I press my forehead against the cool, rough bark of the tree. My body is a live wire, every muscle coiled tight with a frustration so deep it feels like grief.
Five years. Five years I’ve spent building walls around my heart, brick by painful brick, convincing myself I hated her. And in one kitchen, in less than five minutes, she tore them all down.
The pressure at the base of my spine is unbearable. My knot. It’s forming, a hard, insistent swell that demands release.
It’s a biological betrayal, my Alpha body responding to its Omega as if no time has passed at all. As if she didn’t leave me. As if my heart isn’t a shattered mess in my chest.
My hand moves of its own accord, fumbling with the button of my jeans, then yanking down the zipper. The cold rain hits my hot, straining flesh, and I hiss at the shock.
I wrap my hand around my cock, the grip rough and punishing. This isn’t about pleasure. This is about survival. I need the release.
I need to purge this feeling before it consumes me whole.
I close my eyes, and the memory of her crashes over me. The feel of her hands under my shirt, tracing the muscles of my back. The sounds she made. Her skin…
Fuck.
I stroke myself faster, my movements uncoordinated in the pouring rain. Each pull is an act of anger, at her, at myself.
I’m angry that I still want her this much. I’m angry that my body remembers hers so perfectly. I’m angry that one taste, one touch, was enough to almost bring me to my knees.
My hips jerk, fucking into my own fist. The pressure builds in my groin. I can feel the knot swelling, the skin stretching.
I think of her mouth, her lips swollen from my kiss. I think of her neck, the delicate skin over her scent gland, and how I wanted to bite her, to mark her, to make her mine again so no one could ever take her from me.
The orgasm hits me, ripping a groan from my throat. I come hard, the hot, slick pulses of my release lost in the cold rain.
My body convulses, the pleasure so intense it’s almost pain, a wave that crashes over me and leaves me shaking, braced against the tree.
But there’s no peace. No relief.
I lean my head back, letting the rain wash over my face, trying to clean the taste of her from my lips, but it’s no use.
She’s imprinted on me. On my tongue. In my blood. In my soul. I’m completely and utterly fucked. And I have no idea what I’m going to do next.
The rain stops.
I stand in the dripping silence of the woods, water sluicing off my nose, my chin, pooling in the hollow of my throat. My chest heaves, trying to pull in air that doesn’t smell like her.
It’s useless. The pine needles and wet earth are overpowered by the phantom scent of honeysuckle and cedar. It’s inside me now, a second pulse beating behind my ribs.
My jeans are soaked, heavy, and clinging to my thighs. The evidence of my mistake washes away in the runoff, but the shame is sticky, coating my skin like sap.
I let it happen. I let her in. I let her hands touch me, let her mouth ruin five years of distance with one whispered word.
Baby.
I kick a rotting log, sending a spray of bark and beetles into the underbrush.
I have to move. I have to get back before someone notices I’m gone.
Before Seth realizes my bed wasn’t slept in. Before Tex starts asking questions with those eyes that see too much. Before Jasper starts snapping photos of the foreman having a breakdown in the mud.
I walk out of the tree line. The ranch is a different world in the gray pre-dawn. The storm stripped the sky clean, leaving it a bruised purple, lightening over the hills.
Puddles reflect the fading stars. The orange tape of the quarantine zone flutters in the breeze, a bright, ugly scar across the property.
The main house is dark. Thank god. I creep onto the porch, peeling off my boots, leaving them on the mat.
