Page 23 of In Knots

Chapter 7

There’s no Jonathan waiting for me when I return home. I assume he’s gone to pick up my mother. I retreat to my room, snuggling up with Claude while I call the alpha as instructed, then pleading a stomachache to avoid everyone for the rest of the day.

I can’t avoid Jonathan forever though. He’s due to drive me to my yoga class at the club the next morning and he greets me with a fierce frown.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight today, kiddo. I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’m not losing my job for it.”

“There’s nothing going on,” I mutter, diving into the passenger seat, gripping my yoga mat to my chest.

He glares at me, his jaw twitching. He doesn’t believe any of it. There’s always been the odd time when I’ve disappeared. But we’ve had an unspoken agreement to keep those disappearances rare and spaced out. Over the last few days, I’ve bolted on him three times in a row, and I suppose he has every right to be suspicious.

He’s true to his word, right outside the door of the yoga studio when I’m finished and hovering outside the changing room once I’ve changed. When I go to lunch with Margo and my other friends, he takes a seat in the corner watching me and drives me straight home afterwards. It’s the same the next day and the day after. I can’t shake him off.

However, he can’t follow me into the sanctuary of my room and so, despite the heavy monitoring, I call Ryan.

Not every evening. I know a little about the games an omega should play. I’m aware I’ll look pathetic if I come across too eager for that gravelly voice in my ear. But I call him as often as my battling pride and interest will allow.

Sometimes he asks me to touch myself again, and I’m more than willing to come for him, those dirty words in my ears. Sometimes we just talk, he doing most of the talking. He tells me about his bike, his work in the shop, where he lives and who he lives with. His pack.

“There are four of you?” I ask him.

“Yeah, four.”

“How … how did it happen?” Alpha packs exist, everyone knows that, but they are about as rare as the omegas they hope to claim. They certainly don’t exist in the circles my parents allow me to float about in, and at the omega finishing school they were talked about in hushed tones. Something to be feared and reviled.

I can’t reconcile those horror stories we’d been told with the two men I’ve met though. Even Buzz with his gruff and direct manner. They don’t seem wild and uncontrollable. A little rough around the edges but maybe that’s what I like about them. They haven’t buffed away their flaws. They aren’t polished to perfection. They are more genuine, more natural, than any other alphas I’ve ever met.

“How did we form our pack?” He chuckles. “Now that is a long story.” But I’ve got nowhere to go. I’d happily listen to his voice in my ear until the early hours of the morning. He’s in the backyard of his pack house. I can hear the murmur of other voices around him. Perhaps they are even listening to his one-sided conversation.

“Give her the clean version,” I hear Buzz say in the background.

“You think the unedited version will scare her away?” Ryan replies. “Might have thought about that before you were rude to her the other day.”

Another low, deep voice speaks, but I don’t catch the words. Then Ryan’s attention is back on me.

“We grew up in the same neighbourhood. Been inseparable since as long as I can remember. Always in and out of each other’s houses. It was sort of inevitable we’d end up binding as a pack when we all revealed as alphas. None of us are the lone wolf type. Family’s important to us. We look out for each other and the people who are important to us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hmmm,” he says, thinking. “Take Buzz’s nan for instance. Some cowboys tried to pull some scam on her. Wanted to charge her a fortune to do some repairs around her flat. We went and had a few words with them, made them see the errors of their ways, got her money back.”

“Oh,” I say. I guess he’s talking violence here. It seems at odds with the care-free guys I spent those hours with at the river. But then … “Are you … are you a motorcycle gang?”

I’ve heard of some notorious ones from the other side of the city, into organised crime – drug trafficking and that kind of thing.

A lump sits in my throat as I wait for his answer. I’m not sure what I’ll do with the answer if I don’t like it. I already know this man is unsuitable. That my parents would be furious if they knew I was talking to him. Yet I’m becoming accustomed to our conversations. And it’s been only a couple of weeks since I met him.

Maybe it’s because I’m lonely. With Chloe gone, I have no one to open up to, no one to confide in, and he is surprisingly easy to talk to.

“Are we a motorcycle gang?” I can hear the amused grin in his voice. “Depends on what you think a motorcycle gang is. We’re a club. We have a name. We have a badge. Like I said, we take care of our people. But I think there’s more to your question here, princess? What have you heard about motorcyclegangs?”

“That they’re criminals,” I confess.

“I can’t promise we always stay strictly inside the letter of the law. Are we running brothels and supplying drugs? No. We’re not into that shit. We’re alphas. We take our responsibilities seriously. We don’t believe in hurting the good guys, only the bad ones.”

I sigh. That’s good enough for me, and a rush of relief sails through me, from my chest to my toes.

“What’s your name? I mean your club name?”

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