Page 49 of Black Moon

I was a member of most of the privileged groups of the world. As much as I wanted to empathize with Brook, my true ability to comprehend was limited. Colt was a lot closer to it, and I could imagine that Brook’s situation hit home for him.

“His youngest sister, Harmony,” I explained. “She’s been off at college, and I don’t think he realized she came home when she heard about what happened. Their father died when she was very young, and Brook was already a teenager. He helped raise her.”

Colt winced, swallowing hard and then staring down at his shoes. “A whole family of omegas, huh?”

“They are,” I agreed. I wondered if that was important to Colt. Did he think we’d failed the Morgans by not taking them in or something?

The pack had certainly helped Rhonda when she’d lost her husband and still had three underage kids to care for, but now they were all independent adults, and the only reason to “take care of them” would be some backward notion that omegas were incapable of taking care of themselves.

I motioned for Colt to follow me, leading him down the main hall to the west wing, turning a little so I could look at him as I explained. “It was good, though. I think Harmony showing up calmed Brook’s fears a little. He’s practically her father, and they’ve always been closer than most siblings. He was stuck in self-protect mode, and forgot that they would want to help with that too. That it’s not always his responsibility to be the strong one.”

Colt’s smile at that was lopsided and endearing, and it made me want to kiss him. Of course, now that I was thinking about it, most everything made me want to kiss him. He was exceptionally attractive, sure, but it turned out he also had the thing that really snatched the attention of the alpha part of my brain: he was a genuinely good person.

I turned to open the bedroom door, and that was when I realized that I’d brought him to my bedroom. Dammit. I ducked my head, dropping my hand from the doorknob and swiping the palm down my face. “I’m sorry.”

“What?” he asked, his tone both joking and nervous at the same time. “Forget you’ve got another omega already booked for this week?”

I had the strangest feeling that someone had done that to him once, and my veins were flooded with an irrational urge to find out who had done it and make them sorry.

At least that cleared up my childish urge to stammer out my mistake. “This is my room. I offered you your own, since I wasn’t sure you’d want to stay right in the middle of alpha stink, and—”

“This is fine,” he answered, and without another word, he grabbed the knob, twisted, and slipped past me into my room. Just inside, he paused and took a deep breath. Gauging whether he really could handle days in the overwhelming middle of alpha scent, maybe.

Even I knew it was a lot. These rooms, bedroom, bathroom, and a small office across the hall, had been mine since childhood. I couldn’t smell them anymore, but it wouldn’t have surprised me to hear that the layers of alpha and wool and books were underlaid by the glue I’d used to build model trains as a kid.

Or, well, the scent of perpetually sexually frustrated alpha.

It wasn’t that I had never dated, or that I couldn’t find someone to sleep with, but as my father had always said, “Don’t shit where you eat.”

If I dated one of the beautiful grandsons my patients were constantly trying to shove at me and it didn’t work out, then I wasn’t nice Doctor Grove anymore. I was Doctor Grove, the asshole who broke little Jonny’s heart. Get that reputation with even one person in a town as small as ours, and it was yours for life.

There were still people who talked about how my older brother had “ruined” Brook. I didn’t think they meant in the creepy virginity-as-a-commodity way...probably. Mostly, they seemed to think that Brook had never moved past Aspen, and so his whole life was on hold, waiting for a man who was never coming back.

I didn’t want any part of the pitying looks at Brook’s back, or the whispers about how the bad, bad alpha abandoned the sweet innocent omega. Not that Brook wasn’t sweet, but his life was his own. Aspen might have left him behind, and I’d be the first person to say my brother was an irresponsible douchebag, but Brook had made his own decisions, and he’d always seemed basically happy with them.

But he also hadn’t made any effort to move on and date anyone else.

I had simply stayed out of it, because I hadn’t wanted to date any residents of Grovetown, either.

“This room is great,” Colt said, interrupting my worries. He was scanning my bookshelves with a surprising amount of interest, considering the wave of his heat pheromones tingling at the base of my neck, drawing me in after him.

“Reader?” I asked. “Those are just my favorites. We’ve got a library if there’s something specific you’d like.”

He turned and winked at me. “Just checking. Back when they had me writing pure fluff, I once wrote an article called ‘The Red Flags You Might Find on His Bookshelf.’”

I looked over at the shelf, scanning the titles and trying to imagine which among them might be seen as a red flag. I didn’t think Asimov had fallen into disrepute, and I was pretty sure Ursula K. LeGuin was practically on the docket for sainthood, but I didn’t doubt there were some questionable choices among them.

“Pretty sure I got rid of that copy of ‘How to Serve Man,’ because of the last guy who ran off screaming about cannibalism,” I said, without looking at him.

Why yes, I do use humor to cover self-consciousness, why do you ask?

He chuckled, burying his face in his hands. “I think you’re okay. Didn’t see an Ayn Rand title in the lot.”

I grimaced at the notion. “Okay, I’m not going to lie, I went through that pseudo-intellectual phase where I pretended to both read and enjoy Rand. Then I realized that no one actually cared if I preferred Octavia Butler.” I made a general hand motion toward Grovetown. “Heck, most of the people I know don’t even know who either of them are. If it’s not Nora Roberts or James Patterson, they’re not interested.”

Somewhere in the middle of my ramble, his face went from detached interest to this expression that...well hell, I could have looked into those sparkling eyes and bitten-back grin forever and been pretty happy about it.

Have I mentioned yet that Colt is stunningly beautiful?

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