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Her small hand grips my wrist, her hold on me surprisingly strong, and I stop, turning back with a frown. “Everleigh?”
She gives me a long look. It’s deep, and it’s thoughtful. “About my heat. If I—”
The front door slams open.
“No luck on the suppressants,” Cian calls out.
Everleigh blinks and releases her grip on my wrist before sliding off the counter.
“Everleigh?” I frown after her as she heads for the door.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
As she retreats, I could cheerfully strangle Cian for his bad timing. What had Everleigh been about to say? That she wanted us to help her through her heat? That she wanted to stay?
“Rune, are you okay?” Cian smiles at Everleigh as she skirts around him. “You’re staring into space.”
Waiting until I hear Everleigh’s footsteps thump up the stairs, I focus on Cian. “I was talking with Everleigh. I think she was getting ready to ask us to help her through her heat. Maybe even say she wanted to stay with us after.”
He blinks, and a rare grin stretches his lips. “She was?”
“You know why she didn’t?” I ask mildly.
His grin fades. “She changed her mind?”
“An idiot burst through the front door yelling about suppressants. I’ll give you three guesses as to who it was.”
Cian stares at me, then curses. “Fuck.”
“Yeah, fuck.” I turn on the stove, though I’m no longer interested in cooking. If I took this up to her, would she eat? Or should I give her time on her own to work through what she wants to do? “So who knows if she’ll say it again?”
“She might,” Cian says.
“And she might just as easily decide she can’t trust alphas after all,” I say. “Given she couldn’t get out of the kitchen—and away from us—fast enough.”
Chapter38
Everleigh
If I want to have my heat with you, would you agree?
The words I’d come so close to saying out loud hover in my mind. They linger long after I’ve made my way up the stairs and into omega territory. And I stop, just inside the doorway, peering at the window and then at the empty dish beside the bed I never sleep in.
Under the covers is a sketchpad and a pencil.
I’d snatched them from the dining table and rushed up the stairs, hoping no one would see me, or worse, no one would bump into me. I’d shoved them under the sheets. And I’d stood, like I stand now, working up the courage to draw something.
I knew exactly what I would draw. The memory of Rune standing at the stove, a crooked smile tilting one corner of his lips up, and the pan he’d tossed high in the air had imprinted on my mind. There was no doubt in my mind what I wanted to draw.
It had taken seconds, then minutes of waiting for someone to notice the pencil and sketchpad were gone and to punish me for taking them.
No one had.
Still wary, I’d crept closer to the bed, slipped under the sheets, and I’d drawn. A line here, a curve there, a bit of shadow there. Rune’s smile, his liveliness, and his passion had spilled from my mind and onto the page.
Long after I’d finished, tucking the pad and pencil back under the sheets, I’d waited for someone to punish me for not being the perfect omega Lawrence had made me.
Shaking my head, I refocus on what truly matters.
