Page 36 of The Last Great Omegaverse

But the hunger hasn’t fully subsided.

I lay her back against the cushions, spread her thighs, and put my mouth on her again. She’s oversensitive, still flooded with my cum, and the first drag of my tongue makes her arch with a broken sound. I lick her clean—slow, thorough strokes that gather every trace of slick and release—then focus on her clit until she’s trembling and pushing at my shoulders.

“Coop—too much—”

“One more, sweetheart,” I tell her, voice rough against her folds. “Give me one more and then I’ll let you rest.”

I push two fingers back inside her while I suck gently on her clit. She’s so wet, so open, still trembling from the knotting. I clench them deliberately, hitting the swollen spot, and fuck her with my hand until she comes again—more contained this time, a long, shuddering wave that leaves her limp and dazed against the cushions.

Only then do I ease up, wipe my mouth, and gather her into my arms. I carry her upstairs to her bedroom, lay her on the clean sheets, and climb in after her. She curls against my chest without prompting. My hand strokes random trails on the contour of her spine. The window is open a crack; cool evening air moves over our sweat-damp skin, carrying the faint scent of woodsmoke from the burn pile still lingering outside.

I give a kiss to the crown of her head. Her breathing is already evening out against my throat. My own body is heavy with spent pleasure, but the deep, satisfied thrum of an Alpha who has taken his Omega twice and still wants more dissolves into my bones like it belongs there.

“Next time,” I murmur into her hair, “we do this in the morning. Slowly. When there’s nowhere either of us has to be.”

She makes a soft sound of agreement, already half-asleep. I hold her closer, one heavy thigh draped over hers, and let the quiet of the house settle around us. Outside, the last light fades. Inside, the sheets smell like sex and smoke and the growing certainty that this—her, the soft weight of her body against mine, the residual heat of her pussy still clinging to my cock—is exactly where I am meant to be.

I close my eyes and breathe her in. The cautious part of me that used to check every motive twice is silent. There is only this, the second time, already better than the first, and the certainty that there will be a third, and a fourth, and as many more as she will let me have.

She curls into my side, radiant and loose-limbed. I hold her there a long while, listening to the last of the fire crackling outside, thinking about muffins and clipboards and a day that finally let me prove, to her and to myself, that I’m more than just the youngest, more than the easiest one to underestimate.

Something’s different about her tonight, underneath the exhaustion and the satisfaction and the general ease of a woman who’s just been thoroughly taken care of. I noticed it earlier, actually, somewhere around the second time. It’s a simmering heat under her skin that had been building for days finally easing off, like a kettle taken off the burner right before it screams.

She hasn’t said anything about it, and I don’t ask. Some things a body handles on its own timeline, and I’ve learned enough this month to know when to just be grateful for the quiet instead of interrogating it.

“Twenty-eight days left,” she murmurs, half-asleep already.

“Twenty-eight days,” I agree, and press a kiss to her temple. I let myself believe, for the first time since I watched that bus pull in four weeks ago, that whatever’s coming at the end of this countdown, we’re going to meet it together, all five of us, exactly the way today proved we could.

Chapter 15

Wren

10 Days To Go.

It’s been almost three weeks since the Community Harvest Day, and I’d almost convinced myself the strange, simmering heat that was building under my skin had simply passed. Whatever Coop and I did in that mudroom, and later, upstairs, in the hours after the crowd went home, seemed to resolve something that had been building toward a very different kind of crisis.

The livewire hypersensitivity, the restless bunker-building instinct, the hum under my ribs that had me testing curtains and counting ice packs like my body was bracing for a siege, all of it went quiet afterward. Quiet enough that I stopped watching the calendar for it. Quiet enough that I let myself believe, foolishly, that maybe it had just been a false alarm. A near-heat. A body getting confused by four Alphas showing up at once and calibrating wrong.

I should have known better. I should have recognized, if nothing else, that whatever eased that week wasn’t gone so much as postponed, the way a storm sometimes stalls out over open water before it finally decides to come ashore.

It’s been building again for two days now, subtler than before, easier to explain away as ordinary tiredness. But underneath the fatigue there’s a familiar warmth gathering, and some part of me that’s spent nearly a decade learning to read her own body’s early warnings recognizes exactly what it is, even before I’m willing to admit I recognize it.

But I can’t focus on that right now. There is still too much to do.

Warren Whitfield needs proof of yield before he can file the inheritance paperwork properly, some formality about documenting production against the will’s terms. It’s as good an excuse as any to finally go through the boxes of old ledgers I’ve been avoiding since the day I arrived. They’re also the one place left I haven’t looked for an answer to the south patch, now that a soil kit, a crop-rotation notebook, and a fence-line conversation with Silas have all come up empty.

I find them in the sewing room upstairs, stacked under a dust sheet that hasn’t been disturbed in longer than I’ve been alive, decades of Calloway Farm records going back further than Eleanor, further than her mother. Ledgers in handwriting that changes generation to generation but keeps the same columns of numbers and notes about weather and blight and, occasionally, something sentimental scrawled in the margins that reads less like bookkeeping and more like a woman talking to herself across time.

I start cross-referencing out of simple curiosity more than any real plan, matching yield numbers to the years they came from, trying to get a sense of what a good season here has historically looked like compared to what I’m currently pulling off with borrowed hands and a lot of luck. The pattern takes a while to notice, buried under decades of ordinary variations. But once I see it, I can’t stop seeing it.

The good years cluster.

Not the way weather clusters, a few strong seasons followed by a few weak ones, ordinary noise. These specific years, the exceptional ones, the ones where yield numbers jump well past what any reasonable person would expect from soil and rainfall alone, line up almost exactly with years where the ledgers mention extra hands on the land. But not hired hands, not seasonal labor brought in and paid off come harvest. Family. Partners.

In Eleanor’s own hand, a note from decades back: Frank and his boys came round again this season, crop’s better for it, same as always. Further back, in handwriting I don’t recognize, someone I’d guess is Eleanor’s mother: Iris says the Hendricks pack make all the difference, and I’m inclined to believe her now, three years running.

And the lean years, the truly bad ones, the ones that read almost like warnings on the page, line up just as clearly with years the farm was run alone. A woman’s name at the top of the ledger, no partners mentioned, yield numbers cratering season after season no matter how hard the notes suggest she worked.