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“Listen, whatever-your-name-is,”—her barbed tone lacked any trace of gentleness—“I appreciate the predicament you’re in here. You joined this Pack thinking there were oodles of Omegas breathlessly waiting for a big, strong Alpha like you to come and claim them.” She bent and, in an obvious provocation, dragged the basket back into the space between them and to the next empty rail while continuing to talk. “Only to discover you assumed incorrectly. So now you’re trying to cut your losses and settle for me.” She smiled up at him—a cold, patronizing flash of white teeth—and heaved the next blanket off the pile. “And while I appreciate your strategy of coming out swinging, I’ll save you the trouble.” She jerked her chin in his direction. “I’m not looking for an Alpha, I don’t need an Alpha, nor am I interested in any kind of casualarrangement with one, and if you can’t accept that, maybe Morris Hill isn’t the place for you. In which case, I’d suggest you head back to wherever you came from.”
Cal held back, hiding his flaring impatience as best he could. Truth be told, he needed the moment to figure out how to respond to the spew of insanity she’d rained down on him. Meant to be a dismissal or a barely polite brush-off, he couldn’t react because, for such an obviously intelligent woman, her understanding of his intentions completely missed the mark.
Did she honestly believe he wanted her as some sort of...consolation prize? Tension gripped his spine in a vice. Was that the way she was treated in this place? As some sort of second-class citizen?
With a frustrated huff at his nonresponse, Della bent to the basket as if to return to her chore. Breaking his inertia, Cal charged forward until his shins touched the basket rim. “The name’s Cal. Guess I forgot to mention that.”
Standing, she rubbed a palm down her face. “Did you hear anything else I said?” The question held no anger or malice, only a sad, tired resignation.
“I heard it.” He flashed her a quelling look as her mouth opened to argue. “Don’t agree with it, got a lot of questions about it, but, as I said last night, I’m gonna listen to whatever it is you have to say, whenever you want to say it.” His feet decided what to do next, kicking the laundry basket out of his way to get to her, this time with more force.
Della angled her upper body away from him but held her ground. Toe to toe, the top of her head reached his chin, and it took every lick of self-possession he’d learned over his fifty-odd years to stop himself from delving a hand into her hair and tilting those rosy lips up to meet his own. This close, a mere inch from the angry points of her nipples that jutted out and begged for his attention, the damp heat rising from her skin beat against his chest. It seeped directly into his blood, making his heart skip faster, harder, pounding out the wordsshe’s yours, she’s yours.
“If you heard me,” she rasped, “then why’re you still here?”
He curled his lips. “Your basket’s empty, why’re you still here?”
Her lashes drooped to half-mast, the only sign of fluster in her otherwise locked-down face. But, despite her obvious efforts, the Omega couldn’t hide everything. Like the smallest ripple in a deep, still lake, the sound of her galloping, excitable pulse fluttered in his ears. He savored that smallest of responses, rejoiced in it, and craved even more.
Reddish brows inched upward. “You’re in my way.”
It was a lie, and they both knew it. Hands in his pockets, he had her constrained in no way at all; she could easily step aside and evade him. If she wanted to. Instead, her steady regard faltered, tripping down his face and landing on his mouth as he mouthed the question, “Am I?”
“Cal!” An Alpha voice barked from the opposite side of the corral. “Time to go!”
Tamping down a curse at the inconvenient timing, he acknowledged the summons with a wave, his eyes never leaving Della’s face. “One clarification before I go, Omega: ain’t nothing about you that is settling. I ain’t cutting my losses”—he tipped forward, hovering his lips over hers—“and I ain’t going nowhere. Not without you, you got me?”
A slight tremble in her exhale whisked over his chin. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Maybe Della wasn’t as affected by him as he was by her, but shewasaffected, and that, he could work with.
Satisfied, Cal straightened and backed a step away, taking a luxuriously decadent parting sweep up and down her body as he did so.Goddamn, once he got his hands on her… A bolt of lightning stirred his dick at the mere thought, but he battened it down for the time being.
“Like I said, I’m on patrol duty”—his eyes slid back to hers—“but I expect we’ll be back by supper. If you’re not in the mess hall, I’ll come for you.”
Della’s back stiffened, which only served to push her nipples further against her damp shirt. Cal clamped down on his tongue to extinguish a groan and took a few more backward steps. “Is that a threat?” she said in a hoarse whisper.
“Only if you consider a good time to be a threat.” He winked. “I understand it might be a shock to your system, seeing as you spend your days hanging up soggy horse blankets. Alone.”
Translucent pink colored her cheeks. “What if I’m not interested in having a good time with you?”
He shrugged as if to say,yeah, so?before turning and striding away with a spring in his step, throwing, “You’re not that good of an actress, darlin’,” over his shoulder.
CHAPTER FIVE
Cal
“We’ll break for lunch up there.” Silas’s voice startled Cal from his thoughts. Not that he’d had the opportunity to have anynewthoughts since riding out of Morris Hill, and, to be honest, he’d tired of the same Della-related looping. Half a dozen times, he’d parted his lips, a question for Silas on the tip of his tongue, only to slam his jaw shut, reminding himself that his courtship of her involved no one but the two of them.
“Alphas don’t court, Alphas claim.”
Another extremely relevant quote from Pa excavated itself from his memories. That was Pa’s take on the Alpha-Omega relationship dynamic in a nutshell: once you knew, you knew, and once you knew, you claimed.
Wild frustration thrashed in Cal’s chest at the inconvenient reminder. In the twenty-four hours since he’d arrived in Morris Hill and first sampled Della’s intoxicating scent, he’d done exactly zero claiming. In fact, riding out of the settlement, away from her, implanted an irritating burr under his skin that worsened with every clip-clop of the mare’s hooves. His base, animal mind, compelled him to turn the horse around, find the Omega, bend her to his will, and be done with it.
After their conversation, he refused to believe she persisted, unaware of the energy that sizzled and popped between them, so vibrant he swore it scintillated in the air. His presence affected her, as hers affected him, and only stubbornness held her from submitting to its inevitability.
It perplexed him. Omegaswantedtheir Alphas. Theywantedto be claimed. Didn’t they?
Then again, for whatever reason, Della maintained she was not Omega, an assertion he had no evidence to counter other than his own experience. In fact, from what Riddick reported, no one else in the settlement picked up on what he did when it came to Della, either. If he had to guess, he would speculate it had something to do with her status as one of the Old Ones, the ones, like Hunter and Pa, who survived from before TheEnd. Those that weren’t born Alpha or Omega but whobecamethem in some mysterious, unexplained way.
