Chapter 2

Maybe we laughed too loud.

Because Henry soon joined us, with a burst of crying.

Before I could react, Alpha Roman already had both hands in the crib, lifting Henry out. “Shhh. I know. I know, buddy. The grown-ups were being too loud.”

Henry was not impressed. He screamed louder.

His father fumbled a little gray wolf plushie off the shelf and made it dance across his huge palm.

“Look who’s here. It’s Mr. Fang.” He pitched his deep voice up into a ridiculous squeaky tone. “Hello, Henry. Why are we screaming at this hour, Henry?”

I lost it. I had to bite my lip to keep from howling with laughter. He shot me a warning look while Mr. Fang continued his performance.

Henry hiccupped. Grabbed the toy. Stuffed an entire wolf ear into his mouth.

His father covered Henry’s whole back with one giant hand and began to rock him, humming something low and old, a melody I had never heard anywhere.

“Lively little thing,” he whispered, shaking his head with a smile. He rose without a sound and settled Henry back in the crib.

Then he turned to me, laughter still lingering on his face.

“Up for a walk?”

I should have said no. There was still heat toxin boiling in his blood, and my chest happened to carry exactly what he craved.

But refusing him was a risk I couldn’t afford. I had no intention of getting thrown out of this manor and ending up homeless after all.

---

“I’m guessing you haven’t been up the observatory tower yet,” he said as we walked the garden path.

“You have a tower?”

“Every pack does.”

“Of course. Silly me. I forgot to bring mine.”

He laughed again, quietly this time, careful of the sleeping windows above us. Then he led me toward the farthest corner of the grounds, where a stone tower rose out of the gardens like something out of a fairy tale.

An ancient elevator carried us up, slow and creaking.

We stepped out onto the open platform at the top, and I forgot how to breathe.

The whole valley spread out below us, silver under the moon. Thousands of stars spilled across the black sky, a view I had never once seen in the city.

Before I could get a word of it out, he spoke.

“It was built for moon-watching, actually.” He leaned on the stone railing beside me, close enough that I could feel the heat rolling off his body.

“The moon matters to us. It doesn’t control us the way your movies say. No forced transformations, no losing our minds. But when it’s full, everything in us gets... louder.”

“Louder?”

“Senses. Emotions.” He glanced at me sideways. “Instincts.”

I decided to look at the stars really, really hard.

He told me many things up there in the dark. How a pack works: Alphas lead, Betas hold everything together, Omegas are the ones everyone protects. How werewolves live long and heal fast. How his family had kept this valley for centuries.

“You’re not bound by the hierarchy, by the way. Feel free to just call me Roman instead of ‘that hot daddy.’”

I choked on air. “The maid told you?”

“You told me. Just now.” A slow grin spread across his face. “Before that, I only had a suspicion.”

I hated him. I hated him so much, this gorgeous, smug wolf bastard and his beautiful stupid tower.

“Okay, serious question.” I turned to face him. “Is there any chance, any chance at all, that a person could reach twenty-eight and then discover she’s secretly a super powerful werewolf? Just asking for a friend.”

“None,” he said, without a second of hesitation.

“Wow. You could have pretended to think about it.”

“Wolves show by thirteen at the latest. I’m sorry, Miss Johnson. Your friend is a human.”

“Figures.” I slumped against the railing. “Honestly, even if I were one of you, I’d be an Omega. Bottom of the ladder. That’s basically my position in the human world anyway. A complete, certified average person. Failed marriage, no career, no home. My only professional skill is producing milk, and I got that from a lab.”

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, all the teasing had left his voice.

“First. An Omega isn’t the bottom of anything. An Alpha protects the pack, but an Omega is the reason the pack is worth protecting. And second.”

He turned, and all of that deep blue attention landed on me. “An average woman doesn’t stay calm when she finds out she’s living in a manor full of werewolves. She doesn’t get my son to sleep through the night for the first time in his life, or make a grieving pack laugh again. You walked into a den full of monsters, Miss Johnson, and within two weeks, every monster in it would take a bullet for you.”

The wind moved between us. I couldn’t find a single word. Twenty-eight years of life, and no one, not my parents, not my ex-husband, no one, had ever said anything like that to me.

Finally I cleared my throat and reached for a new topic, and maybe because my brain hates me, it picked the worst one available.

“So. This heat toxin thing.” I forced myself to look at him. “What is it, exactly? Please tell me it’s not what I’m thinking.”

He paused a bit.

“It’s probably what you’re thinking.”

“Oh my God.”

“It’s a poison that traps a wolf in a permanent pre-heat state.” His tone stayed flat and even, like he was pressing it down. “Elevated temperature. Heightened senses. Constant... desire. It builds and builds until it burns the body out.” He looked away, out over the valley. “It’s been three months. I can handle it.”

“You can handle it?”

“I have control, Miss Johnson. It’s uncomfortable, nothing more. You don’t need to worry that I’ll...”

And that was the exact moment the universe decided to test his control, because I took a step back, and my heel found the one loose stone on that entire ancient tower.

I tipped backward.

He moved faster than anything I had ever seen. An arm of steel wrapped my waist, and the falling stopped. I was crushed against him, my hands fisted in his shirt, my chest pressed flat against a body as hot as a furnace.

My swollen, oversensitive nipples got seared against all that burning muscle.

My milk spilled over instantly.

“Oh no,” I whispered.

The smell bloomed between us at once, sweet, warm, unmistakable. I watched it hit him. His pupils blew wide and turned pure gold. Every muscle in the arm around my waist locked tight. A sound rose out of his chest that belonged to nothing human. Low, rough, starving.

“Sorry, they do that, when they’re full and something presses on them...” I was babbling. The wet patch on my blouse kept spreading. And low against my belly, I could feel with terrible clarity exactly how bad his condition had gotten.

“Don’t move,” he said through his teeth. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and tried to blot the stain on my blouse.

It made everything worse.

Every pass of the cloth dragged a shiver out of me, and the more he dabbed, the more the flow answered, until the entire front of me was soaked through.

“Okay. New plan.” His voice had gone hoarse beyond saving. His hands went to his own collar.

He stripped the shirt off.

His shoulders were broad and heavy with muscle. His chest was deep and solid, and below it, hard ridges of muscle stacked all the way down his stomach, every line of them sharp under the moonlight. His bare skin steamed faintly in the cold night air.

My brain crashed all over again.

He wrapped the shirt around me. It was huge and warm, and it smelled like cedar and him. Then, before I could produce a single syllable, he scooped me up against his chest with one arm, like I weighed nothing at all.

“What... I can walk...”

“You can’t be seen like this.” His jaw was tight. He hit the elevator button and carried me through the dark gardens in long, urgent strides. “And I can’t stay this close to you much longer. So we’re doing both problems a favor.”

I could hear his heart hammering, fast and violent, inside his chest.

---

By the time he shouldered open the door of my room, he was trembling.

Fine tremors, running down arms that could bend steel. Every inch of him that touched me burned. The gold in his eyes had swallowed almost all the blue, and his breathing was slow and deliberate, like every breath cost him something.

He laid me on the bed.

He stayed bent over me, one hand pressed into the mattress beside my head.

“I should go,” he said, like a man repeating a goal he had no way of reaching.

One second later, he kissed me.

Deep, burning, desperate, like he had been thinking about it for exactly as long as I had. His mouth covered mine completely, and in the small space beneath him, there was nowhere to hide.

Then he wrenched himself back, chest heaving. “I’m sorry. My control, it...”

“What if I helped?” The words escaped before my courage could consult my brain. “I mean. Hypothetically. It’s not like I’d be... completely opposed. To helping.”

He went very still. When he finally spoke, his voice was gravel and smoke.

“Think it through. If this is pity, or the money, or you feeling cornered, then say no. I’ll walk out that door and none of this ever happened. I don’t want you to feel...” His throat bobbed. “Obligated.”

Honestly, that was what decided me.

“Relax.” I pushed him gently back and sat up, working hard to sound far more casual than my heartbeat allowed. “I’ll just... use my hand.”