Page 10 of His Prize (Omegas After Dark: Omega Auction #1)

CHAPTER SIX

Keiran

W ow. Everything with Darby suddenly made sense. He’d brought a heck of a lot of baggage into this fantasy. Way more than any high school soccer player. Way more than I wondered if he’d realized.

Air traffic controller, huh? Frankly, I thought that was super cool. And he was a supervisor. He was right to say that it was almost unheard of for an omega to reach that height in his career. That must have been an enormous amount of pressure on top of an already high-stress job.

It was no wonder the alphas he’d been working with the day of his mistake had given him a hard time.

And honestly, it was those alphas’ fault that Darby had cracked.

Even the strongest omega could only take so much bullying.

It wasn’t Darby who had nearly put hundreds of people in a dangerous situation, it was those shitty alphas.

High school or air traffic control, kids in their teens or grown people in their thirties and older, the same thing happened everywhere. Bullies who thought they were entitled to something treated smart, enterprising people like shit when their false sense of superiority was threatened.

Fortunately, I knew how to deal with those situations. That was one area where, despite my age, I had a wealth of experience.

“I’m going to tell you something you don’t want to hear,” I told Darby, switching back to a little more authority than I’d just been using, because I thought he’d respond to it. “None of what happened is your fault.”

Darby made a disbelieving sound and tensed in my hold. Since my knot was going down anyhow, his body pushed me out. “It was definitely my fault,” he said, sounding depressed. “I made the wrong call.”

In fact, I could feel that depression radiating from him on a visceral level, which was interesting. It certainly wasn’t what I thought a bond felt like, even a new bond. But sometimes alphas and omegas had a sixth sense for each other when they were in the middle of a heat together.

I decided to take a huge leap of faith, one that was technically against the rules. But if Darby could be honest with me about his reality, then I could do the same.

“I’ve made tons of bad calls,” I said, continuing to rub his arm, even though we’d physically separated. “I’ve made calls that lost us the state championship.”

Darby, who had been looking down, lost in his thoughts, snapped his eyes up to meet mine.

“So you are still in school?” he asked, a slightly horrified look lighting his eyes.

I laughed, half in relief, as the shock of thinking I was just a kid had momentarily snapped Darby out of his funk.

“No,” I said. “I’m a coach. I coach high school soccer, and I teach PE, too. I’m twenty-five.”

The way Darby breathed out in relief also had me shaking with the effort not to laugh out loud.

“You had me worried for a second there,” he said, wriggling and stretching, like he was trying to work the kinks out of his muscles, but also like he was gearing up for another heat wave. “I thought I was cradle-robbing.”

That did have me laughing out loud. “Do you really think the Dark Fantasies Club would have invited me to beta-test this program if I was underage?”

“Well, no,” Darby said, now looking sheepish.

He was so full of emotion and expression.

I was momentarily captivated by that and just stared at him as we lay side by side in bed.

It was a cliché to say that omegas were the most emotional of the genders, but I had a feeling Darby really was.

Maybe he kept it zipped up when he was at work, which I assumed he did, given his profession, but he felt to me like someone who needed to have and express his emotions.

That was what BDSM was all about, really.

Venting things inside you that were too intense for vanilla life.

“I’m eleven years older than you,” Darby confessed, his face coloring, like he thought that would put me off or something.

I shrugged one shoulder. “I would bet I’m eleven inches taller than you. Does that make a difference?”

“No,” he said, blushing harder. “I like alphas who can physically overpower me.”

On a gamble, I took that invitation and rolled over him, grabbing his wrists and pinning them above his head. I used my thighs to pin his legs down and slightly open, and the weight of my torso to give him the feeling like he was trapped under me.

“Like this?” I said in a voice closer to my dark, Dom persona.

Darby gasped, and his breathing didn’t recover. He panted under me, his cock pressing up into my belly. A sudden increase in his delicious berry scent told me he’d gushed slick. His arousal had my alpha going nuts with the need to get right back in the game and plow him into next Sunday.

As quickly as the air crackled between us, Darby deflated. He turned his face to the side and murmured, “I don’t deserve an alpha like you.”

“Hey,” I snapped, which had him jerking his head back to look right at me. “None of that. Stop beating yourself up. That’s my job.”

Darby’s mouth twitched, like his instinct was to grin at the joke, but he couldn’t quite manage it.

“But that’s the point,” I went on, guessing where his thoughts were going from the emotion that flickered through his eyes. “You agreed to test the auction concept because you wanted someone like me to beat your ass the way you think you deserve.”

Darby sucked in a juddering breath. “Yes, sir.”

I grinned, even though I didn’t think he was making a joke.

“I’ve got news for you, boy,” I said, feeling my way back into a dynamic that felt right and comfortable for both of us.

“Even if I lashed every inch of you to that St. Andrew’s cross out there and bloodied your back with a single-tail whip, even if I bound you so tight that you could barely breathe and fucked you hard enough to rearrange your insides, even if I stuck my cock down your throat and held it there until you passed out from lack of oxygen, it wouldn’t take that bad feeling in you away. ”

Darby’s face crumpled and contorted into guilty misery.

“All those people put their trust in me,” he sighed, back to being deeply upset in an instant. “Their lives are in my hands. I can’t let them down, or actual lives will be lost. Actual lives almost were lost.”

“Because your teammates let you down,” I said firmly, tightening my grip on his wrists to keep him pinned. “Because they dumped a shitload of work on you out of spite. Whether they were goofing off or seriously trying to undermine you, it was wrong.”

Darby shook his head, thrashing as he did. “I’m the supervisor. It’s my job to manage my team. If they slacked off, it was because I didn’t do my job.”

“You can’t make a poor player into the star of the match,” I said. “Just like you can’t make a star player with natural talent stink up the whole field. But even a superstar has bad days now and then.”

Darby made a sound between a huff and a sob. “I’m hardly a superstar.”

“Well, you’re a superstar sub, if you ask me.”

Darby laughed. Even though it was short-lived, it made me smile.

“I love subbing,” he admitted quietly. “I love how helpless and powerless it makes me feel. I love having an alpha hurt me and pleasure me for his own enjoyment. It makes me feel so alive.”

A thousand questions jumped instantly to my mind.

What had Darby’s past relationships been like?

Was he in one now but playing on the side?

Had he been neglected as a child? Popular in school?

Were most of his friends omegas or betas?

What was his family like? There were a million different reasons people got kinky.

Maybe kink just tickled Darby’s fancy. But I suspected it was a way for him to reach for something more that he wasn’t getting from a vanilla life.

“I think another heat wave is starting,” he panted under me, his hips squirming, like he was trying to move into position to be bred. “Those Heat Lightning pills really pack a punch.”

“Have you ever taken one before?” I asked.

He shook his head and let out a moan.

The sound and his movements had my alpha roaring and restless.

Omega heat hormones were the most powerful drug known to alphas.

I’d heard a rumor that a team of research scientists had been working on pills that would give alphas the effect of omega heat hormones without being with an omega, but it had turned them so aggressive and rapacious that they’d immediately ended the program.

I could certainly understand that.

“Mmm,” I hummed, breathing in his rich scent as I bent to bury my face against the crook of his neck. “Ripe omega. My favorite.”

I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to play with Darby. That was why we were both here, after all. I wanted to play with him in more ways than an average Dom/sub fantasy, too. Maybe going full soft-Dom wasn’t the answer, but there were other scenarios that might give us both what we needed.

“Right,” I said, pulling back suddenly and kneeling between Darby’s open legs. “I paid a million dollars for your ass, and I intend to use you until I get my money’s worth.”

Darby had gasped at the speed with which I left him sprawled and unprotected on the bed.

He writhed and bucked his hips, moaning and instinctively reaching for me.

Not only that, but it was clear he was still in a hyper-emotional, potentially bad place by the way he started to cry and thrash his head.

“Please,” he begged. “I need you, I need it.”

I arched one eyebrow. Needing me and needing “it” were two entirely different things. My alpha pride wanted him to need me only.

“I know what you need,” I said, going full-in menacing. “But what I need is the only thing that matters.”

I shuffled off the bed, then grabbed Darby’s ankle as he tried to right himself and yanked him toward me. The suddenness of the movement surprised him, and whether by instinct or because he was back in the fantasy and playing his part, he attempted to scramble away from me.