Page 15 of Knot Just A Fan

But Briella smells like a luxurious beach, like coconut and jasmine and sunset on sand. She smells like a feeling I’ve always wanted but never known, which can mean only one thing.

She smells like my soulmate. And even more important, her body, her eyes, her soul, said she’s been waiting for me to know that for ten years.

Could an Alpha feel more guilt? I hope to never fucking know the answer to that.

I want this conversation over. “Guys, if you don’t care how she is, deal with that somewhere else. I’m going to check.”

I stand my ground between the dressing room door and my bandmates, praying this is not the first of many instances where I have to choose between them.

On the other side of the door are sounds of movement and a quiet moan. From the ballroom, a more subdued but still party atmosphere continues. Ash is still pacing at the end of the corridor, but his eyes haven’t peeled away from our standoff.

Finally, Enzo grabs Ronan by the elbow and the pair head back toward the stage. “C’mon. Your overheated shitshow is the last thing a recently-collapsed girl wants to see.”

Woman, I want to say. We might’ve gotten away with calling her a girl back when I’d first met her, but she’d been twenty-three. She’d been a woman then.

Surely she’d been on suppressants then which would’ve muted her scent. And she still isn’t matched and marked by a pack, so she must still be on them. So why did her scent hit me like a wall just now?

Willow has smelled powerfully of honeysuckle, rose, and vanilla since we’d met in our mid-teens. It had been sickly sweet to me, but I’d loved her. As a friend, as a lover.

But not as my match. And that had been the guilty secret I’d kept from my pack mates. Willow knew. I knew. But neither of us have been able to say goodbye to something so long-standing. A friendship, a sexual connection, a life connection. Even if we rarely see each other. Even if I don’t have a clue what consumes her days anymore.

I love Willow. But Briella, who’s been the most wide-eyed and earnest learner, the most determined student, the most self-deprecating but wittiest conversationalist, and the most perceptive person I’ve ever met—she has her fingers on my heart, even if I’d never properly admitted it to myself.

I’ve never flirted with her. Never made it clear I found her attractive. And she, well—shit. She’s sexy, sensual, enticing in a disarming, unaware, youthful yet powerful way. But she’s never thrown herself at me. She’s far too polite and respectful.

But maybe in my deepest fantasies at night, I wish … No.

I knock on the door again. “Briella, are you okay?”

More sounds of movement. I glance around but Ash is gone.

“Hold on,” comes Cami’s voice. “She’s come to. Is that Grayson?”

“Yes.”

The door opens a crack, with one big dark eye peering out, the lashes practically reaching beyond the door frame. “She’s okay, she’d just kill me if you saw her like this,” Cami whispers. “She’s fuzzy. I’ve given her some water and she’s on the sofa, getting her bearings.”

“What happened?” My pulse leaps into my throat, and I start to feel a bit queasy myself. “Is she okay?”

Cami’s eye blinks a few times, looks to the side, then peers back at me, her nose and its one piercing visible. “She will be. Just—trust me—you shouldn’t see her right now. But can I ask, just what the fuck were you doing with her?”

Her tone’s not accusatory, but protective. And I don’t blame her. I feel my own swell of protectiveness over Briella Phillips like a swarm of hornets in my chest, ready to escape and attack anyone and anything that threatens her.

But if she’s just dehydrated, or exhausted, or simply overwhelmed looking out from the stage under the heat of the lights at all the crowd watching—that’s understandable.

“I don’t—it’s my fault,” I say. “God, I just need to talk to her.”

This protectiveness isn’t new. It’s been there. For years. I stuffed it down, maybe subconsciously. Maybe she saw some of it. Either way, now I know it for what it is.

Cami’s almond-shaped eye blinks several times. “Whatexactlyhave you got in mind?”

I sigh, impatient to get my point across. “Nothing dodgy! I just need to talk to someone and I’m afraid—I don’t know how to talk toherabout it yet.”

Cami’s eye narrows. “Give us your phone.”

I look down the corridor. Then I pass it through the crack in the door.

A few seconds later she’s typed her number in. She hands the phone back but doesn’t let go as she says, “If you do anything to hurt her, jerk her around, or mindfuck her, I will fuck you and your boys up like you can’t begin to understand.” The growl she ends on says it all.

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