Chapter One
I smiled softly as two strong arms pulled me in for a bear hug from behind as my giant, teddy bear of a best friend let his head fall to my shoulder, mumbling a good morning against my neck.
I set the bread down on the counter, rubbing my hand along his forearms before going back to making my sandwich for lunch. I'd already planned out the lunches for the week for him and his daycare kids, so all he had to do was get them out of the containers in the fridge and prepare them.
"Good morning," I answered softly, sighing happily as his whiskers scraped against my skin.
"Good morning," he repeated, his deep voice scratchy from sleep, and I chuckled, rolling my eyes.
"You already said that."
"Then I must have meant it."
I shuddered at the rasp of his whiskers, biting down on my lip hard, needing the distraction of pain to keep myself from responding to his sexy voice and the sting of his pre-shave growth.
He was always like this in the mornings. Cuddly and warm, confused and a little slow. He set three different alarms and hit snooze on every one of them. It was why he had to be up and around before I left for work with caffeine in his hand and vertical, because I didn't trust him not to curl up on the couch and go right back to sleep.
"I've already got you some coffee brewing," I said, doing my best to ignore the way his fingers had slipped up under the hem of my shirt, and were rubbing soft, circles low on my stomach. It was pretty typical behavior for Avery when he was still mostly asleep.
It was like his inhibitions were down, and the things he wanted that he never voiced while he was awake, he did while he was like this. I'd never complain about it because, yeah, a gorgeous alpha who I cared about deeply was touching me like I was his. I wasn't an idiot. I'd take advantage of that any time I got it.
Since the day we met, there was just something about Avery Lynskey that called to the part of me that needed to nurture. The part of me that I'd always considered dormant before I met him.
It had been his first day at my high school, and every alpha with a swinging dick had taken one look at the giant of a man and decided they needed to show their superiority. Oddly, though Avery was probably the biggest alpha I'd ever met in my entire life, he was undoubtedly the least confrontational. I'd learned since then there was a reason for him to hate confrontation… aside from his super sweet temperament, but it really didn't matter why he didn't want to fight everyone he came in contact with, it just mattered that he didn't want to, and idiot alphas weren't taking no for an answer.
He'd managed to make it through the first half of the day, just being harassed and challenged. It hadn't been until lunch that one of the other alphas had actually gotten physical.
Of course, Avery was undeniably gorgeous. It had been as impossible to deny then as it was now, and the moment I first saw him, I'd stopped in my tracks in the hallway, nearly getting mowed down by my cousin Ronni, since she'd been too busy walking backward, pestering Scout to see me.
Avery stood above everyone in the hallway, topping our tallest senior alpha by at least six inches. His golden-blond hair looked like a fucking halo as it caught the light spilling in from one of the open doors behind him. It was truly like one of those damn romance movie moments, and even though time didn't stand still, or even move in slow motion, the way the man was looking at the floor as he walked into a room where he should be the king of everything, made me feel oddly protective.
I'd spent the entire day watching him from afar, knowing that I really had no business wanting him the way that I did. I wasn't exactly the type of omega that most alphas would choose to boyfriend up. I was short and a bit chubby, something that had only changed marginally as I'd gotten older. I also hadn't had much interest in going out and partying in fields, drinking myself into projectile vomiting, and having unprotected sex in the back seat of someone's smelly car with the windows fogged up, fully aware I was risking teen pregnancy just to get the attention of some asshole that was going to treat me like shit every time he was around his friends.
That wasn't something that had changed much either now that I was an adult.
Not being any alpha's type hadn't really been something that bothered me, since I had my family with me there at school, and though I wasn't really as popular as Evan or Ronni, everyone knew me, and I wasn't necessarily teased, so as far as high school went, I'd fully recognized that I was getting off easy in comparison to others.
Learning, and learning to learn, and learning to teach people to learn was my passion. Education and all its components had been a fascination of mine since I was in the eighth grade and we'd taken a little test that was supposed to help us figure out what kind of learners we were. Of course, we all compared, discovering our own personal preferences, and laughing when the quirks seemed to line up well with our personalities.
I wasn't sure why, but that day had stuck with me, and I'd started researching. I read every article I could find on the different ways people learned, and methods to help them when presented with something that was only taught one way for some reason or another. When I'd watch my friends, or even people I barely knew, trying to learn something and struggling, it was almost like a fun little game to figure out how I could help them understand it.
In high school, I'd started tutoring. It had blown me away that people were actually willing to give me money in return for not only helping them learn new things, but teaching them how to learn new things, showing them how their mind worked and watching things click for the first time.
At that time, there were zero alphas in my school that I found the least bit sexy. There had never been one of those tutor-tutee romcom moments where some jock-lete alpha needed help with his Algebra and started seeing me as something more than the chunky kid who held the key to his scholarship goals… or something like that.
For one, most alphas got on my last fucking nerve, and I did just about everything I could to avoid having a conversation with one under the age of twenty-five. Two, I had first choice of who I wanted to work with, and after one alpha had actually tried to talk me into sex in the library during one of our sessions, and I'd nearly fed him a science book, completely humiliating him, I'd told the coordinator not to pair me with another one, to which, she'd assured me all the alphas that had signed up since then had been pretty adamant that they didn't want me as a tutor either, and we were all happy.
So, having a crush on the new guy at school was absolutely pointless, since I wasn't really anyone's type, much less a man who could probably crook his finger and have any omega he wanted, and it was only a matter of time before he was warned away from me by all the other bitch-ass alphas.
But, as I went about my day, crushing anyway, and acting in a manner that kinda surprised me, since it meant following the guy around at a distance, I noticed something about him. He wasn't like most alphas any more than I was like most omegas. He didn't posture or bow up when someone looked at him for longer than a few seconds… hell, he probably couldn't even see them, since he refused to look up from the floor for more than a second at a time.
He was kind and shy, quietly waiting to the side to let people pass, and not responding in any way when one of the passing alphas took offense at him being in the same hallway, even if he wasn't bothering anyone. I was utterly fascinated. There was something special about this guy.