Page 8 of My Begrudging Scent Matches

To: Alice Walton

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024 at 7:32 PM

Subject: Re: Incentive Plan Notes

Alice,

Edits on your memo and incentive plan for tomorrow are attached. There aren’t many.

Caleb

three

Lily sits on the edge of Alice's desk just before lunch, so close that Alice must scoot away from her computer to see her friend's face.

Alice sniffs the air. There’s something like the scent of a Christmas candle flooding her senses. “Are you wearing a new perfume? Why do you smell so good?”

“No?” Lily ducks her nose to her shoulder and sniffs. “If anything, I smell like I just ran a 5k. I just got out of that design meeting,” Lily says, then lowers her voice. “Absolute hell.”

“I thought that was this morning?” Alice asks and squints at her clock. It’s noon.

“It was.”

Alice grimaces. “What made the meeting need to be three hours long?”

“Two words: live designing.”

Alice groans. She’s all too familiar with having to make revisions on the fly in a conference room full of stakeholders. It’s a unique kind of frustrating hell that often leaves drafts less cohesive than they started.

“Logan was being a nightmare,” Lily whispers.

“His favorite thing to be.”

“Caleb was great though, really sharp.”

This information startles Alice, who has been diligently trying to forget that he exists and is in the same building as her. No wonder she hadn’t seen him around this morning shooting her probing glances as he walked by or sending unapproachable Slack messages from his desk.

“Was he a jerk? Like, did he say anything rude?”

“I’ve literally never seen him be rude.” Lily pulls open Alice’s drawer and snags a bag of fruit snacks. “I still think you’re seeing things, but who knows, maybe he saves it all for you.”

The office is big, but not big enough that Caleb and Grant don’t choose that time to walk by, each offering their polite hellos as they do.

Lily pushes off the desk. “Why are they both way hotter in person?”

Alice doesn’t dignify that question with an answer. To herself, she had noticed that indeed they were both hotter than she expected. They’re the hottest-men-she’s-ever-seen-in-real-life kind of hot. This attraction is probably born from the fact that one or both of them are Alphas and not from true personal preference. She’s not really attracted to either of them, she just thinks she is. It’s not real. It’s her biology tricking her into believing otherwise.

Lily walks back to her desk, leaving the lingering scent of the perfume or body lotion that Alice is determined to get from her later. She is about to dive back in on her project when a sea of email pings go off on the floor at once, not unlike an Amber Alert, but this one notifies that there are free sandwiches in the building lobby for their enjoyment.

Alice would guess that it’s a celebration of Thing 1 and Thing 2 joining the corporate office, but the email doesn’t mention that part. Logan’s favoritism is clear, but he’s not going to broadcast it after he got in trouble with HR the last time.

Based on the picture Logan’s assistant shares of the cafeteria table, it’s a shit ton of sandwiches, enough for everyone to eat two. Alice idly wonders if she’ll be able to keep a couple hidden in the fridge for her to eat tonight when she will most likely have to stay until seven again.

As soon as she steps out of the stairwell ten minutes later, Alice is assaulted with the smell of toasted bread. Her dizziness at this is just another reminder that her heat suppressants are barely holding on. The deodorizers have been less effective, too, not lasting the whole eight hours on most days. She keeps smelling her scent on the bus ride home and can only pray that there are no Alphas on board.

Before Caleb and Grant got here, it didn't really matter if she perfumed at work because no Beta has a sense of smell strong enough to recognize it. As long as she steered clear of the Omegas on floor three, everyone would be none the wiser. Not like if she was in her hometown and every eligible Alpha in city limits would be knocking on her door trying to “protect her”. . . Please, she knows what that means.

But now there’s at least one, potentially two, Alphas on her floor to sniff around if she’s not careful. The best way to be careful would be to stay the hell away from them at all costs.

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