Page 32 of Omega's Dream (The Hartwell Sisters Saga 4)

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Polly

It was some hours later when the bolt screeched back and woke me from a fitful slumber. Puck carried a tray with what smelled of some gamey strew. My stomach grumbled. The closer to my heat, the more I tended to eat. I’d give their cook full credit for sending up delicious feasts that were impossible to refuse.

“Are you going to eat in there?” he asked as he set the tray on a small table and draped his coat over back of his chair.

“No.” I never did, always crawling out of the cage to sit at the table while he watched me eat.

“Come on, then.” He unlocked the cage door and sat in the other chair. That was when I noticed the two plates. “Eat with me or not at all.”

“What a ridiculous stipulation.”

“Oberon seems convinced you won’t eat if you aren’t watched.” We both knew that to be untrue. He had some other reason for joining me tonight. “Besides, don’t you want to know about all those little plans your people have been engaging in?”

“Tell me.” I sat and cut into the pheasant drenched in a sauce unfamiliar and delicious.

“I see why they call you ‘majesty’. All brusk commands. Are you like that when you fuck?”

I paused, fork halfway to my mouth. So he wanted to taunt me into rash remarks and even rasher actions. “Not always.”

“I’d like to see you fuck someone.”

“Unlikely to happen in this lifetime.” Our nightly back and forth was a tonic to my soul. The food, the way he teased, and laughed reminded me of better days with Jude and others with my sisters. He reminded me that Sarah had always claimed we should get along. My appetite fled. Her memory brought back my resolve to bring Puck and Oberon to their knees.

“You don’t actually hate alphas,” he said. I blinked at the abrupt change in tactic. He smeared a finger through the last of the sauce and sucked it until it was clean. “You are… put on edge because of us. You hate the way some alphas treat omegas.”

“All alphas.” I met his gaze. Dark eyes complimented his skin which glowed in the candlelight. The denial was on the tip of my tongue when a thought struck me. “I don’t know many alphas.” The words were out before I could consider the consequences. His eyes danced in victory. “I didn’t intend to say that out loud.”

“That is a confession. A good meal with friends loosens lips faster than wine or any truth drug.”

“Friends? Are you mad?” I flung the napkin at him and stormed back to the cage, locking myself in with the key before flinging it at him. I wanted him gone that I might clear my head. Allow my senses to readjust and expel the heady alpha scent he brought with him. I was behaving like a spoiled child. Flinging myself about when my will was thwarted. “Leave.”

“This is a development. Not many get the better of you. Here.” Puck pushed his hand between the bars and handed me the laudanum handkerchief. I was conscious of his eyes on my as I sucked on the fabric. There was no heat in them, just a steady regard as if he could not make sense of my presence here. “If you tell Oberon I provide you with juice of the poppy, I shall make you regret my kindness.”

“What your kindness?” I sneered. “Using our connection to draw some admission from me? I’ll tell Oberon everything.”

He ran a hand over his too handsome face and I couldn’t help licking my lips, the excuse, if he asked, being to gather the remnants of the drug. In truth my body in its fractured state wanted to reach out and see if his beauty was real or a mirage constructed by my fevered brain.

“You smell of slick.” I didn’t mind when he ignored my threat. I preferred his changing topics than what I would have expected from Oberon—taunts that teasing him was a sign that I wanted to be here.

“I’m an omega,” I quipped as if that explained it. As if slick was as common as sweat or breathing when we both knew that slick had one purpose and one purpose only, to help a knot into the hot wet hole of an omega.

“You—” He bit his lip and looked up to the ceiling. A soft curse in a language I didn’t recognise and once again I was the centre of his attention. “I wish Sarah was here to set us straight.”

Like that the tension dissipated. All animosity gone as we clung to the woman we mourned. “She’d tease us.”

“Pout and crawl into our laps.” He laughed, his lips stayed in a smile when the laugh faded.

“I miss her.” I blinked away the tears and rubbed the heel of my hand along my chest so hard I hoped it would bruise. “It hurts.”

“She wouldn’t want you to cry.” He reached through the bars as if he wanted to touch me but at the last moment retracted his hand and instead wrapped his hands around the gold painted metal. Leaning close, he rested his forehead on cage’s door. “What else can I say?”

“You’ve said and done enough.” Goddess, why did it have to be him comforting me? Or why couldn’t he have been a beta? Or why did there have to be so many questions since that impulsive decision to sell myself to them? I could have, should have found another way to save Beatrice. “I’d like to sleep now.”

“’Night, Polly.”

The lightof the moon cast long shadows when next I woke, feverish and aware of every molecule in my body, the cage, the room, and the world.

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