Page 141 of Captive Omega

So naturally, the only person in the kitchen is the man I want to see least of all.

Garrison sits at the dining table, a newspaper open in front of him, and a mug of something steaming beside him. Coffee. Because of the cold shower Vaughn told me he would need to have after listening to me?—

Hazel eyes snap up and my cheeks burn as I wrench my thoughts away from…

Things.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

“What for?”

Clearly, my mind is entrenched deep, deep in the gutter.

Food. Resa. The guy means food.

“Uh, sure,” I mumble belatedly.

A flicker of amusement is there and gone again so quickly I almost believe I imagined it. “It’s probably too late for lunch and too early for dinner, but I can throw together a sandwich.”

I’m not hungry anymore. I nod anyway, so he will stop looking at me.

He closes his newspaper and returns it to the table with a suspiciously heavy thump before rising.

When I find myself noticing his shoulders, his scent, and the way he rolled his shirtsleeves up to reveal strong, tanned forearms, I order myself to get a grip on myself.

As he crosses over to the refrigerator, I look at the newspaper and the book I think it contains. The pregnancy book. One with Post-it tabs.

Why is he reading it? And why is he hiding it from me?

Would it make sense to just ask? Sure. But this feels like a game, playful rather than harmful and cruel. It’s a game I don’t mind playing, if only to find out how far they’re willing to go to hide the book from me.

“Have you thought about the trial?” he asks.

I rip my eyes from the newspaper and take my usual seat at the kitchen island, my designated safe place. At least it was until the last time I came in here looking for Blaine. I smiled as I pulled up a chair at the dining table with two alphas and no knife in my hand like it was nothing.

Wait.

Why am I just thinking of that now?

“Resa?” Garrison studies me across a slab of granite as he waits for a response to his trial question.

“Uh. A bit.” In reality, I haven’t spent nearly enough time thinking about what I want to say.

I’d write a speech, but I was never bookish or smart, and I hated almost every day of school. If any assignment involved public speaking, I failed it. I hated not knowing what to say, the stares, and the follow-up questions I never had an answer for.

So I stammered or spoke too fast and missed entire lines in the script I’d write up. I’d hurry through it as fast as I could and plant my ass in my seat as soon as fucking possible, telling myself that next time, I’d work just a little harder to convince my mom I was truly on my death-bed sick and avoid public speaking assignments forever. I sucked at them.

It’s why I opted out of college and settled for a quiet, unsatisfying real estate assistant job that was a little more boring than I wanted to admit to myself.

Now I have to speak in a trial and make people believe what I say is the truth, even though I don’t have a lick of evidence to back up my words.

“We have a small window for you to speak.” He looks at me. “Tomorrow mid-morning.”

I wish the ground would open up, swallowing me whole so I never have to take one step in that courtroom.

But alphas need to pay, so I gulp instead of running out of the room and diving into my nest to spend the next ten years hiding. “Will there be reporters there?” I ask.

“There will.” He pulls sliced meat and cheese from the refrigerator. “Sloane is the first alpha going on trial for his role in the free heat clinic abuses. There will be more, but this is unprecedented.”

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