I asked.
Rake rolled over, his thin t-shirt rucking up his stomach slightly, and rubbed his hand over the stubble on his jaw. “Um, through the Omega Center. But Wes, he worked for a different security company at the time, and he didn’t have a pack. I was his first assignment, and we just… It’s weird to say it because I know what people think of omegas and their alphas, but Wes is like my brother. He’s not my alpha because he throws me into heat or I put him in rut. He’s my family. He’s who I trust to keep me safe, to keep my pack safe too. So he joined the pack when I did.”
“Baby met her pack through the Omega Center, but she was a late bloomer. How does it work when you’re still a teenager?”
“Right,” Rake nodded, wiggling backward into the pillows and waiting for me to join him. I settled against his side before he continued. “So I started kids’ modeling when I was fourteen or so, and my perfume came in a year later. The Omega Center advised that I quit modeling and just worry about school until my maturity hit, or at least get a beta security team if I insisted on modeling. But I liked Wes when I met him. He was cool and just out of the military, the kind of badass a teenage boy is inclined to look up to,” Rake said with a smile.
“So I hired him and a beta. Eventually, when Wes and I knew that my perfume wasn’t an issue for him and his pheromones weren’t for me, we just flipped off the Center and kept working together for about five years. Baby didn’t get to go through it, but like…maturity kind of just starts as this general sort of itch. Like little mini heats popping up for ten minutes where suddenly, you wanna just rub up against any available surface. One day, when I was twenty, I popped a boner in a swimsuit photoshoot.”
Rake grinned with me. “I know. I was twenty. Pretty embarrassed. And Wes wouldn’t let me fuck the lighting team, so we left the shoot and headed back to the Omega Center. They opened up their magical binders of alpha scent cards, and I found three packs I liked. This one was the only one where the alphas didn’t seem phased by the idea that I wanted to keep working. And Matt and Wes immediately got along, while all the other packs acted like Wes was a threat to their authority as my alpha. No thanks,” Rake finished with a wave. “So yeah it’s been…eleven years now.”
I rolled to my back and squinted up at the ceiling. “It sounds kind of…businessy.”
“Yeah. I had a romantic period when my perfume first showed up where I thought I’d meet my pack on my own. But…well, let’s just say it was good I had Wes during that time. The Omega Center isn’t always the most unbiased or natural way, but it is safe. And yeah, there were some growing pains at the beginning, but I can’t imagine being in any other pack now.”
“You would’ve scared off any other alphas by now,” Leo said, entering his bedroom while carrying a tray stacked with takeout boxes that made my mouth water with the smells of garlic and tomato and butter. He toed off his shoes and I folded my legs beneath me to make room for him to sit across from me.
“Baby got her perfume while we were at a biker bar in Old Uptown,” I said.
Rake snorted. “God, what a mess. Wait, was it the bikers she ended up with?”
I sucked in a deep breath. There were worse ways to start the story, after all, and after this morning and them opening their home to me, I kind of owed them the truth.
“No, it was a different pack,” I said, watching as Leo parceled out cloth napkins hastily wrapped around silverware to each of us. “She met the beta of one of her alphas there. Seth had his alpha’s scent mark on him, and he was there to discuss a truce between the two packs. He smelled Baby, and she smelled him and that alpha scent and…knew immediately, I guess. He figured out what was happening, and he took her to the Omega Center.”
“Aww. And then she ended up with his pack? How cute,” Rake said. He cracked open a box of ravioli and took a deep breath before releasing a moan.
I glanced at Leo and found his eyes on me, watchful and waiting as if he knew what I would say next.
“I didn’t realize she was perfuming, and I’d hugged her and then went to dance. That was the night I met Buzz.”
Both men were quiet, and Rake lowered his fork back down into the pasta. Dumb. Should’ve waited until you were done eating. But I wasn’t sure I could keep food down and tell the story at the same time.
“Um…I was…I was kind of always trying to chase after alphas back then,” I said, voice thinning to a whisper. “And I didn’t know about the perfume that night. It was just the first time an alpha had responded to me in that way, with so much focus and interest. I don’t know what he thought, that I’d bought a hit of perfume or whatever, but…he kept me around for a few days. And it was kind of exciting, and mostly he was…not sweet, but he was intent. And then one night, it just stopped and he told me to leave and went to look for a new fuck buddy. I saw Baby’s text on my way out and realized what happened.”
“This is the asshole that texted you?” Rake asked, brow furrowed. “What a dick.”
&n
bsp; I shook my head and forced myself to breathe through my pounding heartbeat. “I went to see Baby as she was packing up her apartment, and she… I asked her for her sweatshirt and she let me take it. I figured Buzz knew I wasn’t an omega, it wasn’t like I was trying to fool him I just—”
“Oh, gorgeous, hey,” Leo murmured, pushing the tray aside and crawling forward to wipe away tears I hadn’t noticed running down my cheeks.
“He didn’t bother playing nice after that, and I don’t know why I was so determined to stay,” I said, high and breathless.
“Lola, alphas have a pull. I’ve been there,” Leo said, putting his hands on my knees and giving me a comforting squeeze.
“Wes will find him,” Rake said to reassure me.
“No. Buzz is dead.”
“What?” Leo asked, leaning back, face paling with shock.
I groaned and covered my face with my hands. Rake’s palms settled on my shoulders, cupping them gently.
“When I tried to get Buzz’s attention again, he… He was the president of his motorcycle club, the Hangmen. He said he wanted to watch me with Indy, his Vice President. The pair of them…they called it sharing, but it was more like taunting and I…I just put up with it. The whole time. I was basically living there, begging them to be awful to me,” I pushed my hands back, holding my hair away from my face, but I couldn’t bring myself to make eye contact with either Rake or Leo. “They wanted me to see Baby again. I think they wanted to know if I could get her to come back to their clubhouse, but she was already with her pack so they made me go with them to see her.”
“What happened?” Rake asked.
“Lola, you don’t have to—”
“We went. I…hated being there. Baby stayed with her pack. I left with them. They were angry, one of the Howler’s betas had pissed Buzz off. He left me with Indy and…I think someone spiked my drink. I—” I couldn’t tell them everything. I didn’t remember, I didn’t want to remember that night. “I left the next morning. A few weeks later, the Hangmen were raided by the police. They’d been trafficking women out of the city and when the police caught up to them, Buzz was shot. Indy disappeared. He’s the one who texted me.”