Page 35 of Cold Moon

I stood there with the vase in my hands, not sure what to do with it. I wanted to apologize, but I wasn’t sure what to apologize for. Maybe I’d gotten the wrong idea, but even now, I didn’t think so. Something had changed.

Truth was, I didn’t understand a thing. So when Skye finally looked up at me, blinking his wide, blue eyes behind his glasses, and asked, “You do?” nerves soured my stomach.

In the end, what mattered more than understanding the particulars was that Skye wasn’t interested. Even if he had been interested once, he was allowed to change his mind. At the very least, I understood that.

“I do.” My knee bumped the far side of the desk when I stepped closer. Skye was still staring at me, but I shifted a pile of magazines out of the way and put the vase down there. “But I still want to thank you for... everything.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. Those are really pretty.” He pushed his glasses up by the bridge of them and leaned in to smell them.

“You’re welcome. I guess I’ll see you around then?”

“Yeah. Probably.”

“Okay. Bye.” Everything was stilted and awkward, including my hasty retreat to the door of the clinic, swinging open as Linden returned from afternoon rounds.

He nodded to me. “Dante.”

“Alpha.”

I skirted past him—couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Knew if I lingered, they’d see something I didn’t want them to see, some emotion I wasn’t ready to name, maybe ever.

20

Skye

Flowers.

He bought me flowers.

They were perfect and gold and pink and I wanted them like I’d wanted nothing else in my life, ever.

But why had he gotten them for me? Why not Harmony Morgan or, or... I don’t know. Just someone else. Someone not useless and sick andpitiable.

No one wanted a sick omega. No one wanted a partner who might waste away and leave them with lifelong control issues. No one wanted a drain on their resources that couldn’t give back.

No one wanted an omega for whom every heat was more danger than fun. On the single occasion I’d had a heat in the previous year, my temperature had spiked dangerously high. I’d ended up in the clinic, which was oh-so-sexy.

Every alpha wanted to have heat sex with their omega partner under constant medical supervision, I was sure.

Linden: You two doing okay? Need any more lube because your defective omega doesn’t produce enough slick?

Dante: Sure thing, doc. Everything under control.

Me: (incomprehensible mumbling because of the thermometer in my mouth.)

Yup. Super sexy. Not at all a nightmare.

Linden hovered in the doorway for a long time after Dante left, watching him walk away—probably from the last time he’d ever talk to me—before turning and looking at me. And at the flowers. And then at me again.

It was subtle, the way he sniffed the air, subtler than Dante had been, but I knew Linden. I wondered what pitiful smelled like. To me, it always just smelled like Skye, and I was too used to it to even notice anymore.

I figured that in his usual Linden style, he’d let it go, let me figure out my own issues. Linden was good at only sticking his nose into people’s private lives when it was obvious they couldn’t handle it themselves. Like when Mom and I had gotten into a shouting match in the clinic about her “right” to be present for my checkups because I was “living under her roof.”

He’d taken me aside that very afternoon and offered me the job.

I might have been a little in love with him at the time.

Mom had freaked out and gone over his head to his father, who had been the pack alpha at the time. She’d insisted I was incapable of holding a job, and demanded that the alpha rescind the offer, or order Linden to rescind it.

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