Page 100 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

But then we hear footsteps in the corridor, and we jump apart so fast my hip catches the edge of the display case. The sharp pain is almost a relief—something concrete, something that isn’t the heat still radiating through my body.

I watch her come to her senses immediately. Her jaw tightens and her shoulders square. Her eyes, which were soft and dark and close enough to drown in three seconds ago, go flat and steady, and the woman who was breathing my air and leaning toward my mouth disappears as if she never existed.

“I get the idea, Ethan.” Her voice is even.

The device is still in my hand, the knot fully inflated, and the absurdity of it hits me—standing here, holding a swollen knotting device, my heart pounding, while Sophie straightens her blouse like we’ve just been caught doing something we’ll both pretend never happened. I press the button. The knot deflates with a quiet hiss. I place it back in the display case.

And the shame hits me like a slow tide.

Because I saw her glance at that display case with something she didn’t mean to feel, and instead of pretending I hadn’t noticed—the way any decent person would—I picked up the thing she was trying not to look at and held it between us and made her watch it inflate while I narrated the experience in clinical detail.

She gave me a stolen glance. A two-second lapse in a lifetime of perfect control. And I turned it into a demonstration.

“The pharmaceutical section is this way,” I say, and my voice is normal again. “I’ll walk you through the regulatory pipeline.”

We walk to the pharmaceutical wing. I spend the next forty minutes explaining the regulatory pipeline with aggressively professional detail, and Sophie asks intelligent questions, and neither of us acknowledges what happened in the product lab.

But I know.

And she knows I know.

Later, alone in my office with the door closed, I press my palms against my eyes.

I know better than this. I have boundaries for a reason, and using my position to get close to someone who works for me is exactly the kind of thing I swore I’d never do.

And I picked up a knotting device and used it as an excuse to stand close enough to count the freckles on her nose. I watched her breathing change and I liked it. If those footsteps had come five seconds later, I would have kissed her.

She’s a contractor, here on an assignment. And I was inches from her mouth in a product lab, holding a sex toy, telling myself it was professional.

I lower my hands and stare at the ceiling.

SOPHIE

By six the research wing has mostly emptied out, and I’m shutting down my workstation when someone stops beside my desk.

“You must be Sophie.”

I look up. And my first thought is that she looks like a 1950s pin-up who took a wrong turn and ended up in corporate biotech.

A couple of inches taller than me and all curves, with dark red hair falling in waves past her shoulders and the kind of figure her lab coat is doing absolutely nothing to hide. Hazel eyes, a wide, open face, and a smile so warm and immediate it hits like stepping into sunlight from a cold room.

She’s an omega. I can see it in her curves, in the softness, in the way her body fills the space it takes up. And she carries all of it without a scrap of apology—the kind of confident, comfortable femininity that I’ve spent my whole life burying.

“Oh my God, finally.” She breathes, already reaching for my hand. “I’m Evie. Mr. Brooks told me you’d be at this desk and I have been waiting all day, except I got stuck in back-to-back supply meetings, which is seven hours of my life that I will never get back and I am still furious about it.” She hasn’t let go of my hand. “You have no idea how excited I am. It gets so lonely being the only non-scientist in this wing. Everyone else just mutters about compounds and half-lives and I’m over here like, great, the printer’s jammed again, does anyone care? Nope, nobody cares.”

I blink. She’s not even breathing between sentences.

A category unto itself, Ethan said. He undersold it.

“It’s nice to meet you, Evie.”

She lets go of my hand and steps back to look at me properly, tilting her head like she’s appraising a painting. “Gosh, Sophie, Mr. Brooks did not mention you were this pretty. Look at those eyes. And that bone structure.”

“Stop,” I say, and I’m half-laughing. She’s one to talk. Standing there with that red hair and those curves, looking like she belongs on the cover of something, and she’s complimenting my bone structure.

“I will not stop. It needed to be said.” She waves a hand like she’s swatting the modesty out of the air.

She loops her arm through mine. “Come on. Machine’s still on and I refuse to let your first day end without proper coffee. You haven’t had coffee until you’ve had research wing coffee.”