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Donovan was out of bed, pulling clothes out of his drawers, before I could even finish the request. “Can you get dressed? We can go get whatever you need.”
“I can’t. I need to fix the nest,” I told him, fretting with the bedding. “And I don’t have clothes.”
“You can wear the dress?—”
I hissed. “It smells like the turd.”
Donovan frowned. “Yeah. I’ll throw it away.” He pulled on a pair of gray sweatpants and a black, form-fitting t-shirt. His dick—my dick—was visible through the fabric of the pants, and the shirt revealed every ridge of muscle.
“I need juice,” I repeated, suddenly very thirsty. “And then I need my dick again. But I really, really need juice. Can’t we get it delivered?”
He grinned. “It snowed all night. The Hummer is safe on the roads, but the lady who owns the grocery store, Maggie Barnes, is ninety-two and the nosiest lady ever to walk the earth. If she made it here in her beat-up truck, she’d stay for hours.”
“How long would it take to get there and back?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Go,” I growled. “Get some real milk, eggs, and dark chocolate, if they have any.”
“And vanilla?”
“All the vanilla.”
He grabbed me and gave me a long, thorough kiss, rubbing his beard on my face and neck—scent-marking me—before pressing his phone into my hand. He set it to unlock with my fingerprint, then opened his contacts. “If you need anything, the grocery store is called Magpie’s Nest. If you want to call your sisters, now is the time.” He started a countdown timer at fifteen minutes. “You don’t take one step out of this house, Valentine. Not one.”
“I promise I won’t.”
He wasn’t gone one minute before my first heat spike started. It was like my body wanted to punish me for letting him go without me. I crawled to the bedroom and nestled in the middle of the rumpled blankets, but the harsh light from the windows and the obvious lack of my alpha made the pain worse.
I dragged myself to the bathroom and thought about crawling into the tub. My new almost-sister-in-law, Candy, had done that when she was alone during a heat spike. She’d told me afterward that she needed a small space, and that was all she had. But Donovan’s shower had a huge half-wall of glass cinder blocks, and felt even more exposed than the bedroom.
So I sobbed my way to the only room I hadn’t explored yet… and felt like Goldilocks. The room was almost empty, except for a lamp and a queen-sized mattress on the floor.
It was just right.
With a sudden burst of energy, I ran for the burrito blanket, fishing it out of the hamper along with Donovan’s dirty clothes from the day before. Next, I grabbed all the blankets off the big bed, as well as the pillows, and used them to make edges of my nest. There was a chest with more quilts, which made everything softer. Then I plunked down the bag I’d refilled with the toys Donovan had bought for me, and fixed a few more things in the room that needed adjusting.
Finally, it was all perfect. Turning the lamp on the lowest setting, I shut the door. With the phone pressed to my chest, I rocked back and forth, watching the timer move toward zero as I did my breathing exercises. I had done lots of harder things than waiting for fifteen minutes, while ripples of what felt like hot pokers unraveling my intestines tore through me. I’d make it through this.
I had to.
Chapter 11
Donovan
“Valentine!” I shouted from the front porch as I unlocked the door. The light on the keypad wasn’t blinking, so I knew no one had gone in or out, but my inner alpha nature had been raging since I’d climbed into the Hummer. The snow had been high, and I’d more or less offended every person in the small grocery store in my hurry to get my omega what she needed. But now I was back home.
My arms loaded with over-full grocery bags, I kicked the door shut behind me. The living room was a mess, with rugs moved, and the cushions on the sofa and chairs missing. “Valentine?”
There was no answer.
She had to be here somewhere. I raced to the bedroom to find the bed empty. More than empty—this room also looked like it had been ransacked, stripped down to the mattress, with my shelves open and empty. The bathroom door was open, and the half-emptied laundry basket lay on its side, clothing scattered all around.
That only left one room. I opened the door to the empty bedroom and blinked. “Sweetheart?” I murmured. “What… How?”
The room had been transformed. The lamp had a sheet draped artfully over the shade, diffusing the light. She’d strewn more sheets over the table and had somehow pinned some to the walls, blue and white alternating colors, with intricate, matching fabric roses tacked between them. Had she folded the roses out of pillowcases? Amazed, I stepped inside.
A low hiss came from the mattress in the middle of the room, though it wasn’t a mattress anymore. It was a nest, with raised edges created from what had to be pillows, covered with blankets. I saw all the sex toys I’d bought tucked into the bases of the pillows, evenly spaced around the oval interior.
