Page 1 of The Omega Princess

1

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I HAD SEEN pictures of Prince Devlin in magazines and on the internet before, so I didn’t expect him to look much better in person.

It was usually not that way, after all. Usually, people were digitally enhanced in the media, or at least lit with flattering studio lights, dusted with powder to take the shine from their foreheads, given veto power over unflatteringly angled shots in magazines.

I thought he’d seem more normal in real life. I would see that he was only flesh and blood, and I would realize he was just a human being like the rest of us.

But that wasn’t what happened.

First, I caught a glance at him across the room. I was holding a tray of smoked salmon with goat cheese on rye crackers. Each one had a tiny sprig of dill artfully arranged over top. They were too pretty to eat, really, but people were eating them.

I’d gotten this catering gig last minute. I had a hard time holding down jobs longterm, truth be told. Drama seemed to follow me wherever I went. I was always being asked to leave or getting outright fired. I hoped that as long as I didn’t call attention to myself, I wouldn’t screw this gig up. There wasn’t much to it. All I had to do was wander and let people take things off my tray. Easy enough, right?

The prince was holding a champagne flute, wearing a dark blue suit with a canary blue tie and a yellow pocket square. His reddish-brown hair fell carelessly over his forehead, the only thing about him that didn’t broadcast his tidy respectability. He looked up and he saw me, too, and there was something about the way his dark eyes widened, about the way his brows came together, something…

My stomach turned over.

I thought, Oh, he’s much more attractive than I ever realized.

Because I had always sort of thought of him as boringly handsome. Sure, he was good-looking, but there was nothing about him that made him stand out, I always thought.

I didn’t know what it was about seeing him there, across the room like that, but I thought it was a sense of his deep, quiet, effortless power.

He was broad and tall and strong and dark and he knew it and yet didn’t flaunt it. It simply was. It emanated off of him in waves. I could feel it, somehow, even over here.

He set down the champagne he was carrying and started moving across the room towards me. He was looking at me.

No, he couldn’t be looking at me. That was ridiculous. I looked to one side and then the other, trying to figure out what he was actually looking at, why he was coming right for me. But I didn’t see anything.

I put both hands underneath the tray I was holding and I got lost in his dark eyes and he came closer and closer.

And then I realized something strange. It wasn’t that I felt his power, or his presence, or his, I don’t know, his essence? Really, that was strange enough, but this was stranger. I smelled him.

I don’t know what he smelled like, because it wasn’t something that I could graft onto some other scent. I had never smelled anything like it before. But some part of my brain knew what the scent meant, the way you know when a person is smiling that they are happy or that when a person clenches his hands in fists, he’s angry. It was something instinctive.

The scent meant power and the scent meant safety and it also meant, embarrassingly, sex.

But this, at least, I was sort of used to, because I had my strange and awful sexual issues, after all.

And his scent, it was sort of like that, except that usually, when my sexual desires took control of me, I felt frightened and out of control, and his scent was entirely soothing and reassuring. I’d be safe with him, and I knew it. I’d always be safe with him. I was supposed to go to him. I was supposed to—

He was there. He lifted the tray I was holding out of my hands and set it down on a nearby table, where several people were sitting in their dresses and jewels, and they looked up at him, miffed, then they recognized him, and none of them said anything.

“Hello,” said the prince. He was too close. His face was inches from mine and he was crowding me with his body.

If anyone else had crowded me like this, I would have stepped away. It would have made me uncomfortable. But I actually stepped closer to him, letting out a little noise that I think might have been a whine.

He clucked his tongue. “Shh,” he breathed, and then he had his nose on my neck, his hand on my face, and his—oh, geez—his teeth on the nape of my neck, right under my ponytail. He didn’t bite me, not really, just grazed my skin there.

And I collapsed into him, rushes of hot, sweet goodness flowing down my spine.

“That’s right,” he whispered in my ear, gathering me into his arms. “I’ve got you. Here you are, after all this time. I thought I was never going to find you, but here you are.”

I snuggled into his chest, drowsy and happy and home and safe, and his scent was everywhere.

“Omega,” he breathed into my skin.

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