Page 10 of Want It All
I floated in the afterglow; Tristan gathered me in his arms and brushed kisses below my ears and across my scent glands. He was an alpha, after all; if alphas had one trait in common, it was their obsession with scent. It was part of the reason we did this so often: scent blockers were effective at eliminating scent from our skin – from sweat pores or scent glands – but they only minimised the taste of us in cum or slick. Tristan was obsessed with my scent – a cherry I found much too sweet – and he got his fix in whatever way he could.
I wasn’t any better. His scent was a mouthwatering, elegant vanilla, and I wanted to breathe it in every moment of the day. I wanted him to scent mark me so I could smell it on my clothes, on my skin, and to have him bite and bond me so that the echoes of his scent would twine through mine, letting every other alpha know that I was taken.
But alas.
Any other alpha in his position would have bitten me without a second thought. But Tristan insisted on beingnobleabout it, and so I remained unbonded. But I was open to the idea of a pack, and Banksia was as good a place as any to start looking.
I gently disentangled myself from his arms and fished in my bag for scent-cancelling spray and wipes. I was never without either, and Tristan always carried extra, too.
We knew what we’d be risking if we weren’t careful.
‘I want to go to the discipline mixers,’ I said, coating myself with cancelling spray. The later-year and research students were hosting mixers for the first years in discipline common rooms that night. Tristan would die before studying anything but archaeology, so his specialisation was already set, but I hadn’t decided yet. I’d been getting a bit bored during our undergraduate degree, even with all the time we’d taken off for Tristan to go on digs, so I wondered whether something new might be better for me. Ancient history, perhaps, or something completely outside my wheelhouse, like literature. A different discipline, so I could do a cross-school PhD, with the added bonus of entertaining my brain for a few months while I caught up to the other students.
And I would catch up. I wasn’t conceited, but I couldn’t be modest about it, either. Even without my parents and their achievements, I deserved my place here.
I pushed the thought of my parents away. Banksia House had been theirs; now it was mine. I refused to spend the next few years standing in my mother’s shadow, even if one of the libraries was named after her.
Not the library this study room was in, obviously. I’d never get hard again.
Tristan sprayed himself with canceller while I watched appreciatively. My alpha was so beautiful, with his even features and soulful green eyes, deep enough to drown in. He wasn’tbuilt big – not like Byron Griffiths – and people tended to underestimate him because of that, even though he was still taller than me and roped in enough slender muscle that his clothes draped and clung in all the right places. His family oozed cash – the kind that came with ancestral manor houses and invitations to coronations – and Tristan carried himself with a quiet self-assurance that I’d found irresistible since he’d smiled at me on our first day of university six years ago.
When our clothes were straight and there was no hint of scent in the air, we left the study room for the first mixer. We were early – and byearly, we’d arrived at the first common room twenty minutes after the advertised start time – so it was just us and the later-year students. We’d started with the classics mixer, and the vibe was overwhelminglyfriendly but awkward; a handsome PhD candidate made a joke in Latin that I responded to unthinkingly, and they paid us more attention after that. I didn’t think I’d choose classics as my speciality – I didn’t enjoy the rote learning aspect of languages – but I worked to charm them nonetheless, while Tristan watched with an indulgent smile.
We moved onto philosophy next, where I was greeted by a blonde man with a wide grin and eyes that dropped a nanosecond later to my crotch. I retreated and Tristan stepped forward, clearing his throat and moving his hand to rest in the small of my back.
I fucking loved it when he did that. The touch was calming, centring – but it was also a non-verbalfuck youto the other alpha ogling my package.
I couldn’t blame him, obviously. But he could also fuck right off.
I didn’t think philosophy was for me, and not just because it had been my mother’s specialisation.
We left quickly, heading for more familiar ground. The ancient and modern history students had teamed up, but you wouldn’t know it to look at them: it was as if a line had been drawn down the centre of their common room, with a few hapless individuals that I imagined to be Middle Ages specialists wandering between the two groups.
Tristan must have thought the same, because he gave a tiny cough, a sound that usually covered a laugh. We headed for a stern-looking woman wearing an SPQR pin on her lapel, and a few moments later, Tristan was deep in conversation about museums returning stolen artefacts.
A man smiled at me, and it was a genuinehey-how-are-yousmile, not ahey-I’d-like-to-be-in-your-pantsone, and I was so grateful that I proceeded to talk his ear off. Two other men watched from a distance, but I had the feeling they were keeping an eye on their packmate, not assessing a potential new one.
The man’s name was Paul – I had a strong suspicion he was an alpha – and he told me about the ancient history specialisation, dropping the names of a few guest lecturers and tutors he’d had over the years. I recognised all the names, which was impressive, coming from a different discipline; Banksia House didn’t fuck about when it came to their academic hires. Paul mentioned their six-monthly trips – to central Australia, Italy, Greece, England, and South America – and their links to academies overseas before he suddenly faltered.
‘Gosh,’ he said quietly, his eyes fixing on the door behind me. ‘She’s brave, I’ll give her that.’
I turned. My breath caught in my throat, because standing in the doorway was a poem of a woman, pretty and curvy with thick auburn hair falling over her shoulders in shining waves. I knew immediately who she was.
Rosemary.
The omega.
The chatter in the room stopped.
She flushed the most delicious shade of pink I’d ever seen, then turned to leave. My chest gave a strange, tight squeeze of what felt like empathy for her.
‘Hey, Rosemary,’ I called to her, running my mouth before my brain could catch up. Tristan shot me awhat the heck, Sebastianlook, but I ignored it. ‘I’m so glad you made it! Paul was just telling me about the ancient history tutors, and they’re insane.’ I gave her my best warm smile and held out my arm, as if I was expecting her to walk into an embrace. ‘And youhaveto hear about their overseas trips.’
Her brow furrowed, but she must have been dying to hear about the specialisation – or perhaps she was simply desperate for some time out of her bedroom – because she walked slowly across the room andstepped into my outstretched arm, pressing herself lightly against my side. I let my hand rest on her hip, as if this wastotally what I had expected and I was completely fine with it, and not, in fact, battling the sudden, odd urge to push my face into her hair and inhale.
Paul seemed stunned into silence, so I forced myself to chatter. Tristan was tense, but as I hadn’t yet given him myplease save mesignal, he stayed where he was, though his eyes flickered between Rosemary and me. I repeated all the information Paul had already given me, and, by the time I’d finished, the man had recovered enough to keep talking about the second-year curriculum and the current third-year research projects.
Rosemary listened, her lips slightly parted. My lungs were full of a sweet floral scent, but it wasn’thers. It was her hair product, or fragrance, or both, and it was lovely, but my teeth were aching with the unhinged desire to rake across her scent gland to see if she would perfume.Which would be atotally fucked up thing to do, I told myself, trying to concentrate on keeping my fingersloose on her hip, and not tightening to pull her closer the way I wanted.
