Omega Reimagined volume 1 Read online

  I hated to release Leo, having only just lured him onto my lap, but I had to put him aside and go dig my phone out of my pants and make a ridiculously phony (and late) call to the boss to claim sudden-onset flu or something. I was vague on the details.

  As a shapeshifter, I got sick, like, never and I hadn’t bothered to catalog the many symptoms my human co-workers complained of, not realizing I might need them someday. If we’d been in wolf territory, I’d have told my boss that my omega was in heat, but we weren’t in wolf territory and he wasn’t my omega, so I fumbled my way through some noises that were halfway between a hacking cough and projectile vomiting. I doubted my boss believed a word of it, but I’d never called in sick a single day in the two years I’d been working for her, so she could fucking lump it. Leo was important.

  When I got back to the bedroom, Leo was wearing clothes. I didn’t like that. That was why my own clothes were wadded up in my hands and not bedecking my body. I wasn’t ready for clothes.

  “I’m hungry,” he said. “There’s nothing much here to eat.”

  Actually, his cupboards were full of food, but I knew what he meant. He needed meat—wolf food—not carb-loaded human fare.

  “You going out?” I asked, my alpha-mind not liking that much more than the sight of him wearing clothes. “I’ll go. You should probably stay here.”

  “I’ll leave the house anytime I want to. You fucked me once. It doesn’t give you the right to go all alpha on me.”

  “Point. You still smell good though.”

  “Worried that a marauding band of alphas might rape me? Relax. You’re the only alpha around for miles. Miles and miles and miles.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “The nose knows,” he said, tapping his. “I’ve been smelling you. Two weeks, give or take. You couldn’t smell me?”

  Two weeks ago I’d changed the way I walked home. I’d avoided the park while it was covered with snow, too much a temptation for my inner wolf who’d been born to frolic and hunt in the welcome cold of its whiteness. I hadn’t needed the temptation of an omega on the other side of the park either, but I hadn’t known he was there.

  “The first time I noticed you was last night. The heat, plus your window was open.”

  For some reason, that made him flush.

  “There are other omegas in New During,” I pointed out. I passed them on the street every now and then. There was even one who worked in my same building. They weren’t a problem generally when they weren’t in heat and kept to themselves. I wasn’t an animal anymore.

  “Well, you’re the only alpha,” he said grumpily. “Probably just as well, if this is how I’m going to behave.”

  “Hey, now. That was the heat. You were scenting me for two weeks and you didn’t run out and hunt me down, right? I’m the one who came to you.”

  Another flush. Maybe the heat was rising again.

  “Why don’t you stay here and let me go out?” I suggested gently. “Not because you can’t. Just because you’re not yourself right now. This thing isn’t over yet.”

  “I know.” He shifted from foot to foot, not meeting my eye.

  “Do you need me now?” I took a step towards him. “I could—”

  “No, I’m OK.” He took a step back. “Go ahead. If you don’t mind.”

  I minded leaving him, even though my alpha-self preened to be providing for my mate.

  Chapter 3

  Going to a grocery store: what passed for providing in the big city. I was such a stud.

  I’d spent most of the trip to the store and back consumed by a fire of self-flagellation. I had no business engaging with an omega. I had no plans to mate, at least not until my empire had been built, and not with an omega even then, and this omega was already taken. Fucking him was a breach of etiquette, a betrayal of trust, and illegal in three of the five wolf territories. Even where not technically illegal, like here in human territory, congress with a claimed omega opened one up to a challenge from the omega’s alpha. Somewhere out there was a wolf who had the right to fight me to the death.

  Then there was the question of what I now owed Leo. You didn’t just knot someone and walk away from him, not even if the knotting was a temporary expediency to solve an urgent problem. No one had ever died from heat. Even left completely unattended, an omega could weather three days of not eating.

  Except Leo had already been on day five when I’d found him. Something was wrong there. But probably he wouldn’t have died if I’d just left him to sort his heat out on his own. Probably, he’d have been fine.

  But hero Angel, still the alpha in his own mind if not so much in anyone else’s these days, had to step in, and now there was that question: what responsibility did that confer on me? Here I was, doing his shopping already. I had a bleak vision of becoming one of those alphas—at my omega’s constant beck and call, slavishly devoted to his welfare above all things, calling him little one.

  I’d called him little one last night, hadn’t I?

  Biology sucked. Sometimes I wished I was human. I didn’t want to be either emotionally or physically tied to this stranger. I wanted to do my job, get promoted; save my money and invest it into my own company; lead a team of smart, capable people in a common, worthy pursuit. Not spend the weekend rutting around on a small bed in a one-bedroom apartment in the outer boroughs of New During.

  Then I was back at his door which was nowhere near thick enough to block the scent of his need and a weekend of hot omega sex once again sounded like a prize I’d won in a drawing I hadn’t known I’d entered, so that instead of fearing a surrender to my own base instincts, what I feared was that he might have changed his mind while I was out.

  I knocked, because the last time I’d seen him he’d been sane enough to make his own decision about whether or not he wanted me in his apartment, and he wrenched the door open so violently it was obvious his sanity was receding fast.

  He panted, doing nothing but looking at me for half a second, some mixture of reluctance and need painted across his expressive face, and then he was on top of me. The packages scattered as I grabbed for him, no choice but to hold on. He was so strong in his frenzy. He nearly had us backed out of the apartment and into the hallway, he came at me so hard, but I managed to reverse our momentum and get us inside the door and kick it shut behind me.

  I’d had a lot of great ideas while I’d been out for topics of conversation we might engage in. Like, his alpha. An excellent topic to cover. And what he was doing here alone and why his heat was dragging out so long and whether it would ever end. Did he even know? And then there was that idea of getting to know each other. I had a feeling our lives weren’t going to part after this weekend, not with a knot joining them. Might be nice to know who I’d joined myself to and just how he figured he were joined.

  But talking would have to wait. Food would have to wait. This was a hunger that superseded all else. And it was glorious.

  He had his legs wrapped around my waist and his arms wrapped around my shoulders and his tongue wrapped around my tongue. I carried him like that into the bedroom and then peeled him off of me to dump him on the bed. He came back after me with that speedy determination he had. He must be a formidable wolf. Even crediting the heat for some of his strength and speed, I could tell he was tough. Alpha wolves typically had an edge over omegas due to our size, but there was no guarantee. A honed omega like this one could take an alpha who didn’t keep himself in his prime.

  Living amongst humans, I wasn’t as primed as I could be. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d made time to get out and run wild. The little park that separated my apartment from Leo’s would have felt like a lap pool to my wolf, like running in place. Going somewhere farther afield meant arranging transportation and taking time and running the risk of arrest.

  While it wasn’t technically illegal to transform, human cops were quick to pull in a wolf for threatening, intimidation, damage, you name it. They had an array of charges they could whip out of their back pocket if they caught you in wolf form, maybe the easiest of which was public nudity. It wasn’t illegal to transform. It was just illegal to do it naked. And you try transforming a pair of sweat pants. They transform into tattered rags, that’s what they transform into.

  I could definitely be in better shape than I was. I vowed to at least make more time for the gym. If I were a little stronger, I might be doing a better job of holding Leo off with one hand while taking my clothes off with the other. I resorted to using my alpha voice to order him in place. It wasn’t that I didn’t want him all over me. I just wanted him all over naked me.

  Naked me pushed Leo down on his back. I positioned myself over him, still holding him down with one hand while I explored him with my lips and other hand.

  “But I want you to fuck me,” he complained when I got his dick in my mouth. I grinned around it. An omega in heat was one seriously focused dude. Not many guys complained about being sucked off. I had every intention of fucking him, but not until I’d tortured us both as long as I could stand it.

  “Lie still and take it,” I ordered him. I took my hand off his chest. I’d just given him an order and was interested to see if he’d follow it. It was pretty funny watching him try. Being told to “take it” had thrown some kind of kink switch in his head because he became even more frantic in his attempts to make maximum contact with me, and yet there was an obvious, totally failed, effort to be compliant.

  “Alpha, Angel, Angel, Alpha.”

  “I like the way you beg, little one.” And I really liked the way he said Angel and Alpha as though they were interchangeable. I’d spent two years running from my alpha nature, determined never to take advantage of an omega’s biological need for me again, and here I was embracing even
the smallest nuance of my power over this man’s body.

  He needed me, needed me, needed me. I put his cock back in my mouth. While he told me over and over of his need, I sucked and licked. I played with his balls and with that beautiful, tight pucker dripping out his need for me like the words dripped from his mouth. Need, need, need.

  “Need what, little one?” I teased, even as I slid a single, insufficient finger inside him.

  “More,” he gasped out. “Need more.” He couldn’t decide whether to tilt his hips up to thrust his cock deeper into my mouth or press down to suck my finger deeper into his ass. Whichever way he went, I lightened the pressure on the other until his eyes were as wet as his ass and he’d stopped even asking for what he wanted.

  His surrender was even sexier than his need, the way he relaxed finally and let me do whatever I wanted to his body. It was through surrender that he won, because I had to fuck him then, when he was lax and dumbstruck. He’d had an orgasm somewhere along the way, while I was sucking him or finger fucking him or both, but his dick hadn’t gone soft even for a second. I wondered how many times I could make him come before knotting him, but it turned out that the limiting factor was in me, not him. I had to have him again and it was starting to feel like I had to have him now.

  I flipped him over and put him on his knees so I could have him good and hard. He moved into position instinctively, his chest scraping along the bed, his ass thrust high up into the air.

  “Yes,” he sighed, though I hadn’t impaled him yet. I was taking this final moment to appreciate the beauty of the body I knew I’d be too lust-blinded to see once I was inside him. He had the strong haunches and tight ass typical of our kind, something I’d only seen in the humans who called themselves runners. The pucker between his firm ass cheeks glistened with the slick that would ease my way—a substance ten times sweeter and silkier than any man-made lube.

  My first time with a human male, I’d felt like my dick would get sandpapered right off. I’d taken to wearing the condoms humans wore, not because I worried about diseases I couldn’t catch, but because they protected my skin from the roughness I wasn’t accustomed to. Now, sinking slowly into Leo’s welcoming, slick-coated passage, I felt like I was coming home.

  Whatever semblance of control I’d managed to maintain before I got my dick in his ass disappeared once I was in. I was immediately transformed back to the rutting, non-sentient animal I’d been when I’d fucked him earlier. The pleasure, the drive were so intense, there was no room for thought in my brain. In fact, my brain had temporarily vacated my head and moved into my dick where it could experience firsthand the sights and sounds and sensations of sliding in and out of Leo’s ass.

  This time I didn’t even try to stop my knot from rising. I welcomed the flood of sensation pulsing at the base of my cock. Every balls-deep thrust felt so much the better for that last pulsing bang as my knot forced its way into him. The sounds alone could have made me come: the squelch of slick, the slap of flesh, and that pop of something much too large being forced through an opening much too tight.

  But best of all were the sounds coming out of Leo’s mouth. He was delirious with pleasure, so pliant everywhere except where his sphincter milked my knot with grasping tugs and the demanding urging pleas leaking from his mouth like the overflow of what was in his heart.

  “Fuck, Angel. You fuck me so good. Don’t ever stop.” And then a moment later. “Knot, knot, knot.”

  I laughed, more of a choking cough around my heaving breaths, and asked him: “Which? Should I fuck you more or knot you now?”

  He only groaned, as if to say that either one was more than he could stand. I knew how he felt—I never wanted this to end but I also knew what came next, and I wanted that too.

  If either of us thought we had a choice in the matter, we were both wrong. I came whether I wanted to or not. The knot locked us together and that blissful period where the frenetic energy died and there was quiet and stillness and absolutely nothing except our mutual pleasure began.

  I rolled onto my side and pulled him up tight against me so that my lips fell easily against the back of his neck. I mouthed at that spot where I could see the faded remains of the scar from his claiming bite, where I could still smell that other alpha. I hated it—that Leo should smell like someone else—and so I licked and sucked and even worried at the spot gently with my teeth, futilely trying to wash him clean.

  We needed to talk about the wolf behind the smell, but not now, not while we were joined and his satisfied whimpers washed over me, sending extra shots of sensation to the knot throbbing inside him.

  They’d always told me that knotting was the best thing ever, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it could be so much better than the sex I knew. Now it turned out they were right, that knotting was to knotless fucking what fucking was to masturbation. The awesomeness of these moments when we were joined, when our orgasms rocked through us without effort, reverberating back and forth between us almost made me understand what my brother had done. Not forgive or condone, but understand.

  I didn’t want to think about my brother—about why I’d left my pack to try to make it big in New During, or about Leo’s alpha either, so I just licked and kissed and told Leo he was a good boy when I could speak and I thought he could hear. His hands clasped hard onto the arm I had wrapped around him, clenching with his climaxes. His eyes were closed and a smiled curled his parted lips upward. I’d sworn to never play this alpha role, but at least I played it well.

  My only criticism of knotting was that it didn’t last forever. Once my knot receded and I reluctantly withdrew what remained of my erection from Leo’s ass, he scrambled away from me. That shy, regretful look was back in his eyes, the one that said “I don’t know you” and “I shouldn’t have let/begged you to do that to me.”

  I sighed to see it. I couldn’t deny that the what the hell am I doing thoughts had started circulating in my head again too. Hormones either made everything really complicated or really clear. I couldn’t decide which, so I concentrated on more practical things.

  “Let’s get you fed.”

  “Before I jump you again, you mean,” Leo answered in that shamed tone. Thing was, it was very hard on my wolf to hear him upset. He was meant to be satisfied and grateful.

  I held back from grabbing on to him in an attempt to soothe or subdue and instead padded naked out to the kitchen. We should probably shower some of the accumulated fluids off of ourselves before handling food, but we wolves weren’t born to be fastidious and, bitterly-made jokes aside, it was possible we didn’t have a lot of time.

  “I can cook,” he said, when I started rummaging through his cabinets for a frying pan, but he didn’t jump in to take over from me.

  “You can get me the groceries. I think we left them by the door.”

  He flushed at that and disappeared from the doorway where he’d been leaning. He came back with the bags I’d brought in and I fried us each up a half dozen eggs, over-easy so the yolks were deliciously runny, and a porterhouse.

  I made sure he drank more water than coffee. He’d been losing a lot of fluids lately. I knew because I was covered in them.

  When he stopped eating like an animal and started eating like a human—dipping hot-buttered toast into the smears of yolk covering his plate—I knew it was time to have that conversation I’d put off while I was buried in him, though remembering being buried in him made my cock expand lazily. Not yet, I told it. More to come.

  “So what’s the deal with this alpha of yours? Is he going to charge in here raring to rip my head off?”

  “I hope not,” Leo said with a little duck of his chin towards his chest. “I haven’t seen him in five years. It’d be inconvenient timing for him to show up now.”

  “Why haven’t you seen him in five years?”

  “I left him.” Leo raised his eyes to stare at me defiantly.

  “Oh.”

  “He was an asshole. I had the right to leave him. I had to protect myself. The pack wasn’t going to do it.”

  “OK.”

  “You don’t think I have the right to leave him, do you?”