Page 22 of Omega's Virtue: Part One (The Hartwell Sisters Saga 2)

“Thank you for facilitating our return from Paris. Viola was kind enough to inform me of your assistance,” she said, with as much emotion as she might use while discussing the weather. “It is all forgotten. We both made our decisions. I wasn’t wrong. But clearly neither were you. Don’t feel guilty. I don’t.”

I didn’t respond. I hardly understood what she was talking about. Guilt? I carried mine like Atlas. But what guilt might she feel? What—Had she fucked another alpha? Had she done so to even the score? To get one back at me?

“I told people that my mate had died. I lied. To protect your reputation, your virtue, an omega’s greatest prize… I told people you had died.”

“I never asked that of you!” She spat. For the first time, I saw the young woman I remembered.

“I never said you did. Ain’t right though, Trix. Never was.”

“Oh, must you adopt that stupid slang that all those high born alphas do? They think it fashionable to speak as if they come from the slums! But Goddess, it just makes them sound stupid to my ears! I thought better of you!” With each new thought her tone rose, her anger bubbled closer to the surface.

I snatched her chin and tilted her face to better see those bright eyes flashing and fierce. “There she is. I knew you couldn’t have changed.”

Knowing that beneath the mask was my Trix, my omega and mate, I felt no compunction taking what was mine by rights. I kissed her. Nothing gentle or sweet, but claiming and demanding. I bit her lip until I tasted copper and knew she was mine for the little desperate sounds she made. Knew because her scent told me everything. I’d rut her. Now. Here. Before we’d have the chance to speak. I’d remind her who I was, and what it meant to wear my bite on her neck.

I gave her a moment to breathe and for me to see the evidence of her arousal in her eyes, the flush of her cheeks and her lips red and bruised from the kiss. All of her was mine.

“Scoundrel.”

I grinned. “You are my mate. I can do as I please.”

“Not like this.”

It took more than I cared to admit to pull away, to set some distance between us.

“I won’t, Tod… I cannot make you understand, but we cannot go back to what, to who we were.”

How could I smile at such a statement? But she called me Tod, and that slip of the tongue told me enough. “I’ll take my leave of you then.” I bowed, content in the knowledge my mate breathed the same air I did and had yet to shoot at me. “But you won’t be able to avoid me, to run from me, simply because you deny what we are to each other.”

“What is going on?”

Beatrice jumped at the alpha’s bark and reached for me. We both looked to where Paxton stood, radiating the kind of alpha rage you rarely saw outside of a battlefield.

“Go into your room, Trix. We will speak later.” I shoved her through the door and closed it.

“Follow me,” I told Pax, leading him away from her door.

“What were—“

“We were reacquainting… I’ve made a decision. If you want, we will take her.”

What else could we do? She was an omega who resided in an alpha’s dreams, and she was mine. There would be no convincing me otherwise… A Lovers’ Circle? My bite, so clear and visible that it loudly proclaimed to the world that she irrefutably belonged to me. Test that bite mark against any other alpha’s teeth and no one in the whole wide world would contest my right to my mate.

“This is sudden.”

I looked around at the wealth of a duke’s ancestral seat, waiting for the old bitterness, my otherness to appear. Nothing but the eerie calm before battle, an energy of readiness to begin the fight. I needed to get out of here. To put my fist through something and revel in the rightness of this moment’s realisation. Trix had been as much mine for the last decade as she had when I first realised I would make her my mate. Yes, with her the readiness was all. “Yes it is. Now… I mean to stretch my legs before dinner.”

“You’re going to brawl?”

“Always. My dear Benedict, Lord Paxton, Baron Mote…” I tutted. “The world is a complicated place. But today everything is clear as day.”

“What passed between the two of you?”

“Nothing, Pax. Nothing worth being anxious over at least. If I’m not back by the dinner bell, fetch a surgeon.”

Beatrice

How dare he!How dare he come and pick a fight with me. After what he had done? What I’d been forced to go through because of him?

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