Page 4 of Knot The Nanny We Planned

I squeeze my eyes shut. My hand curls into a fist against the wall, knuckles white.

I am not a fucking animal.

I am not the feral, unwanted foster kid who grew up with nothing but rage and hunger. I am JD Blaine. I built Blaine Capital from a single loan and sheer stubbornness. I control boardrooms, I dismantle competitors, and I do not lose control over an omega I met fifteen minutes ago.

But God, her scent.

It's not just attraction. I've felt attraction before. Hired omegas for heat cycles when the biological need became too much to ignore. It was transactional, clinical, and forgettable. This is something else entirely. This is the scent-match the agency promised, the one I didn't believe in, the one I only agreed to because Deklan was drowning, and Knox thought it would be funny and I was desperate enough to try anything.

Lily needs an omega. That's what I told myself when I signed the contract. Lily needs warmth. Lily needs softness. Lily needs someone who won't look at her and see a burden.

But I didn't expect Willow.

I didn't expect her wide, terrified eyes or her shaking hands or the way she clutched that battered duffel bag like it was the only thing she owned in the world. I didn't expect her voice, soft, slightly hoarse, with a drawl that speaks to small towns and front porches, and a life so far removed from this penthouse that it might as well be a different planet.

And I sure as hell didn't expect my knot to start swelling the moment her scent hit me.

"JD."

Knox's voice comes from behind me. I don't turn around. If I look at him right now, he'll see everything. He'll see the primal need written across my face, the way my hands are shaking, the way my cock is pressing obscenely against my slacks.

"You need to handle that," he says, and his voice is rougher than usual. He felt it too. The match. The pull. Knox hides behind his smirk and his dirty mouth, but I've known him since we were eight years old, shoved into the same overcrowded foster home in South Boston. I know what he looks like when he's barely holding it together.

And he looks like that right now.

"I'm handling it," I say through my teeth.

"That's what I'm afraid of." Knox steps closer, and I feel his pheromones, smoky, sharp, and mixing with the honey-vanilla still hanging in the air. Two alphas in a hallway saturated with an omega's slick. It's a miracle we haven't started fighting yet.

"You're about two seconds from kicking her door down. I can see it. Deklan can see it. And if you don't get yourself under control, she's going to see it, and she's going to run."

I turn and look at him because he's right.

Knox stands three feet away, his golden hair disheveled from where he's been running his hands through it. His green eyes are still blown wide, the Alpha in him surging close to the surface, but his expression is serious. Rare for Knox. Almost unheard of.

"She's not a heat hire," he says quietly. "She's not one of the omegas we've used before. This is real, JD. The match is real. And if you go in there like a feral dog, you'll ruin it before it starts."

I know he's right. I know it. But my knot is aching, and her scent is in my lungs, and every cell in my body is screaming at me to go to her.

"I need a shower," I mutter.

Knox's eyebrow arches, and the ghost of his usual smirk flickers across his face. "Yeah. I bet you do."

I don't dignify that with a response as I turn and walk down the hall toward my bedroom, forcing one foot in front of the other like a man walking through quicksand. Every step away from her door feels wrong, my Alpha instincts howling, clawing, demanding I turn back.

I make it to my room, close the door, and lock it. Then I press my forehead against the cool wood and breathe.

Honey and vanilla. Wet. Ready. Ours.

The thought slams into me, ours, and it's so instinctive, so certain, that it steals my breath. Not mine. Ours. All three of us. The match doesn't lie. The agency's proprietary scent-matching algorithm doesn't make mistakes. Willow is ours.

And she's in the next room, slick and trembling and probably terrified, and I'm standing here like a goddamn teenager, hard enough to cut glass.

I push off the door and strip. The shirt first, buttons tearing because I don't have the patience to undo them. Then the slacks, shoving them down my hips along with my boxers. My cock springs free, thick and heavy, the shaft flushed dark with blood. And at the base, my knot is already swelling, a dense, aching lump of tissue that pulses with every heartbeat, demanding something to grip, something to fill.

I don't look at myself in the mirror. I don't want to see what I look like right now, unhinged, desperate, and barely human.

I walk into the bathroom and turn the shower on. Cold. As cold as the tap will go, but it doesn't help.