Page 126 of Run Wild Omega

“My gait is fine.”

“Your gait is compensatory. You’re shifting weight to your right hip to avoid loading the left side, which is going to cause a chain reaction in your pelvis and lower back if we don’t address it.”

I stare at him. “You’re very annoying.”

“I’m very thorough. There’s a difference.” He crosses the kitchen and stops in front of me, his expression shifting from clinical to something warmer. “How are you? Actually.”

“Actually?”

“Not the leg. You.”

I look at him. His eyes are steady behind his glasses, and there’s no judgment in them. No agenda. Just Miles, seeing me the way he always does, straight through to the parts I try to hide.

“Terrified,” I admit.

“Of Saturday?”

“Of everything. Of Rourke. Of the lawsuit. Of the fact that I’m about to sit in a room with three men I have feelings for and try to explain something I don’t fully understand myself.”

He reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers trail down to my jaw, tilting my face up.

“You don’t have to have it all figured out,” he says. “None of us do. We just have to be honest.”

“Since when are you the feelings guy?”

“Since I came in my pants on a sofa with you. That was a humbling experience.”

I burst out laughing, and he grins, and the tension cracks enough that I can breathe.

He scents me before he leaves. His wrist presses against my neck, sagebrush and mountain rain sinking into my skin, and his lips brush my forehead.

“Drink the tea,” he says. “All of it.”

“Bossy.”

“Accurate.”

He walks out, and I drink the tea. All of it.

Saturday morning, I wake up burning.

My skin is too tight. The air in my bedroom feels thick, heavy, pressing against me like a fever. I throw off the duvet and lie in the dark, my T-shirt soaked through with sweat, my hair clinging to my neck.

My temperature is up. I can feel it in the ache behind my eyes, the flush spreading across my chest, the way my muscles are twitching like they’re trying to crawl off my bones.

And between my legs, slick.

Not the faint trace from a dream. This is a flood, warm and constant, soaking through my underwear and into the sheets. My body is producing it on autopilot, a physiological response that has nothing to do with conscious desire and everything to do with biology.

No. No, no, no. It’s too early.

My heat isn’t due for another two weeks. I track it. I’ve always tracked it, because an unbonded Omega in a mountain town can’t afford to be caught off guard. The cycle is predictable, regular, a twenty-eight-day clock that I’ve monitored since the Academy.

But my body doesn’t care about the calendar.

Three men. Days of continuous pheromone exposure. Wyatt’s pine and smoke on my neck. Dylan’s woodsmoke and amber on my wrists. Miles’s sagebrush and rain on my clothes. The combined biological signal has been building in my system, triggering a cascade that my conscious brain can’t override.

My body thinks it’s bonding. My body thinks it’s found its pack.