Page 26 of Scheme
“I can’t even remember the last time I took a nap,” I said with a dramatic sigh.
“Is there some particular reason why lawyers can’t take naps?” Kit asked drily.
“The general workload? Peer pressure? Our naturally competitive natures?”
Kit’s lips twitched, and I silently swore to myself that I’d get a full-blown smile out of him in the next few weeks.
“Do you like your job?” he asked, grabbing a tea towel to dry the pots.
“I do,” I replied after a short pause. “I used to work in the office until a few years ago. Obviously, by my age, most omegas are mated and transition into working from home. I didn’tneedthat, but I guess HR didn’t know what to do with me, so they pushed me in that direction.”
“You don’t like working from home?”
“Omegas are social creatures,” I pointed out with a soft smile. Actually, we were needy little hornballs, but we liked regular, non-sexual socialising too. Sometimes. “That being said, the oddness of my situation can make people uncomfortable sometimes, even colleagues who have known me for years.”
He hadn’t asked me yetwhyI didn’t have a mate. He’d accepted it as fact without question—a rarity I appreciated—but I could see the wheels turning in his head now.
Fortunately, Violet reappeared before Kit could put those thoughts into words, the buttons on the front of her dress skewed and her cheeks flushed, offering the perfect excuse to change the subject.
“So,” I began. “Shall we get out the board games?”
Chapter 7
Therewasnothingmoremortifying as an omega than submitting the same five-day leave request each year.
Nothing.
I would rather go into a real-life, in-person sex-toy store—something I had never done—and buy ten Colossal Cock dildos, the ones with the silicone knot as big as a tennis ball and a ridge of piercing simulations around the crown, than submit this fucking form again.
If I had an alpha of my own, my heats would only be a couple of days long and easily chalked up to a sick day, and so routine that HR wouldn’t blink an eye.
But no.
I was monestrous, going into heat once a year as I had done every year since I was eighteen. It was my body waving a sad little pick-me flag for alphas, and I resented the inconvenience immensely.
With a heavy sigh, I clicked the ‘submit’ button, giving HR a heads up that they absolutely didn’t need that I’d be taking a few days off in the foreseeable future.
Smug Lora, the HR Manager and my nemesis, probably had a bet going with her underlings about when my leave request would arrive.
With a heavy sigh, I pulled off the headphones that had been blasting classical focus music in my ears and rubbed my temple. I still had a few weeks to go before the big bang-my-dildo-collection event arrived, but my back was achy, and I was bloated, hungry, and extremely irritable.
Tea, I decided. A cup of tea would help the achiness.
And a pack of biscuits would help my mood.
My phone buzzed and I glanced down, expecting to either see an eight-minute voice note from Michelle about her mother-in-law, or another weird meme I was too old to understand from Asher.
Kit: I’m downstairs.
Well, that I hadn’t expected.
I pushed out of my uncomfortable office chair and grabbed my keys so I could head down and let him in. It had been a couple of days since I’d seen him at Nico and Violet’s for lunch, and we definitely hadn’t made plans to meet up again.
Kit’s hair was wet from the faint drizzle that had been falling all morning, his glasses speckled with water and skin all damp and glowing. A light drizzle made me look like a rat who’d just climbed out of a particularly objectionable drainpipe. Some people had all the luck.
“Come in, come in, let’s get you out of the rain.”
I led Kit upstairs, and he set down a paper bag on the table before taking off his wet jacket and drying his glasses.
