Lola & the Millionaires: Part One (Sweet Omegaverse #2)(46)
“I don’t want to find him, I just want to know he can’t find me,” I said.
Rake’s fingers squeezed gently on my side as the elevator slowed and settled to a stop. As soon as Rake opened the elevator gate, I gasped.
“So this floor is an addition that Leo and Matthieu came up with. They like their open spaces.”
There were two dividing walls running down the hall on either side of us, but the wall opposite us was entirely glass, and the ceiling overhead was made of thick glass bricks, letting in light but warping the view.
“Matthieu’s side is to the left, Leo has the right side.” Rake held my hand in his as he pulled me down to the doorway that led to Leo’s suite. The space was surrounded by floor to ceiling windows, some curtained and others hanging open to reveal a balcony around the outside of the building, dense with greenery.
“Leo came up with this place?” I asked.
“He found the property. Matthieu and Caleb picked out an architect to redesign the space with Caleb’s input. Caleb wanted to be sure it didn’t feel like one of those sterile contemporary lofts everyone has.”
‘Everyone’ they knew at least. I hoped Leo hadn’t told any of them about my shoebox—cardboard walls included—apartment.
“Bed’s this way.”
Rake’s bed had been massive, which I guess made sense as the omega, but I was surprised to find that Leo’s was equally so. The mattress would fit Rake, Leo, and I with plenty of room to spare. For the first time since Leo had mentioned his pack being open to outside relationships, I wondered what those relationships looked like. Was Rake used to sharing with Leo and his alphas? Did they regularly bring in beta girls like me to play around with?
Not like you, that’s for sure.
I couldn’t imagine it. If Leo had been looking for easy sex to share with his pack, he would’ve run the other way after getting to know me.
The bed was on a platform in front of a windowed wall with wood slat shutters that were angled, striping the sheets with sunlight. Rake crossed to the bed, crawling on his knees to the center and then flopping face down. I smiled at his sprawled form and joined him, kneeling just out of reach.
“How did you meet your pack?” I asked.
Rake rolled over, his thin t-shirt rucking up his stomach slightly, and rubbed his hand over the stubble on his jaw. “Um, through the Omega Center. But Wes, he worked for a different security company at the time, and he didn’t have a pack. I was his first assignment, and we just… It’s weird to say it because I know what people think of omegas and their alphas, but Wes is like my brother. He’s not my alpha because he throws me into heat or I put him in rut. He’s my family. He’s who I trust to keep me safe, to keep my pack safe too. So he joined the pack when I did.”
“Baby met her pack through the Omega Center, but she was a late bloomer. How does it work when you’re still a teenager?”
“Right,” Rake nodded, wiggling backward into the pillows and waiting for me to join him. I settled against his side before he continued. “So I started kids’ modeling when I was fourteen or so, and my perfume came in a year later. The Omega Center advised that I quit modeling and just worry about school until my maturity hit, or at least get a beta security team if I insisted on modeling. But I liked Wes when I met him. He was cool and just out of the military, the kind of badass a teenage boy is inclined to look up to,” Rake said with a smile.
“So I hired him and a beta. Eventually, when Wes and I knew that my perfume wasn’t an issue for him and his pheromones weren’t for me, we just flipped off the Center and kept working together for about five years. Baby didn’t get to go through it, but like…maturity kind of just starts as this general sort of itch. Like little mini heats popping up for ten minutes where suddenly, you wanna just rub up against any available surface. One day, when I was twenty, I popped a boner in a swimsuit photoshoot.”
Rake grinned with me. “I know. I was twenty. Pretty embarrassed. And Wes wouldn’t let me fuck the lighting team, so we left the shoot and headed back to the Omega Center. They opened up their magical binders of alpha scent cards, and I found three packs I liked. This one was the only one where the alphas didn’t seem phased by the idea that I wanted to keep working. And Matt and Wes immediately got along, while all the other packs acted like Wes was a threat to their authority as my alpha. No thanks,” Rake finished with a wave. “So yeah it’s been…eleven years now.”
I rolled to my back and squinted up at the ceiling. “It sounds kind of…businessy.”
“Yeah. I had a romantic period when my perfume first showed up where I thought I’d meet my pack on my own. But…well, let’s just say it was good I had Wes during that time. The Omega Center isn’t always the most unbiased or natural way, but it is safe. And yeah, there were some growing pains at the beginning, but I can’t imagine being in any other pack now.”
“You would’ve scared off any other alphas by now,” Leo said, entering his bedroom while carrying a tray stacked with takeout boxes that made my mouth water with the smells of garlic and tomato and butter. He toed off his shoes and I folded my legs beneath me to make room for him to sit across from me.
“Baby got her perfume while we were at a biker bar in Old Uptown,” I said.
Rake snorted. “God, what a mess. Wait, was it the bikers she ended up with?”