Page 69 of The Alpha Escort Agency
Alice? Alice?
He can’t help it, his heart leaps in his chest. He doesn’t want it to, fighting to push it back down, struggling to control its eagerness. He doesn’t want to get his hopes up. Not after he’d laid this same heart out on the table for her and she’d trampled all over it. Not when he’d decided to throw his life upside down for her and she’d rejected him anyway.
He’d already bought the three little ducks. He’d spotted them in a shop a month ago and knew that that was what he would give her for Christmas. They’d sat there on the table in his house, the days getting closer and closer to Christmas, his heart and his head in chaos. He’d meant to give them to her at the bar that night, but things hadn’t gone the way he’d planned.
Probably, he told himself, he shouldn’t send them.
Probably, he ought to forget all about the little Omega who’d set his heart on fire, only to douse it in freezing cold water.
Probably, the trio of ducks belonged in the bin.
But somehow it seemed as if they already belonged to her, and he had no right to keep them.
He’d told his nan how things had gone and she’d fussed over him at Christmas time, offering him endless hot drinks and pieces of Christmas cake, just like she would do when he was a child ill in bed, or on those occasions his mum had let him down once again. Failing to come visit when she promised, failing to send a birthday gift, failing to call at Christmas.
As a child, he’d lapped up that fuss and affection, relishing the opportunity of extra sweets or unsupervised telly. This Christmas it had only made him feel worse, and so today, he’d had to escape. Here, where his mind and his heart could forget all about it.
How ironic, then, that as soon as his heart is at peace, his mind clear, she’d appear.
Alice lifts her mittened hand and shields her face against the brightness, continuing to sweep her gaze across the landscape.
He raises his camera and automatically positions her to the side of the frame, allowing the landscape to fill the space around her. But no, that’s not right. She should be in the middle of the shot because she is the centre of his everything; striking, colourful and alive against the frozen winter land. He wants to remember this. Just in case. He wants one last memento.
Then he throws off the blankets and hauls himself up to standing, his limbs stiff and aching from the cold. He stretches and flexes his fingers, stamping his feet, attempting to get the blood flowing, the warmth returning.
She is the most wonderful being he has ever seen. He is a connoisseur of living things, an expert in the beauty of nature. Yes, the features of her face are expertly crafted and the lines of her body perfectly proportioned, but it is her movement, her expressions, her soul, that makes her so exquisite. Things he could never, ever hope to capture in the lens of his camera.
It takes a moment for her to locate him, her head darting this way and that, and when she does, he thinks she smiles — it’s hard to tell over the distance.
She waves, an excited, shy, sort of movement close to her body, and dashes along the lake’s path, her scarf trailing behind her, slipping and sliding on the icy surface.
He wants to run too, but his legs won’t. There’s a caution holding him back, forcing him to approach with care. He stops at the edge of the lake, planting his feet apart, hands buried in his pockets, and watches as she circles the water’s edge, drawing closer and closer. She’s more beautiful than he remembered, more beautiful than she appeared through the lens of his camera. More beautiful each time he sees her.
If she made an impression on him the first moment he met her in that bar, now that impression is so deep, so firmly pressed, that it is permanent. A branding. A scar. A mark. Like the teeth marks on the glands of mated couples, the tiny white lines clear and bold on the backs of their necks.
He shudders. He’d like her to mark him more visibly. For everyone to know he is hers. For the unique pattern of her teeth to pierce his gland.
She’s closer, closer still, mere meters away, her every step, driving his heart beat stronger, louder in his chest, pounding the walls of his ribs in synchronization with her feet on the ground.
Then she’s there, red-cheeked, bathed in clouds of her breath, streaming from her nose and her mouth, so he can hardly see her, her scent strong in the clear morning’s air.
“Alice,” he says, as if her appearance here is not completely unexpected, as if he’d been waiting for her.
“Hi,” she pants, clutching her stomach. “Stitch.” She grimaces, bending double and peering up at him.
“Just breathe.”
She nods and sucks in three deep lungfuls of air.
“Alright?” he asks.
She holds up a finger, instructing him to wait, and takes three more breaths.
When she straightens up, he can read the nerves in the faint crease of her forehead and lift of her brow. “I went to your grandparents to find you and they said you were here.”
“You came all the way out here?”
“I needed to see you.”
