Page 2 of Alpha's Two Omegas

“Me?”

His faux-innocence didn’t work on me. And he knew it. I knew him too well.

Finally, he relented. “I wasn’t going to set a booby-trap or anything, Ty. Give me some credit. I just thought maybe someone had seen the mugger coming out of the other end of the alleyway, that was all.”

“That’s all?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Alder,” I said again, not liking that little addition of ‘pretty much’ at all.

“It’s the alleyway right outside my building. I was just going to have a little look, that’s all.”

“To see what?”

“Just… anything I could see.”

The trouble was, I knew Alder better than I knew myself and I was absolutely certain he was up to something. I heard the begging sound in my own voice as I asked, “Please don’t do anything reckless.”

“I won’t. I just want to take a look.”

There was nothing else I could do. I trusted Alder and I knew that, for all he was a bit… reckless, he wasn’t stupid. It was just that the thought of something bad happening to him made my stomach squirm and my heart rate pick up. I wanted to protect Alder more than anything. I also loved the fact that he didn’t actuallyneedmy protection. I just wanted to give it to him. I wanted to give him everything.

I’d been in love with Alder for years. Since we were in junior school, in fact. I didn’t even remember when exactly I fell in love with him. All I knew was that he was the most important person to me when I was a kid and that had never changed. My mum still joked about the time my grandma asked me if I was going to marry a nice omega when I grew up and I’d said, “No, I’m going to marry Alder.”

She’d asked, “Isn’t Alder nice?”

I’d shaken my head. “No, he’s not nice to other people. Only to me.”

And that was true. Alder was one of a kind. He wasn’t reallyniceto a lot of people because he had a really short attention span for people who were hard work. And Alder found alotof people hard work.

“They’re just so slooooow,” he’d say

I’d heard him complain about that on more than one occasion. I would say that about half the time that was true. The fact was that half the people who talked to Alder were slow, but the other half were perfectly normal. It was just that Alder was a genius and most normal people couldn’t keep up with him.

And, if that sounded like I was in love with him for his mind, that was true. I was. Except the part of me that was in love with him for his body, too.

Yeah, I didn’t feel great about perving on my best friend but he was so sexy that it was hard not to.

I cleared my throat, trying to drag my mind back to the conversation. The pause had given Alder time to wander over to the table, though, and he was rifling through the bills.

“Any luck with these?”

“Not really.”

Alder poked at them but didn’t really try to read them. He’d already seen them.

I cleared my throat again, building up to saying what I needed to say. Alder raised an eyebrow at me again. He knew what was coming.

“We need a new housemate,” I said.

Alder sighed, and he managed to fill that sound withallthe arguments he was about to make. I knew them before he even spoke.

“But people are so annoying.”

“I know,” I said.

“I don’t want annoying people all up in my personal space.”