Page 20 of The Faceless Omega

Brinley had no idea what to do with that.

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Lennox could sense her confusion, her uncertainty, despite that their bond was incomplete. She was too in her head. He’d recognized that about her the night of the masquerade party. She had the instinct to reach for him, but continued holding herself back. It might have been admirable if it weren’t also rather frustrating.

But he needed her to trust him, to listen to him, so he held that minor irritation in check.

She hadn’t liked the idea of traveling to his residence, despite that they both agreed they needed somewhere to speak with a reassurance of privacy. He could have paid to shut down a restaurant for the day, or bought out a nearby event space, but Brinley had flippantly suggested eating and talking in his car instead. She’d clearly tossed the words out as something like a challenge disguised as a joke. Her phrasing and her tone had reminded him of the way she spoke about herself in financial and situational terms. So he’d agreed.

It was unconventional, certainly not his usual style, but it offered the privacy they required. At least since he’d had the foresight to drive himself to her apartment previously.

“Well, this’ll teach me for running my mouth,” Brinley muttered as she balanced her take-out brunch in her lap. She lifted the breakfast burrito carefully, leaning forward as she did, making sure the entire thing remained positioned over the recycled plastic carton.

Lennox bit back his smirk and dug another bite out of his own meal. He would help her learn not to worry about making a mess. This wasn’t the time for that lesson. Instead, he calmly finished his bite before opening a more critical conversation. “You have questions, Brinley. I’m willing to answer them, but you have to ask.” He waited until she had lifted her gaze again. “In return, I expect you to keep an open mind and consider that my answers might just be truthful.”

She scrunched up her lips and for a second he couldn’t tell if she wanted to argue or was offended at his insinuation. The moment passed and her expression settled back to neutral. “That’s fair.” Her gaze dropped back to the meal still balanced in her lap. “I don’t even know where to start,” she said on a whisper. “I can think of plenty of ways you could have found me—learned my name, where I live—but none of that equates to chasing me down or whatever it is you were talking about with my job.” She winced. “Myformerjob.”

Lennox reached for his coffee, sitting in the secondary slot in the console between them, and took a gulp of the too-bitter liquid before answering. “It’s the same as why I bothered having you unmasked in the first place,” he said. “I warned you, didn’t I? One night wouldn’t be enough. You ran off before I could persuade you to voluntarily tell me your name or how to find you, so I had to get creative.”

Brinley frowned around her latest, smaller, bite and lowered the burrito. “But that doesn’t make sense,” she said as soon as she’d swallowed. “Whydid you have to find me? Were you worried I would sell the story of our night together for some quick cash? Did you just want another roll under the sheets with an obviously stupid omega?”

Lennox growled low, set down his coffee, and reached across the console to catch Brinley’s jaw in a firm grip. He dragged her head up enough to trap her wide, beautiful brown eyes in his stare. “You’ve clearly developed a disdain for yourself, perhaps specifically for your omega biology, and we’ll work on that.Together. Because you are going to learn, whether you want to or not, that I’m not going to disappear. And you, Brinley, are not stupid.” His lips curled over the world, the idea itself angering him.

He watched Brinley take a deep breath. Saw her gather herself.

He didn’t give her a chance to argue. “The issue here is that you overthink,” he declared. “You’re always searching for a rational, external explanation.” Lennox carefully adjusted in his seat, moving to rest his half-eaten brunch on the dashboard so he could reposition to face her better. “The problem with that is that sometimes, some things, are intuitive. Instinctual.”

Her brow furrowed. “You didn’t even know I was an omega before—”

“Precisely.” He tightened his grip on her jaw ever-so-slightly. “I knew you were mine the moment I laid eyes on you in that party. I didn’t give a fuck if you were omega, beta, human, or something else altogether. You could have been something I didn’t know existed until that night. I wouldn’t have given a shit.” He tugged her forward, just enough to tilt her own meal precariously in her lap, and lowered his voice. “Because I knew the one thing that mattered more than all of that, Brinley. I knew you were fuckingmine, and whatever it took, I was going to make sure you knew it, too.”

Brinley dragged in another breath and busied herself with restabilizing her food. She tried to pull from his grip, and when that failed, she licked her lips. “That was just … alpha-omega nonsense. It wasn’t anything.”

Lennox barely restrained the next growl, and for her own sake, he moved his hand from her jaw. He chose instead to settle it on her thigh in a firm grip. “You’re the one who just pointed out I had no way of knowing what you were.”

She opened her mouth with the clear intent to argue.

“This is you denying your instinct again, baby.”

She snapped her mouth shut and glared at him.

“You can feel it,” Lennox pressed. “You’re just afraid to. If anything, that is where we differ. I’ve always heeded my instinct first.” He gave her thigh a squeeze. “And that, Brinley, is why we’re here in this car right now.”

“Instinct,” she repeated, as if to herself. Brinley lowered her gaze and reached for her burrito again. “Earlier, you said you bought the entire company I had worked for. Did you do that on instinct, too?”

A grin tugged at his lips and Lennox eased back, opting to let her get some more food in her system. He pulled his own back into his lap and set about stabbing up another bite. “In a manner of speaking, yes. I looked it up once I learned where you worked, and when the report from my investigators came in, I couldn’t ignore the reality of the conditions you were working in.”

“But I was fired,” she said from behind a quickly raised hand.

He inclined his head. “I didn’t learn that tidbit until the deal had already been presented.” He popped his own bite into his mouth, lowered the fork, and plucked his phone up from the mount where it had been charging. As soon as it was unlocked, he swiped to the text conversation from his lawyers, where they had verified the deal and even sent a picture of the contract with Neil Waters’ signature. He tapped that and zoomed in just enough to make the scribble clear, then held it out for her to see. “It’s done,” he said. “Relief packages will be presented to the existing staff based on their individual merit tomorrow morning.”

Brinley stared at the screen for a long minute, her face a blanket of shock.

Lennox returned his phone to the dock.

Seconds passed in a heavy silence as Brinley nibbled at her burrito with her brow scrunched and her eyes distant. Lennox watched her, trying to give her time to process.

Finally, after chasing her last bite with a large swallow of her drink, she said, “Okay. Maybe I overthink sometimes. I’ll give you that.” Her shoulders stiffened. “That’s still a lot to do—a lot of money, a huge investment, a damn bigcommitment—for a woman you basically don’t know.”

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