Page 26 of Captive Omega

“You’re a lot stronger than I am.”

My eyes fly open.

Vaughn glances up at me. “I’d be wailing like a baby.”

I swallow hard, blinking back tears. “You shot two men in the head,” I remind him. To do something like that, surely a bit of glass would be nothing.

“Yup,” he concedes. “But this is different.”

He gently runs his fingers along the soles of my right foot from my toes, down my arch to my heel, a ticklish sensation that makes me want to curl my toes, yank my foot away and giggle at the same time.

“This one is good,” he says, grabbing a small roll of gauze he uses to wrap my right foot before he turns to my left. It hits me that I have to go through this agony all over again.

He picks up the torch again and nods at the knife I’ve clenched in one fist. “Feel free to use it on me if you want.”

“You want me to cut you?”

“Well, no, actually.” He bends his head and sweeps the torch across the sole of my foot before setting it aside. “But if you feel you must, I can take it.”

“I thought you said you’d wail like a baby.”

“Now I didn’t say I’d take it quietly,” he drawls.

He is not for me. My place is not in this house with two alphas, but a tiny part of me likes this beta with his cheeky smiles, winks, and flirtatious behavior far more than I should.

His eyes flick up.

I flatten my lips immediately. He does not need to know how close I came to smiling.

“There’s less glass in this foot, so it shouldn’t take me long.” After a brief pause, he says casually, “You have a couple of bruises on your arms, and blood on the front of your dress.”

The bruises I knew about. Rupert didn’t know the meaning of gentle. But the blood?

I glance down. It’s only a bit, courtesy of the tree I crashed into. “So?”

I count myself lucky to be alive after my leap out of the window. A little blood and a few scratches are nothing in the grand scheme of things.

“So I can do quick and dirty, but anything serious is above my pay grade.”

It sounds like he’s pushing me to see his alpha. Probably even the doctor I told him I didn’t want.

My eyes narrow. “I said no drugs.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

With his head still bent over my foot, his tone is casual. “I have a very particular skill-set. We all do. I can do enough to buy someone time to get to a hospital, but I’m not a medic. Deeper injuries and other internal stuff is something I don’t know how to help or heal. If you catch my drift?”

He lifts his head, and his eyes flick to my belly and linger there for two seconds.

“Yeah, I think I do.”

He can fix cuts and stop bleeding, but he can’t do anything about my baby.

I itch to ask about the particular skill sets of the other men under this roof. I have a beta who apparently doesn’t even need to aim to blow two men away and can patch up a person so they survive long enough to get to a hospital.

He’s the beta here. In our world, on TV and in the movies, only alphas are the heroes and only they are brilliant enough to change the world.

I don’t believe that any more than someone will replace a lost tooth with a dollar bill if I leave it under my pillow. But most people do believe it. It’s been that way for so long that I doubt things will ever change, even though they need to.

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