Page 156 of Stolen Omega

I just held on for as long as I could.

It’s over now.

I should let go.

“He’s changed,” Dale tells me. “He was lost for a long time. Looking for her, and then finding a way to get to her. He knew we’d always feel like something was missing without her. He was right. Everything is different now. Come and meet him, and Zoey.”

He holds out his hand to me.

I take it, even as my heart sinks.

He’s not leaving this place. He’s staying with them.

I follow him into the hotel, deciding I might as well meet his new family before I say goodbye.

If nothing else, I’ll finally have a face to put to the name that’s been hanging over our relationship ever since we first kissed.

Chapter Fifty-Five

Archer

I pick up Zelena’s perfume the second I step into the hotel lobby. It’s the faintest whisper of coconut cream in the air, the sexiest scent I’ve ever breathed in, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it belongs to her. Russ told me it was intoxicating, but I had no idea it would hit me so hard to taste her on the air like this.

I follow the scent of her perfume, knowing it’ll lead me to where she is.

My true mate. My Omega.

No man should ever have had the chance to steal her away like this before I even got the chance to know her. For the first time in my life, I regret following the rules. If I’d broken them, there’s no way this would have happened, because I would have been the one transporting her from place to place.

I would have been the one personally protecting her.

Keeping her safe from every threat.

No one can do that better, because no one else is her Alpha.

That means more than anything. I wish I’d realized that sooner.

I knew from the moment I first heard her voice that she was the true mate I’d spent my life looking for. I’d never felt anything like it before. It was like being struck by lightning. I was jolted out of my body as I listened to her sing, shocked by the connection I could feel without having had a physical meeting.

That connection was even stronger the day we were introduced to one another, from across a meeting room. The rules I’d been introduced to for interacting with her were firmly set in my mind, and I know if they hadn’t been drilled into me, I wouldn’t have hesitated to step close enough to make sure she felt it, too.

Her shy demeanor made it hard to tell if she was attracted to me in the more basic sense, but I caught the flush of color in her cheeks when I admitted I was a fan of her work, and every time we spoke from that moment on, I watched for that blush. It happened every time I spoke, whether it was to her, or someone else. If nothing else, my voice was having an effect on her.

Some deep, dark, primal part of me wanted nothing more than to trigger her perfume, to show everyone she was unequivocally mine. If I wasn’t so bound to the rules, it would have been hard to ignore that impulse.

An Omega’s perfume can only stay hidden from her true mates for so long.

I follow the soft scent from the hotel lobby into a corridor.

There are a million reasons an Omega’s perfume can come out after that first time it happens for a mate. It can be triggered by her emotions, by the emotions of other people, by physical or mental discomfort, or it can be triggered by drugs.

The guy who stole her away is an Alpha.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that he waited this long to take her.

I’m not sure how he could have found out that she’d started to perfume, but it seems awfully convenient for him that she’s already perfuming, and close to her first heat.

Without Harris, we might never have found her, and if we hadn’t, her kidnapper would have been the only Alpha around.

---