Page 28 of Omega's Forbidden Heat
“Are we going home then or not?” he says over his shoulder.
She can’t help rolling her eyes. “You didn’t have to do that, you know? I’m not 14 anymore. I don’t need rescuing in the playground. I can look after myself.”
He pivots round to glare at her. “Yep, sure looked like it.”
“I work in a pub, Jack. I get creeps like that trying things on all the time. I know how to handle myself.” There’s a mixture of confusion and hurt playing across his face and her tone is kinder when she speaks again. “I don’t want you getting into trouble for me.”
“I was never going to get into any trouble,” he says, his eyes falling to his hands as he flexes his fingers. He scuffs the toes of his trainer against a crack in the pavement. “I know how to handle guys like that too. Give them a bit of the Alpha show and they disappear quicker than a rat up a drainpipe.”
What does that mean? She wants to ask him, but she’s scared of what she might find out, and the bitter cold sinks right through to her bones now and she shakes uncontrollably.
“Let’s just go home,” she mutters, strolling past him. She hears him groan and then his own footsteps follow hers. They walk in silence, he walking a few paces behind until they arrive at her car in the multi-storey car park. She unlocks the door and climbs in, and he hovers by the passenger door for a minute before slipping inside and immediately winding down his window.
“My scent is not that bad,” she says, with a crease between her brows.
“It’s not you,” he says gruffly, “I can smell some shitty Alpha all over you.”
She raises an eyebrow. “You mean you?”
“No, you stink of some other Alpha.”
She cocks her head. “Oh yeah,” she says lifting her wrist to her nose, “there was some shady dude hanging around me, trying to scent me.”
He grabs her arm and lifts her wrist to his own nose, inhaling sharply, his mouth curling with disgust. “Well, he succeeded.” Then he releases his own scent into the air and the thick aroma fills the car. Her eyes roll momentarily backwards in their sockets and her gland prickles. Then she feels him rub his own wrist against hers before sniffing her once more.
“There, now you smell better.”
“Arsehole,” she says, “what the hell did you do that for?”
“If I’m sharing this lift with you, I don’t wanna be smelling some other Alpha all the way home.”
“Well, at least shut the window then, it’s bloody freezing.” She switches on the engine and jerks the car out of the parking space and down the ramps, out into the town.
They don’t speak as she swerves along the empty metropolitan streets, passing rows of houses with darkened windows, and as soon as they’re out into the country lanes she puts her foot down, speeding in the direction of home.
He sits with his arms crossed over his chest, staring out the window. She wants to speak to him, wants to ask him why he stormed out of the club like that, wants to tell him to take no notice of Finn, to reassure him she is in charge of her own life and her own decisions and her brother should mind his own goddamn business. But something prevents her from doing it, something between them that’s as fragile as eggshells, so she scrabbles around in her brain instead to find another topic to talk to him about.
“How’s it going with packing up the house?” she asks, clicking on the indicator and turning right into an even narrower lane. Beside her in the passenger seat he shifts and she curses herself for choosing that subject to light upon. It’s too late now.
“Fine,” he says. There is silence again and she thinks maybe they’ll sit like this all the way home. Then, to her surprise, he says more as he swipes away condensation from the door’s window and peers out at the ghostly lit trees.
“There’s so much stuff,” he says, his thumb slipping over the fine mist of moisture. “I thought I wanted to get rid of it, and that that was the right thing to do, but now, I don’t know, it feels wrong.”
“Feels wrong, how?”
His gaze is fixed on the moonlit scene beyond the window. “Like I’m throwing her away.”
His words hit her hard in the chest and it aches for him.
“They’re just things, Jack, just things. You have your memories and that’s what counts.”
He shakes his head. “It feels like a betrayal.”
She considers this for a moment. “I’d keep the things that are special, the things that have particular meaning or memory. The other stuff I’d give away.”
“Maybe. But everything seems to have some memory or other attached to it.”
She’s never lost anyone like he has. Her grandparents died before she was born. No one else important in her life has ever gone. She can’t imagine how he feels, the big gaping hole that must exist inside him. He only really had his mum.
