Page 13 of My Begrudging Scent Matches

You know what.

Alice Walton

My bandwidth isn’t great today, but feel free to send any requests to my inbox and I can try to fit them in this week.

Caleb Everett

I can swing by your desk.

Alice’s eyes widen at the threat and her fingers fly over her keyboard.

Alice Walton

Please, please do not.

If he came that close, she would fully scent him again, and from that alone, she would start perfuming her own horny Omega pheromones, enough to fill the whole floor. Caleb smelling this would probably result in his scent growing stronger and stronger, and nothing good could come from that cycle. Her dreams had been fitful, full of imagining exactly that. The imagining was against her will, she might add.

Alice Walton

I think that would be a very, very bad idea.

Caleb Everett

Alright, then when?

Alice Walton

I need to get through today. After the meeting. Please steer clear of me until then.

Caleb doesn’t respond for a few minutes, and when she looks up at him, he is still looking at her—as if she’s a puzzle he can’t quite crack. Grant is watching, too, Alice can tell that he knows.

Caleb Everett

Fine.

Fine.

Even when talking with his scent match, he can’t bring any liveliness to a message.

It was a long eight hours of avoiding getting any closer than a yard away from Caleb or Grant. Alice didn’t think Grant was any harm, but with her suppressants hanging on by a thread, she didn’t believe they’d do any good with another potential Alpha in the mix.

Staying away from Caleb doesn’t mean that she’s not currently as uncomfortable as she’s ever been, though. Her clothes don’t sit right on her body, the lights are too bright, giving her a blaring headache, and every perfume or cologne in the office that isn’t Caleb’s scent makes her nauseous. She wants to be home in her own bed, her nest, for all intents and purposes, with the blackout curtains drawn as she’s buried beneath three blankets minimum.

The meeting was great, but Caleb being in person meant that he could get under her skin in real-time. As they were wrapping up and defining action items, he kept taking things on her list and reassigning them to someone else in the room.

“Scott, you have bandwidth for that right?” or “Lisa, since you were in charge of that project for a similar client, would you take that over?” By the end of the meeting, Alice had three action items, about the same amount or more as everyone else, but it still felt wrong when the bulk share of the work was originally expected to be done by her.

Does Caleb think being an Omega makes her so incompetent? She can’t humor the idea without her eye twitching.

After the day is technically done, she procrastinates at her desk by answering emails, squeezing her neon green stress ball, and otherwise doing things that could absolutely hold until Monday in the hopes that Caleb will just give up and leave.

But no, of course not.

At 5:30 on the dot, Caleb approaches her desk. He doesn’t stand too close, but close enough that his scent greets her full force. She hates that this immediately helps lighten her headache.

“You got here early, you shouldn’t stay late,” he says. He’s got a brown messenger bag slung over his shoulder and carries a red scarf on his arm. It looks soft, but Alice pointedly turns away from it before she can do something mortifying like asking if she can have it.

“Thanks for the concern, Mother.” Alice is being short, trying to convince herself that part of her isn’t thrilled about his worry for her. The traitorous part. None of her managers would tell her to work less, and in fact, they’d applaud her dedication and team spirit.

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