Page 100 of Rejected By My Shifter Billionaire
He smelled like winter mornings and something darker. Something that made my mouth water and my pulse skip.
“This will take about twenty seconds,” he said, reaching out to place one hand on the side of my neck.
His fingers were warm. Steady. The touch should have been clinical, professional. Instead, it felt like a brand.
“Fantastic,” I managed.
“Try to relax.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one being sniffed by your stepbrother.”
Something flickered in his expression. Too fast for me to interpret.
The scanner beeped. Green light.
But he didn’t move his hand.
“You got the baseline,” I said, my voice coming out breathier than I’d intended. “You can let go now.”
He didn’t.
Instead, he stepped even closer, and I found myself backing up until I hit the edge of the console. Trapped. The blue light from the scanner cast shadows across his face, making his cheekbones look sharper, his eyes darker.
His mouth was near my ear now. Close enough that I could feel his breath against my skin.
“You smell like nerves,” he murmured.
“And you smell like an arrogant control freak.”
A low sound escaped him. Not quite a laugh. Something rougher.
“I’m the control variable,” he said. “You’re the chaos.”
“And you like chaos?”
His hand moved, fingers threading through the hair at the base of my neck. The touch was gentle, but there was something possessive about it that made my knees weak.
“I like you.”
Three little words, but they were more than enough to turn my world upside down.
Before I could react, before I could speak or move or remember how to breathe, he stepped back.
The scanner overhead chimed.
*Compatibility: 98.7%. Alpha match potential detected.*
I stared at the display, my heart hammering against my ribs.
98.7%.
That was higher than any pairing I’d ever recorded. Higher than the theoretical maximum I’d built into the system.
Higher than should have been possible.
Nicolo looked up at the screen, then back at me. His expression was unreadable again, but there was something burning in his eyes that made my stomach flip.
“That’s higher than any pairing you’ve run,” he noted.
