Page 4 of Omega's Virtue: Part One (The Hartwell Sisters Saga 2)

I should hate the scent and who it represented, but all too easily I recalled the memory of his heavy, strong alpha body against mine. The kisses against my heat sensitive skin. The bites along my neck, awakening a dangerous knowledge that pain could heighten pleasure. How I could never hope to mimic the stretch of his hard cock or how his knot filled me, stoppered me, and ensured that every drop of his potent seed stayed in my womb.

Any other heat, I’d want,need, to find a beta to help easy the agony. This felt different—different enough that I’d sent Jefferies away. Tears coursed down my cheeks. Every time a beta touched me felt like a betrayal of my mate. But could he fault me when he was the alpha who’d left me? The rejection was worse in these moments when I craved the proof of an alpha’s, my alpha’s devotion: his thick, hard knot filling me up, stretching me, making me come until I passed out from pleasure. I wanted his hot seed to fill me, to coat my body, to drown out my scent with his. His rut pounding me into my nest until—pleasure exhausted—I lay in his arms boneless and used. Each orgasm he wrought from me only tied us closer together until the bonds of sex bound him so tightly that he could never leave.

That is how it should have been. Instead, I must make do with the impersonal stretch of a carved and polished wood substitute which never satisfied. How vividly I remembered every moment of my heat with him. It was almost uncanny.

My first orgasm came sharply, like the snap of dry kindling.

I called out my mate’s name—torn from me in a moment of weakness as I remembered when he’d been mine.

Jack

Half Moon Streetwas eerily quiet, and the still summer evening sporadically punctuated by the sounds of the city reminding me I was far away from my homeland. London was nothing like my childhood home in Edinburgh, from where I’d just returned. A few short weeks ago, my alpha uncle had died, and as the only alpha in a family of betas, I’d inherited what little fortune he had. While most alphas would hardly notice the estate, it provided me with enough of an independence that I’d finally sold out—no longer a colonel in His Majesty’s Army. For the first time in thirty years, I was my own alpha. Beholden to none. The freedom to do as I wished, when I wished, had yet to sink in.

And what to do with that freedom? When the alpha who’d been forced to join the army against his will was so different from the one who found himself drunk on port standing on the narrow street looking at a stranger’s door, wondering what the occupants were doing at this hour.

My change from adolescence to manhood hadn’t come suddenly. After my forceful dislocation from my parents’ home, the army had proven a transition made easier by the use of fists. My ever so noble fellow officers had hours of study and years to cultivate their alpha presence. But me? A gentleman’s upbringing? I was the son of a tradesman with a thick Scottish brogue, rough hands, and a body used to manual labour. I might be the strongest alpha in the room or on the field, but what good was strength when the army’s hierarchy required its officers to boast a noble lineage?

The first year had been a bitch from hell. A broken mate bond I felt every day. My port-coloured mate stain stung. A painful reminder that I’d abandoned the omega I’d always planned to call my own. I blamed no one but myself for what happened that morning. Today I blamed no one but myself for not hunting her down and claiming her… I knew she was somewhere in the capital. I made it my business to know where she was. By rights and law, she was mine, but I held back. Ten years was a long time, and people changed. I’d be an arrogant ass to believe she loved me still. More likely she hated me, wanted to put a bullet between my eyes, before sucking on a piece of candied orange peel.

“She might be your mate, but you ain’t mates.” I cringed at my own play on words, but it lessened the anger somewhat. If I could crack a poor joke in this mood, I wasn’t so lost to melancholy. Humour. Humour became my armour when fists could not protect me. A quick joke to defuse the anger bubbling like a witch’s cauldron inside of me. The world thought me a jokester, but what better mask to wear when my demons clamoured far too loudly in my head. Sometimes the need to exorcise those demons resulted in a loss of temper, a need to take the anger out on my own body. I learnt the lesson to not beat to a pulp some aristocrat’s alpha heir—such behaviour only resulted in a night’s confinement for behaviour unfitting of an officer. Instead, I took my youthful fury out on the rank-and-file soldiers, who were all too happy to start a punch up with one of their own who’d turned traitor by his unwilling elevation to the rank of commissioned officer.

Yet the internal shift began. Adopting a more refined accent to preempt questions or worse still, the humiliation of the general approval of Mrs Hartwells’ generous patronage. As the years passed, the army granted me a genuine sense of purpose. My star rose steadily because I stood in place of a bridge between my men and the officers. Those who’d enjoyed throwing a punch at my face now followed me into battle with a fierceness of those born in my motherland. Of course, the Hartwells had forced me into an English regiment—the better to keep me far away from Beatrice Hartwell.

“Trix.” Her name on my lips sent a shiver up my spine, and I rolled my shoulders, hoping to dispel her memory.

Yet I could not shake her ghost.

The whole day I had been restless with a sense of anticipation only exacerbated by my mate stain, which itched and was hot to touch. Somewhere my omega was going into heat.

The toxin I’d ingested when I’d mated her triggered the flames of arousal once a year. If I’d had her by my side, perhaps helping her through her heat would soothe my own turbulent desires, which bordered on the unnatural. Talking to other mated alphas, I knew my troubles were not normal. An alpha’s mate stain should have calmed in the years following that first mating heat. Mine only seemed to get worse.

And as always, when I felt lost and irritable, I stood in front of Lord Benedict Paxton’s house. The alpha and I could not be more dissimilar in background or tastes, but since our meeting we’d cultivated a friendship both deep and lasting.

Which was why I felt no compunction to showing myself in and climbing the stairs, hoping to find him asleep—perhaps a beta with him since he’d been ornery of late, talking about finding a mate. I’d join him if that was the case. Though any lover I took paled in comparison to my mate, whom I’d mourned long enough, whom I hoped would consider the betas I fucked not replacements but merely bodies to relieve natural urges. I prayed to the Goddess she found similar comfort during her heats. I’d wish her a hundred beta lovers so long as mine was the only knot she knew.

However, instead of a naked Pax and a beautiful beta, my friend sat, propped up by pillows, chest bare, and his shoulder bandaged. A bloody stain indicated he’d incurred some wound in the last weeks since I’d seen him and by the metallic smell in the air, the wound was fresh. But why was he so placid about the whole thing? For a small smile flickered across his features as he played with a pair of women’s shoes.

Immediately as I stepped into the room, another scent—one I knew as well as my own—assaulted my senses, though I’d not smelt her for a decade. A growl started deep in my chest and grew in strength until it nearly overwhelmed my senses when I stood at the foot of the bed. Paxton glanced up, a rare smile brightening his face, and my anger dissipated and my cock grew hard.—Why? I could not understand my reaction. I should want to rip his throat out for smelling of my mate, but I didn’t… Why?

“Fordom! This is a pleasant surprise. How was Scotland? You find me somewhat indisposed.”

“You’ve made the acquaintance of Beatrice Hartwell,” I said without revealing how much it meant to me he smelled like the siren from my past. The one omega who could overset my temper and my plans with a sly grin, compelling me to follow her, telling myself I was looking out for her while, in fact, I just enjoyed watching her wildness. Knowing if there were to be an alpha to rescue the reckless, headstrong omega, it would be me. Only, for my childish plans to make Beatrice mine shatter the day her mating heat ended.

“How did you know it was her?” he asked. “I’d no notion a Beatrice Hartwell existed before this afternoon.”

“I am… I was acquainted with her in her girlhood,” I said as I stole one shoe from where it rested on his lap. “Do these belong to her?”

“She is wild. Abundant, soft curves and that hair to match her fiery disposition! But no alpha to protect her,” he mused, the smile still in place. “I met her at the Royal Academy. She wanted her paintings… Jack… I could kill her. The dammed omega went into heat while we sat there arguing the merits of her work… I chased her down, and she shot me. I live as you see…”

“Naturally.” I returned the shoe to him.

“Naturally,” he grinned. His thumb absently rubbed along the brocade shoe. “She shot me at point blank range. Missed the joint, mere flesh wound. But right over my mate stain, can you believe it? She could have killed me.”

“You don’t seem concerned by her violence. Or did it make you hard?” I asked, already knowing the answer. If her lingering scent had me hard and my knot pulsing, how could he not be in as much agony when he’d been close enough for the agony of being shot? What devil was in me I must torture myself by thinking about our reaction to her.

“Did you want to rut her? Make her your mate?” I wanted to regret the words, but I needed to hear him say it.

“Yes.”

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