"Garcia—"
"Miles, you're burning up." He crosses the room and puts the back of his palm against my forehead before I can stop him, and the touch of his skin sends a shock through me so intense I gasp. His eyes go wide. "Fuck. You're — are you—"
"Don't say it."
"Miles, are you going into heat?"
The word lands in the room like a bomb. I close my eyes. The warmth is a wave now, rolling through me, and where Ray is touching my forehead my skin feels electric, alive, desperate for more.
"I don't know," I whisper. "Maybe. I'm — my suppressants ran out."
"When?"
"Just now. I took the last one. It might hold."
"And if it doesn't?"
I open my eyes and look at him. He's standing over me with his palm on my forehead and his expression is scared and focused, and my omega brain — the part I've spent my entire adult life strangling into silence — is screaming at me to lean into his touch and bare my throat and let him take care of me.
"If it doesn't," I say, "then we have a problem."
His palm doesn't move. My skin burns where he's touching me. The room is very quiet, and the heat inside me rises another degree, and we stare at each other and wait.
Ray
He's burning up. That's the first thing I register — the heat of his skin under my palm, way too hot, like a fever but different. Hotter. His eyes are glassy and his breathing is wrong and I can smell him, really smell him, in a way I haven't been able to before, and my palm is on his forehead and my brain is finally catching up to what the rest of me already knows.
"Miles. How long has this been building?"
"I'm fine." He pulls away from me and stands up, swaying, grabbing the nightstand. "It's just the altitude. Or the stress. It's going to pass."
"That's not what this is."
"You're not a doctor, Garcia."
"No, but I've got a nose and you smell like—" I stop myself. Like everything I've ever wanted. Like a sweetness that's making my pulse hammer and my skin prickle and my cock pay attention, which is fucked up because he's clearly in pain and Iapparently don't care. "You smell different. Way different. And you're burning up."
He sits back down on the side of the bed and drops his face into his palms. His shirt is damp at the collar and between his shoulder blades, and his fingers are shaking. Miles Covington, who I have never seen lose his composure once in the entire time I've known him, is sitting on a hotel bed with his face buried in his palms and every wall he's built crumbling around him.
"When did you last have a heat?" I ask.
"I don't want to talk about this."
"I know. When?"
He's quiet for a long time. "Years," he says into his palms. "I've been on suppressants since I was a teenager. I haven't had a full heat in—" He cuts himself off. "A long time."
That scares me more than anything else he's said tonight. A heat after years of suppression. I don't know a lot about omega biology, but I know enough to know that a breakthrough heat is bad. It's not a normal cycle. It's everything the suppressants held back flooding in at once, and it hits harder the longer it's been held down.
I pull out my phone. Devon's name is right there at the top of my contacts, and I stare at it. My thumb hovers over the call button. What would I even say? Hey Dev, I'm in a hotel room with my boss and he's going into heat and I'm the only alpha here and I think I might be in love with him and I have no fucking idea what to do.
Devon would tell me to call a doctor. Devon would be right.
I close my contacts and open my messages instead. I type: Hey, something came up at the conference. Might need to stay a couple extra days.
Devon replies almost immediately: Lol did you get invited to an after-party? Don't do anything I wouldn't do
I stare at the screen. My brother is on his couch with his baby and his mate and everything is fine and normal and I'm standing in this room with the air getting thicker and sweeter by the minute and nothing is fine.