Page 42 of The Florist and Her Alphas

It’s not enough. It will never be enough. I need more. I need thicker. I need harder. I need a cock, a knot, something to stretch me open and fill me completely and lock inside me while I come.

Tears mix with the shower spray on my face.

Frustration, fear, desperation all come crashing down, and I sink to the floor of the shower, knees pulled to my chest, cold water pounding down on my back, my hand still between my legs but slower now, gentler, just trying to take the edge off the ache.

It doesn’t work.

After a few minutes, I reach up and shut off the water. The sudden silence is deafening. Water drips from my hair, my nose, my chin. My pussy is still throbbing. My body is still burning.

I wrap myself in a towel. The terry cloth is rough against my hypersensitive skin, and I hiss through my teeth as I cinch it around my chest.

My legs are shaking. My vision is blurry.

I make my way back to my bedroom on unsteady feet, leaving wet footprints on the hardwood, and collapse onto the bed.

The sheets are still damp from earlier. I don’t care. I pull the blanket up over my towel-clad body and curl onto my side, knees to my chest, and press my hand between my legs one more time, just to feel the heat there, the slick, the hungry empty ache.

My muscles feel like they’ve been put through a meat grinder. Every movement sends pain radiating through my lower back, my hips, my thighs. My pussy is still throbbing, slick seeping between my folds, soaking the towel between my legs.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand.

Mira

you alive? shop’s dark. coffee?

I fumble for the phone, my fingers shaking. The screen blurs. I have to blink three times to focus.

sick. Not opening today.

Three dots. Then:

Mira

on my way.

Mira arrives fifteen minutes later with a paper bag from her bakery and a thermos of something that smells like ginger and honey. She lets herself in with the key I gave her last winter after she got locked out during a snowstorm and had to bang on my window at two in the morning.

She takes one look at me and stops dead in the doorway.

“Oh my god,” she says softly.

“I’m fine,” I lie. My voice is hoarse. My hair is plastered to my forehead. The towel is slipping, and I clutch it tighter with trembling fingers.

Mira sets the bag and thermos on my nightstand and sits on the edge of the bed. Her warm vanilla scent cuts through the rose heat filling the room, and for a second I can breathe.

“You’re in heat,” she says. Not a question.

“Yeah, I think so.”

“How bad?”

“Bad.” My voice cracks. “Really bad, Mira. I can’t…I can’t function. I tried. In the shower. It didn’t help. I need…” I stop. I can’t say it out loud.

“You need an alpha.”

Terror lances through me. “No. Not that. Never that.”

“The Frostwoods⁠—”