Page 64 of Omega

But I needed Harris in that moment, and he knew it.

And he was being totally awesome about it, and that pissed me off. I could have handled it if he’d been all cold and businesslike, but he wasn’t. He was looking at me with this…softness…in his eyes that I wasn’t sure any human being had ever seen before. It was odd and disconcerting and disorienting and bizarre, especially because Harris had just killed five men in less than a minute.

It hit me, then, how fast all that had happened. Less than a minute. Five men dead in sixty seconds. Well, if you want to get picky about it, the first four had gone down first, and the last one about a minute later. So the whole business, from the moment the first man stepped through until the last bullet pierced skull bone, had lasted, at most, two minutes.

“Is it always like that?” I asked.

“Is what always like what?”

I gestured around us. “Combat. Does it always happen so fast?”

He nodded. “Yeah. You’re sitting there waiting, and time stretches out like fucking taffy, so slow you can feel each bead of sweat, hear each one of your heartbeats. And then once the first bullet flies…” he shrugged, “everything happens in a split second. Blink and you miss it. Bam, people are dead and you’re pissing yourself and you don’t know whether to cry or laugh or puke or all three.”

“I puked after I shot that guy,” I admitted.

“No shame in that,” Harris said. “I damn near pissed my pants first time I went into combat. If you’re not scared shitless before, during, or after combat, you’re a sociopath.”

“Even after you’ve done it a thousand times?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’m scared every time. I know what to expect and how to deal with it, but I’m still scared. No matter how good you are, how careful you are, something can always go wrong. A stray bullet doesn’t give a shit.” He pulled me into a walk, letting me go briefly to shove the dead man out of the way, and then he helped me over the corrugated iron fence. I refused to look down as I stepped over the corpse.

Harris led me back to the Defender, opened the trunk and set the bag in, keeping only the handguns. I had no memory of doing so, but apparently I’d grabbed my own guns and clips. Harris took them from me, stuffed them in the bag, and then led me to the front passenger seat, opened the door, and helped me in. I was in a daze, running on autopilot, content to let Harris take care of things. Adrenaline was still slamming through me, pulsing in my blood. I didn’t know what to do with myself, whether I wanted to vibrate like I’d OD’d on Five Hour Energy or just fall asleep.

I also felt strangely…turned on.

I mean, it wasn’t hard to turn me on under most circumstances, but this was overwhelming. Waves of need blasted through me, desire throbbing between my legs, making my nipples hard and my breasts ache.

I wasn’t wearing a bra, which meant I had some serious headlights going on.

The dazed feeling, I was realizing, was my circuits being overloaded. I was feeling too many things at once for my psyche to be able to deal with them all.

I wanted, like Harris had said, to puke again from the knowledge that I’d shot a man, and I wanted to cry, and to laugh. I also wanted to touch myself. To pinch my nipples and stuff my hands down my pants and finger my clit.

I wanted to strip naked and shove three fingers inside myself.

And then, the biggest need of all, I glanced over at Harris as he turned on the ignition and backed out of the alleyway. And Jesus shit fuck—I wanted him.

It made no sense, but there it was.

He’d come after me, he’d taken charge, and he’d killed for me.

Risked death for me.

From the point of view of an alpha, Type A, totally independent sort of woman, a man who could take charge was kind of sexy to me. This translated to me being attracted most strongly to men in power, to men who wore uniforms. Of course, those men were usually assholes, but I typically didn’t care because I was just using them for their dicks.

But I’d never in my life felt such a strong need. Not like this. INEEDED.

I ached.

I was hyper-aware of every move I made, how my thighs rubbed together—yes, my thighs rubbed together; no gap there, just flesh and muscle. I was hyper-aware too of Harris, of every move he made, of his hands on the steering wheel and the gear shifter, of how big his hands were, how strong and callused. How they’d feel on my skin, scratchy and hard and powerful. I was aware of his face, the strong jaw and the high cheekbones, the jade of his eyes, the stubble on his cheek, the dark fuzz of his hair cropped close on the sides, and long enough to sweep backward on top. He wasn’t gorgeous, not in the sense that Roth was just insanely, inhumanly beautiful. Too beautiful for my taste. Harris was rugged, hard, and weathered. He was handsome, but again, in that rough and rugged sense. A steamy novel might describe his features as “craggy”. Cheesy and cliché, but true. He looked so rough and hard that he might have been chipped out of granite, carved out from somewhere deep in the crust of the earth. He was lean, sharp as a razor, not overly muscled but quick and lithe.

If Harris had an animal spirit, he’d be a puma.

I almost laughed out loud at myself at the comparison. But it struck me as true. He was a predator. Cunning, able to move in utter silence, radiating threat and lethality, oozing poised grace and coiled ferocity.

I wanted him.

I didn’t want to want him, but I wanted him.