RYAN’S back was to me as I snuck into his basement grow house, rows of dense green plants growing under sun lamps in tidy lines on water tables. He was seated at a desk, more high lamps pointed at the work in front of him, and I considered backing out of the room and leaving him to it, when he sat up straight, setting a pair of small scissors down and dropping a bud into a basket. He glanced over his shoulder, finding me immediately at the door, his brow furrowing.
“Baby. What’s wrong?” His chair spun to face me and he was standing as I fidgeted in the
doorway.
“Nothing. Can I hang out with you?”
He blinked and searched the room as if he thought I was speaking to someone else, except we were alone. “Of course. Want me to take you upstairs? Or my office?”
While my nest was tempting… I looked around the open space. “This isn’t your office?”
Ryan’s smile was faint as he shook his head. “Let me clear this out of the way first.”
“I don’t mind just sitting around while you work. Or helping.”
“We’ll go somewhere quiet. You can’t stand still and you…you smell a little stressed,” Ryan said with his back to me.
My nose wrinkled in response. “That’s weird. I’m not sure I’m wild about being on everyone’s olfactory radar.”
Ryan coughed, or laughed, and shook his head, carrying a tub over to a shelf and then wiping down the scissors he’d been trimming with. “Sorry, normally I wouldn’t say anything but…” He finished putting things away and stood still, watching me from a few yards away. I felt as though he was trying to read the past hour on me, and I wondered how much my scent could really tell him.
“What happened?”
It took rapid blinking and a few swallows before I could answer him. And it wasn’t really an answer so much as an attempt at distracting him from the question. “Office. Cuddle me. Stat.”
He took the order without another word, meeting me in the doorway and pulling me into his chest, my eyes falling shut as I sank into the dark, earthy, and sharp aura he exuded. “Arms around my neck, sweetness.”
I tucked my nose against the hollow of his throat and reached up around his neck as he lifted me from the floor, scooping my legs up with one arm and wrapping them around his waist. The office wasn’t in the basement as I expected. Ryan carried me up a flight of stairs, to the first available door in the hallway. The room smelled like weed, although more like the raw material than the smoke, herbal and fragrant instead of skunky. I lifted my head as he shut the door behind us, shoving it with his shoulder.
“It’s the back of the dispensary,” Ryan said. “Tom has his own office, so we won’t be bothered.
He and I operate pretty independently.”
The room was small and there was a door across from us that probably led out to the shop front, but it had a big stack of empty cardboard boxes piled in front of it as if to discourage visitors. There was a window, but the window had been painted over, only thin catches of light sneaking through scratches in the paint. More interesting to me, however, was the fact that the room had a deep black leather couch taking up most of the available space, with a low, stained coffee table sitting in front of it. There were bookshelves stuffed into the corners, with paperbacks piled in haphazardly to fill
every inch.
“This is kinda a nest,” I said.
Ryan grunted in what might’ve been agreement. He sat down on the couch and then twisted, taking me down with him. I rolled over him, stealing the inside spot as we stretched out together. The room was painted an uneven but dark green, and it was missing the overhead box lighting most of the Plaza had, with just a shaded lamp sitting at the top of a bookshelf for light.
“Better?” he asked.
“Much,” I said, smiling as Ryan wrapped me up against his side, one of his legs leaning over mine. Then he rumbled—a little scratchy sound, but undeniably a purr—and my unease settled. I stretched in his hold, fitting my face against the side of his throat and he raised a hand to my hair, his fingers sticking to the strands almost immediately.
“Shit, the resin gets everywhere, sorry.”
“Do you do all the cleaning and growing yourself?”
“Most of Tom’s stock is ordered in, so my part of the job isn’t too much to do alone. Just gives people a reason to come here instead of any of the other joints.”
I tapped on the end of his chin. “Is that a dispensary pun specialty?”
He huffed and turned his head, bumping against mine and pressing a kiss to my forehead. “Gonna tell me what had you twitchy?”
I was not going to if I could help it. “What got you into growing weed? You don’t seem like the usual…stoner, I guess.”
“I don’t smoke much. Enough to know what I’m growing, but I can tell a lot of that under the microscope.”
His fingers slid up beneath my t-shirt, palm resting against my back. Ryan had none of Cole’s greedy impatience, just the simple appreciation of touch, and every second I spent in his company
made it easier to relax.
“So you’re in it for the science?”
“I was a chemist, I worked in pharmacology out of college.”
I leaned back, staring up at the ceiling and tried not to let my confusion show on my face. Ryan reached out and turned my face back to his, eyes crinkled at the corners with a hidden smile. “I helped invent new medicines. Well, prescriptions at least.”
“Oh! Huh. How do you go from prescription medicine to marijuana grower?”
He was quiet for a long pause, brushing fingers through my hair and studying my face. If he had never answered the question, I still would’ve been content in the silence. Ryan was the most peaceful of my alphas, a steady center for me to rest in.
“I guess…I got one too many results from the drug trials. After a while, when you’re designing new drugs to address the side effects of the last drug, you don’t really feel like you’re helping anyone.
A friend had given me some seeds and I found growing really…meditative. And I was reading a lot of
articles in medical journals about the beneficial properties of marijuana.” He hummed and shrugged his shoulder beneath me. “When I started hanging around here I let Tom try some of my crop, and when he asked me to grow it was easy to quit my job, join the club.”
“Do you miss your old job?”
He huffed. “Nah. Keep in touch with some of my old co-workers and it’s the same old shit in there. I looked into starting my own company at one point, but I don’t have the deep pockets to dig my way into that field. Here I can control the product, put care and thought into the buyer. It may not be a cure for cancer, but it doesn’t come with dangerous side effects. Tom does some buying for the heavier recreational stuff, but for the most part we’re a medical dispensary.”
“Did you make those truffles you gave me?”
“Just the oil for them. Tom knows a guy in the neighborhood with a chocolate shop. You like ‘em?”
I blushed, and Ryan raised his eyebrows as I nodded slowly. “I had one yesterday before Jonah and I… everything was very heightened.”
Ryan grinned, a rare and beautiful sight, and I squirmed closer. “Hmm, that is worth knowing. I think we have some lotions we could experiment with too.” He laughed softly as I lit up at the suggestion. “Now, I let you stall and change subjects. If you won’t tell me what rattled you, will you tell me what I can do to help?”
I avoided Ryan’s stare, mapping the muscle of his throat and the sharp angles of his jaw. I leaned in, took another long hit of the dark and heavenly scent of his, and he started purring. “I’m just… still navigating what’s omega and what’s me, and where those overlap, I guess. I won’t get it right every time.”
“Omega is just biology, sweetness,” Ryan said, voice rough with his purr. “You fit us because you’re you. Anybody ever leaves you confused on the subject, they need to get their head on straight.”
“If I was still a beta and I wandered into the bar…”
Ryan shifted us, curling over me and blocking the room out, his salt and pepper hair hanging into his eyes. I pushed it away so I could soak up the heavy look he was giving me. “I would’ve asked if you’d let me buy you a drink.” He bent his head, rubbed his cheek against mine and pressed his lips to my ear. “And then I would’ve asked if you wanted to go somewhere less crowded.” I sighed, breath shaky and eyes falling shut as he kissed down the length of my jaw. “Told you to call in sick the next day so I could keep you in bed with my face between your thighs.”
Then he smacked a noisy, sucking kiss to the skin over my pulse and leaned back, smiling.
There was heat in my belly, but my skin wasn’t itchy the way it seemed to get before I became really demanding about sex. As tempting as Ryan’s alternate version of our introduction was, I was feeling pretty fond of how I’d found him at the moment.
“Will you lay on top of me?” I asked, answering his smile with one of my own.
His eyebrows ticked up. “Haven’t heard it put like that before.”
I snorted and shook my head. “Nevermi—“ Ryan moved, his arms tucking behind my head as he balanced himself above me. “Like this?”
He was so tall he could cover me head to toe like a blanket. I nodded and then realized he probably couldn’t really see what I was doing, and a head shake might feel about the same as a nod. I dug my fingers into his sweater on his side and tugged him down.
“Yeah, but you don’t have to hold yourself up. Lay down.”
He hummed and hesitated before slowly sinking down. The couch was so soft and I was pressed into the cushions, his weight on just the right side of pressure, heavy enough to hold me still without it
being hard to breathe.
“Are you sure I’m not crushing you?” he asked, the words mostly a vibration through his chest
and throat.
“No. Feels safe,” I said.
With that, Ryan was purring, loud and dense. I parted my thighs slightly, letting him nestle between them, slightly hard. It was sexual and comforting, the force of his purr just slightly erotic against my core, but mostly soothing. His cheek rubbed the top of my head, fingers tangled in my hair.
“You are safe, sweetness.”
“Holding you to the face between my thighs thing for later though,” I murmured and felt him laugh in response.
We stayed like that, quiet aside from Ryan’s dense and uneven purr. The vibration was pleasant between my thighs, but neither of us pushed for more. Every few minutes Ryan’s face would shift, a kiss landing somewhere new on my forehead or in my hair. I was nearly asleep when the door opened.
“Hey, there you ar—“ Bullet’s voice broke off abruptly and his throat cleared. “Okay, I can’t tell if this is a sex thing or not.”
“Not,” Ryan said, words in my hair as he refused to move. “What’s up?”
“Roads are clear and the temp just spiked to the low sixties.”
Ryan twitched over me and I loosened my hold on him, letting him roll to the side. “What does that mean?”
“Heyyyy, there’s my kitten,” Bullet said grinning. “It means we’re going for a ride, Baby.”
RYAN AND BULLET made me change into jeans and get my boots, and by the time we made it back down to the parking lot, the pack was waiting for us on sleek and shining motorcycles, engines humming at the ready.
I fidgeted in place, eyes wide as I took in the sight. It was time for my first ride with my pack.
With my motorcycle club. And I didn’t know what to expect or where to look. Chef and Brody and the others had betas on the back of their bikes, but my alphas all had an open spot for me.
“Coal, Bullet, Scorch, and Bomber have the best seats for sharing,” Ryan said, frowning at his own bike and its narrow, sporty seat. “Gonna have to fix that for another time.”
“Promised you I’d give you a ride, little omega,” Cole said, winking at me from his glossy, electric blue bike.
Hard pass, I thought. Instead, I looked to Jonah. He was beaming at me, shoulders still loose and smile wide. The decision was mine.
I turned to Bullet, bouncing on the balls of my feet, and he barked a laugh. “My fuckin’ honor, kitten.”
“Give our princess her crown,” Tom called out, and Shade brought forward a beautiful helmet with a short visor. It was a nearly black, glittering, emerald color. Bullet took it into his hands as I faced him, standing by his great beast of a motorcycle, all frosted chrome and black leather.
Bullet leaned down to my ear. “Lean in on the vibration and the turns, and you’ll feel like you’re flying.”
I nodded and he smiled, putting the helmet on over my hair. It fit like a glove, and I grinned up at
him like a kid on Christmas morning as he fastened it in place.
He helped me on the bike behind him, showing me where to brace my feet, and then wrapping
my arms around his waist.
“Ready, brothers?” Jonah called out.
“Ready,” the pack chorused.
Engines revved and I squeezed tight around Bullet, a giggle in my throat as we started forward, bike thrumming between my thighs like an alpha with a monster purr. It took me one block and one tipping turn around the corner to fall in love with riding a motorcycle. And as much as I loved holding onto Bullet as we sped through the city with a chorus of machine roars, I wondered how much begging I’d need to do to get a bike of my very own.
