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“Woah, woah, woah.” A sturdy force encircled her waist and eased her back from the brink. Bare feet sliding on the pebbled entrance, Della wanted to resist, to fight back and tell him to get the hell away from her, but she didn’t get a chance before sleep-warmed arms bundled her against a broad, firm chest. He tightly secured her trembling body, a broad palm soothing up and down her back. Slumped against him in desolate resignation, utter helplessness suffused her limbs, and a sob ripped from her throat.
“C’mon now. I promise it ain’t as bad as all that. What’re you trying to do, give me a heart attack?” he whispered into her hair. “Trying to catch a little shut-eye, and the next thing I know, you’re stumbling around on the edge. ‘Bout scared me half to death.”
His hands ran along her back, a steady up and down, as if erasing her fear like chalk from an old-fashioned chalkboard. The rhythmic flex of strong fingers lured her thoughts from the careening panic. They wove a spell that satisfied, in some sick way, the protection she’d longed for moments before.
“What’re you going to do with me?” she murmured into his shirtfront.
He didn’t answer. Or, at least, not with words. His hands continued to work their magic up and down her neck and spine. Tension sloughed from Della’s neck and shoulders, and her head relaxed into his working palm, so large it cradled her skull like a newborn’s.
With a throaty sigh, he tucked her face into his neck. “Ain’t gonna hurt you,” he rumbled against her skin.
Not an answer to her question, but strangely, she wanted to believe him. No doubt, it was stupid, and she’d no doubt regret it later. She wanted to believe this unknown Alpha was different from all the dangerous, volatile ones she’d encountered in the AfterEnd.
Sense and pragmatism revolted, pounding on the door of her reasonable mind to try to wake it up, reviewing argument after argument for the intrinsic savagery of their kind, reminding herself of all the violence she’d witnessed and run from before she’d come to Morris Hill. So many years of fighting tooth and nail to maintain some degree of autonomy, some semblance of choice, some right of self-determination, only to be abducted in the night and hidden away God-knows-where in a fuckingcave?
How could she believe his intentions were anything but vile?
And yet.
The warmth of his body seeped into her cheek and quieted her sobs. Della drew in a long, hiccupping breath, filling her lungs with air seasoned by her tears and the heat of his skin. Soothing, rich coffee flavor and the toasted zing of cinnamon spice worked its way into her nostrils, recalling more scent memories of the horseback ride dream.
Only the scent tickling her nose wasn’t a dream. Her heart stutter-stopped. It wasreal. She was truly smelling something.
She was smellinghim.
A surprised noise popped out, and she pulled in another breath, greedy for more. And more she got. Despite her tear-clogged sinuses and stuffed-up nose, the pure notes of the spicy, wholesome aroma shuddered down her spine. Overcome, Della gorged on breath after greedy breath, afraid it was a hallucination. Afraid it would disappear and plunge her back into the blunted olfactory wasteland of the last hundred years.
Unable to hold back, she yanked at his shirt, exposing more golden skin in which to bury her nose and shamelessly indulge. Inside the confines of his clothes, the scent built up steam, becoming richer and more complex, infused with a provocative, masculine tang. It arrowed directly into her, prompting a small, helpless whimper as it struck her pelvis with a deep and powerful thrum. Sensations she hadn’t experienced for literal decades zoomed around her insides, and none more powerful than an anguished neediness in her sex.
With some difficulty, Della yanked herself away and confronted a pair of smoldering hazel eyes. “It’s you,” she whispered, heart thundering in her ears. “I...” She swallowed. “I can smell you.”
CHAPTER TEN
Della
“You don’t… you don’t…”—too shocked to do anything more than stammer, Della gaped into Cal’s confused face—“understand. I haven’t been able to smell anything since…” The fires, the destruction, the end of the world as she knew it. Della squeezed her eyes shut, strong-arming those memories back into the darkness where they belonged. “For a very long time,” she finished lamely.
She opened her eyes, only to find Cal’s attention fastened on her lips like she was the last sip of water in a desert. The lust already crashing through Della’s body crested in one heaving crush, exploding out in an alarming release of fluid between her legs. With a gasp, she looked down, dampness spreading over her crotch like she’d wet herself. “What the fuck?”
Cal groaned, a deep, powerful sound that prompted a second humiliating gush. “That’s your slick.” He pulled her closer, his chest heaving in great, sawing breaths. His hands flexed and released, aggressively kneading her hips as Della recognized a definite thickening hardness against her belly. “You scented me, and now you’re responding the way an Omega responds to an Alpha.”
“No.” Shaking her head, Della angled her body away from him, unable to back away farther because of the hands that moved to cup her bottom. “I’m not Omega.”
Something dangerous flared in his eyes, and his huge body—how hadn’t she noticed before howhugehe was? — curved over hers, his posture suddenly looming.
This is where you ought to be afraid.Her rational mind argued like a distant voice calling up from the bottom of a well. Except fear wasn’t shooting pleasurable trills deep in her pelvis. And it certainly wasn’t fear that decided his enormous, deliciously fragrant body wasn’t scary but, rather, quitestimulating.
“Whatever you are, you’re mine now.Fuck,you smell so good.” He made the noise again, that groan, that gruff grumble, that gutturalgrowl.Overflowing with potency and raw sexual force, Della’s core spasmed around nothing, and a shallow climax rippled through her and nearly knocked her off her feet again. A shocked cry sailed out of her at the sudden wash of unexpected bliss.
Cal moaned as if in pain. “Fuck me, did you come?” His hand wiggled between them, cupping her sex over her sopping pants. “Did this pussy come for my Alpha growl?”
His scent awakened something inside her, but his words made her lose her mind completely. Without a thought, without a single stitch of hesitation, Della’s pelvis tilted into his palm, angling closer to that possessive grip. If he took his hand away now, she’d go insane.
“What’s happening to me?” she demanded, yanking on his shirt, wanting more of something, more of everything, more ofhim.
Pity tinged the flaring heat in his eyes. “Come on, Della, you know what this is,” he chided gently, detaching her hands from his clothes before bending his knees to scoop her up and carry her back into the gray darkness of the cave.
With trembling, scrabbling hands, she circled his neck and fisted in his hair for something to hold on to, determined to anchor her spiraling acceleration. This wasn’ther. Adeline Cabrese didn’t writhe and pant and grind against Alphas she barely knew.
