Page 39 of Omega's Forbidden Heat
She smiles up at him but then it dies on her face as she examines him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Omega.”
She reaches out to touch his shoulder and he shrugs her away.
She needs to go. To get as far away from him as she can. Because she is too delicious and he doesn’t know if he can be strong anymore. Not now he’s tasted her, not now he’s buried himself inside her. He swallows down the temptation. And stares at the dull curtains. “Your heat’s over, Omega. It’s time to go.”
She’s quiet and the silence hurts his ears. It’s so damn quiet here. All the time. It was never quiet in prison. It drove him mad, the constant murmur of voices, stomp of feet, rattle of doors. All the time. Never ending. Now the silence seems so much worse. Deafening in his ears.
He resists the urge to turn and look at her. Holds his head deadly still, until she climbs from the bed and pads about the room collecting up her clothes, clutching them to her chest.
“That’s it?” she says, anger flashing in her eyes as she glares at him.
“No,” he says flatly, continuing to stare straight ahead. “Get some fucking blockers.”
“I’m already on blockers. I’ve always been on blockers,” she spits, spinning on her heels and scuttling from the bedroom. “And you could try taking some yourself.”
Letting out a long slow exhale, he closes his eyes and sinks under the covers. Her scent is thick in the room, he suddenly has the sensation that he’s choking on it, unable to breathe, scrabbling for Oxygen. He claws at his throat.
What has he done?
Chapter Fourteen
He can say what he wants. He can think what he wants. This wasn’t a one off. This wasn’t a one-time thing. It isn’t over. There is something between them and he can deny it all he wants, but it is there, burning, smouldering, crackling under the surface. And it has been ever since that night he walked into the pub. An intensity that came crashing to the surface when he took her in his arms and had her.
It’s not in her head. She’s seen and felt it now. There’s no way that wasn’t real.
She stifles a sob as she marches into the bathroom. But how could he be so cold? How could he give her everything one moment and then nothing the next? Such a simple flick of the switch and she’s left shivering and trembling. She yanks the handle of the shower and the water comes thundering down. She turns it as hot as it will go, hoping the steam, rising as the temperature soars, will warm her.
What an idiot she is? He’s pushed her away, he’s walked away from her, again and again over these last few weeks. Why did she believe this time would be any different?
Because she’d felt it. Felt the shift in him, like finally he’d allowed himself to just feel, to just be, to succumb to all that’s been building between them over the long, long days.
Shit, she throws her head back, eyes screwed tight. Something is holding him back. Something just there under the surface, that she can almost see if she can just hold it in her focus. But whenever she comes close to it, it slips from her sight and she can’t get a hold on it. If only he’d talk to her, open up, instead of constantly running away. All they’ve just done to one another, intimate things that make her blush thinking about them, and yet he won’t admit the truth, won’t let her in.
No, he said himself, you shouldn’t let people treat you like that. She’s not going to let him.
Jack Johnson ignored her for years. Well, he’s not going to ignore her anymore. She’s going to crack him open like a nut. This isn’t over by any stretch of the imagination.
But she’s not going to have it out with him right now. It will have to wait, because she needs to go and see Maddock. It’s been three whole days and, though she has Emily checking on him, feeding and exercising him, it’s not the same. He needs her.
She plunges into his shower and with reluctance washes away his scent from her skin and the dried come stuck to her flesh. Her fingers trace over the marks he’s made on her body. Finger prints at her hips, bruises between her thighs, bites on her shoulder. She shivers. His passion for her was unquenchable. Like a beast finally let free. And it was both terrifying and thrilling to be consumed by him, to be toyed with and played with, to be taken to pieces and then put back together. To be lifted to places, to heights, she’s never experienced before. She feels different. A different person than the one he carried inside his house.
She scrubs his shampoo into her hair and then lets the suds cascade down her body and run into the drain.
Her clothes are trashed, stinking of sex and covered in dry slick, but she’s got nothing else to wear, so she rubs herself with the towel, ignoring the fact it smells like him and will leave his scent on her skin, and tugs on her jeans and her top.
When she leaves the bathroom, he’s still in the bedroom. She hesitates outside the door, her hand lifts for the handle, then she shakes her head and scurries away.
She needs to get home and change before she goes to check on Maddock. She shuts the front door behind her, glancing up towards his bedroom window, and makes her way down the lane.
What she’d give for her mum to be home right now? Or Jack’s mum, Alison. Someone to talk to about all this. The friends she’s made at Uni are all Betas. In fact, Alison was the only other Omega she knew. No one else can understand what she’s just been through. How it feels to be lifted so high by an Alpha, worshipped and possessed, only for him to drop her and leave her to crash to the ground. She stops, the realisation of that hitting her and a wave of sadness soaking her completely.
No, no one else would understand this. One or two of her friends might try. But they don’t know Jack, they don’t know the boy he was, the man he can be. There’d see the ex-convict, dark and brooding, and they’d warn her to stay away.
She picks up her feet, forcing herself to move. Again she thinks of his face through the mottled glass of the utility window, his smile wide, his blue eyes shining and the deep rumble of his laugh. Carefree and happy. The man he can be.
She’s not going to let him cast her aside.
