I had no idea what it meant, but I didn’t need to understand his words to understand their meaning. He kissed me again, nipping at my lips, and I felt like I was going to combust. My skin felt too tight to contain me.
“Gabriel, please,” I said, and I didn’t recognize my own voice. I couldn’t catch my breath. It was sohotin that tiny room.
He looked down at me, and a bit of the haze left his eyes. “Oh, carissima,” he said. “We need to be home.”
Home. What even was home anymore? The apartment? At the thought of what and who awaited me at their apartment, I felt another rush of heat. Andrew. Nathan.
Was I whining?
Gabriel kissed me once more, hard and fierce, then rolled off me. I keened at the loss of his weight, but he picked me up swiftly, one hand under my back, the other under my knees, like I weighed nothing. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my forehead to the damp skin of his neck.
He swept me down the hall, back through the door of the apartment. I kept my eyes closed, breathing in his scent like thatcould stop the world from spinning. A cramp had started at the base of my stomach that reverberated with each step.
The door slammed closed behind us.
“What is going on?” Nathan asked, sounding angry. “What did you do to her? Is she injured?”
The sound of his voice set off a pulse of cramps low in my stomach. “Nathan?”
Nathan’s scent grew stronger. I opened my eyes briefly. He looked as angry as he sounded. “I’m here,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“She is…” Gabriel groaned as I nuzzled into his neck. “She is in heat, or close to it. Perhaps a spike.”
Heat spike. The analytical part of my mind, distant and locked behind a hazy curtain of lust, concurred. I was flushed, cramping, and felt like my skin was going to burn off. It tallied with the symptoms the doctors at the Center had enumerated, even if I’d never been unfortunate enough to experience one.
The world tilted as Gabriel placed me on the bed in the guest room. I kept my eyes closed as the room spun, my head lolling slightly on the pillow.
“What do we do?” Nathan asked, his voice clipped.
Gabriel brushed strands of hair from my forehead, damp with sweat. “She needs an Alpha.”
Chapter 27 - Nathan
I’d been stewing by myself while Andrew went to buy groceries, considering how much of a coward I was. Hiding here, keeping Bridget from fully connecting with the men she so clearly wanted, and still unable to tell her how I felt.
When Gabriel burst in holding Bridget, there was a split second when I’d been relieved to have a distraction from my pessimism. But as I looked from Bridget, nearly insensible on the bed, to Gabriel, any relief dissolved.
I knew what a heat spike was. I was a biologist and an Alpha. Of course I knew. But seeing the reality differed vastly from studying the concept in a textbook.
“No. This is wrong,” I said. “She can’t consent to anything like this.”
Bridget blinked her eyes open, and they were limned with tears. She focused on me with difficulty. “It hurts.”
To punctuate this heartbreaking picture, she squeezed her eyes shut and whined piteously with her hands pressed to her lower stomach.
“She needs you,” Gabriel said simply.
Bridget was clearly in pain. Even beyond my scientific knowledge, the Alpha in me knew what to do. That beast withinwas clamoring for me to knot her, to fill her with my cum, and bite her so she’d know she was mine.
Luckily, I was in control enough to keep myself from acting on that impulse.
Instead, I lay down next to her. She immediately rolled towards me and crawled to drape her body fully across mine. Her scent was stronger than I’d ever experienced. The heady scent of honey completely subsumed the floral notes, so sweet I could almost taste it in the air. She was restless, rolling her hips and nuzzling into my neck.
It was the closest we’d been since the night of the gala, when we’d both been fighting the pull. Now, that fight was entirely one-sided. Having Bridget in my arms was heaven, but I didn’t want it this way, with her out of her mind on pheromones.
I started purring on instinct, and she calmed enough that I could wrap my arms around her back and roll us to the side.
Gabriel was still watching us, but he started backing out of the room. “Take care of her,” he whispered before shutting the door behind him.
