Page 26 of Roulette Rodeo
I opened the door to emptiness and her lingering scent.
"Fuck," I muttered, stepping inside and closing the door behind me.
The rational part of my brain—the part that had kept me alive through seventeen deployments—said to let it go.
One chance encounter, one kiss, one moment of insanity in a storage closet. It didn't mean anything. Couldn't mean anything in this fucked up world where people came and went.
Except…
I could still taste her on my lips. Still feel the way she'd molded against me, soft curves fitting into all my hard angles like she'd been designed for it. Hear that little moan she'd made when I'd deepened the kiss, inexperienced but eager, innocent but not ignorant.
Should I tell the pack?
The thought stopped me cold.
Rafe would shut down immediately—any mention of omegas still sent him spiraling. Talon would want to hunt, and not in a good way. His history with omegas was almost as traumatic as Rafe's, just manifested differently. And Corwin would analyze it to death, turn it into a case file to be solved rather than a person to be cherished.
But if she was my scent match—our scent match, because these things didn't happen to just one member of a pack—then they had a right to know.
I was about to leave, to close the door on this moment of temporary insanity, when something caught my eye.
A splash of color against the industrial gray shelving.
I moved closer, special forces training making me check corners and shadows even in an empty storage closet. On the shelf, weighed down by a dead pen, was a sticky note.
And underneath it...
"Bold," I murmured, a slow smile spreading across my face. "Bold as fuck for a virgin omega."
I picked up the folded fabric, the material silk-soft between my fingers.
Cherry red lace, delicate as spider web, probably cost more than most people spent on entire outfits. The kind of underwear that was meant to be seen, to be appreciated, to be slowly removed by someone who knew what they were doing.
Or left behind as the world's most provocative calling card.
The sticky note read "My name is..." with the ink dead mid-sentence. But the message was clear in what she'd left.
I couldn't help myself.
I lifted the lace to my nose and inhaled deeply.
Her scent exploded through my senses like a flash bang—bright, overwhelming, disorienting. But there was more. The fabric was damp with slick, her arousal soaked into the delicate material like perfume into silk.
"Fuck," I growled, my cock going from interested to granite in seconds.
She'd been wet.For me.Because of my prescence.
This innocent, virgin omega had soaked her panties from our kiss, then had the audacity to leave them behind like a challenge.
I inhaled again, longer this time, letting her scent fill my lungs. Cherry and honey, smoke and spice, but underneath—fuck, underneath was pure omega arousal. Sweet and rich, like nothing I'd ever scented before. Virgin arousal had a particular quality, untainted by other alphas' scents, pure in a way that made my alpha brain go into overdrive.
Mine. Hunt. Claim. Protect.
The thoughts came in rapid succession, military training warring with alpha instinct. Ineededto find her. Desperate to taste her again, properly this time. To show her what that scent did to me, what she did to me.
But first, I needed to think tactically.
This omega—my omega—had left me a clue.
