Page 58 of Knot Just A Fan

“I need you to protect me. Echo is my pack, I know it. I am your Omega. I need to know if you believe that, too.”

I’ve never heard my voice sound like this. I am not this person.

But my Omega is.

I push Grayson back on the both floor so he’s lying flat, and I straddle him, my core’s wetness seeping into his untucked shirt.

“Jesus, Briella,” he whispers. His arms come up around me, his hands on my hips, holding tight but not tight enough. I grab them and raise them to my breasts, which he takes as invitation.

He squeezes them, gently at first through my thin top.

“Inside,” I command, and he slides his hands beneath the tight, both hands on my bra. “Take it off.”

He doesn’t say a word, eyes wide, lips slightly parted, breathing fast, with his cock rams against me through his trousers, seeking its initiation with the curves of my body. And with it, the knot I suddenly can do nothing but think of, desire more than anything.

Grayson’s hands are on me. The ones I’ve watched so many times slide up and down the guitar neck like I dreamed of them sliding up and down my legs, my skin, through my hair, and inside my folds. I throw my head back as he unhooks my bra and pulls it out. My breasts fall freely into his hands as I rock over him, still clothed, as he kneads them and their razor-sharp tips.

I lean into his ear as his hands caress my breasts. A moan I’ve held inside for something like a thousand years slides out. I rock forward further until I’m pressing his hands down against his own chest. “I need you to say it.”

“You are our Omega, Briella Phillips. I’ve known for so long.” His voice is gravelly, and his face is flushed. His cock is rock-hard beneath me and we both want to get down to business. But even in this mind-altered state, I know I have to hear certain words to pursue this. We could fuck one time, like I always dreamed, but to be truly happy—truly at peace with who and what I am—I know I need a pack. Even if this goes against everything I tried to believe.

“I want to be Arcadia Echo’s Omega,” I manage, pausing every few syllables as I try to hold back the rush of lust driving my body. “I will never get Ronan’s approval. But I will start with yours.”

He reaches up and whispers into my hair. “You have it. And you have my deepest apologies for this undeserved delay.”

Suddenly I lean back. I need him to beg. I need him to grovel, to show me he means this. His set’s continued. Clearly he’s lined up a few tracks, but I don’t care enough to even ask how long we’ve got.

I kneel over him and pull my shirt over my head. He stares at my breasts, the cool breeze and his presence and my heat making my nipples stand up like arrows pointing toward the sky.

“God, you are so unbelievably perfect,” he whispers. But I pull away before his hands touch me. His head’s raised up to meet my gaze. His eyes look like fire, but he’s placed his palms flat on the booth floor.

“Tell me when you knew,” I say. I’ve never heard my own voice so full of iron, so commanding. It’s a side of me I’ve never been able to explore. When I went into heat in my room, I wasn’t speaking, just groaning, moaning, full-on animalistic sounds. But now I have an Alpha beneath me.

I wait for him to reply.

“Briella, I promise, with all that I am, I didn’t scent you until New Year’s Eve. It was like inhaling a breeze straight fromheaven. But before that—until then, I was so drawn to you. I knew you were our Omega without scenting you. I had so much baggage to set down first that I chalked it up to my mind-fucked state at the time. But I knew, that night at your place, when the three of us?—”

He stops. Clears his throat.

“No. It was before that.”

I nod. Because I know it must be that evening by the sea in Devon.

Echo had a gig in Exeter, but it was an early evening gig, opening for two other bands. It was the most social I’ve ever been with Echo.

After the gig, Ronan and Enzo wanted to get down to the coast, and I was itching to take photos of the sea. Not a place I got a chance to see very often growing up.

But it was Grayson who invited me. Ash was chatting up the promoter and the other bands’ managers, schmoozing whoever he could in those days. Grayson asked if I wanted a cheeky trip to a beach that night. We’d be back to our hotel afterwards, and then back home the next day. It felt like sneaking out while our parents were hosting a dinner party.

In those days the band rarely took me out on gigs far enough that an overnight was required. They rarely had them, to be fair, and the drive from Exeter to Reading isn’t far, but it was a mini-festival and the promoter was free with funds, so we made a kind of party weekend out of it.

We got a bus toward the coast then took a rideshare to a beach called Sandy Bay. Clear sky, full moon, starlight on the sands and dramatic cliffs.

I took all the photos I could, trying to capture the romance and the ruggedness I rarely got to see.

Ronan and Enzo didn’t have much time for me, but they were running barefoot through the sand like kids, hooting andhollering before texting Grayson that they’d spotted a shop open up the beach to go grab some drinks from. Maybe even score a small portable BBQ.

That left Grayson and I alone, under the stars, the crash of the waves, talking about books we loved, places we ached to visit—and my landscape photography.

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