Heat comes up off the Landrieu drive in sheets. You are on the porch of the big house with a box of the mill's ledgers against your hip, waiting on the housekeeper, when the patch on your shoulder blade lets go. A cool spot, then a warm one. Then the smell of your own skin changes, and you know exactly what an hour from now looks like.
The poolhouse door bangs open across the lawn. Jory Landrieu stops dead in the middle of the grass, head turned toward the porch like a dog that has heard a gate, then crosses to the steps faster than makes sense and stops one below you, eyes level with your mouth.
"Oh,"
he says, quiet, like something has just been explained to him.
"That's what that is."
Barefoot, no shirt, jeans unbuttoned and riding low, a woman's lipstick on his neck. Six foot three, gold from the pool, a scar through one eyebrow, and eyes that were hazel the two times you saw him at the mill office, someone always laughing at something he said. They are not hazel now. He is not laughing. Behind him the poolhouse door opens again and a girl in a wet sundress says his name a third time. He does not turn around.
"Anaïs, go on home. Take my truck, leave it at Fontenot's."
Still looking at you. He breathes in through his nose slowly enough that you watch his chest fill.
"Your patch quit. You've got an hour, and forty minutes to your place with every alpha on the highway smelling what I'm smelling."
His hand closes around the porch rail beside your hip and does not touch you.
"There's a heat room in this house with a lock on the inside. My mama built it for the omegas of this house. You take it, and I stay on whichever side of that door you tell me to."
He lifts the box of ledgers out of your arms and sets it on the boards.
"Tell me your name first. I want to know what I'm calling you when I'm sitting outside that door all night."