Page 117 of Beautifully Scarred Omega

He looks like he wants to tell me more but he doesn’t. Instead he asks, “What about you, Sophie? Do you have any family?”

“No.” My voice comes out softer than I mean it to. “It’s just me.”

The trees pass. The headlights cut through the dark. And I don’t know why—I don’t know what it is about this night and this man who just told me about his mother’s voice—but I keep talking.

“My mother left when I was young. One moment she was there and the next moment she was just... Gone. Then it was just me and my stepdad.” I watch the road, not him. The words pouring out of me in a way that they never have. “I joined Sentinel when I was twenty-one and have been on my own since then. It’s easier this way. My assignments take me all over the country.”

The silence that follows isn’t awkward. It’s just full. Heavy with things neither of us usually says out loud, and the strange realization that maybe we’re not as different as I thought.

But Max doesn’t say I’m sorry. He doesn’t offer platitudes or follow-up questions or the kind of sympathetic noise that people make when they don’t know what else to do.

He just keeps driving.

He parks at the same exact spot he picked me up at and turns off the engine. He gets out and comes around to my side and opens the door.

I’ve managed to get one shoe on, but I’m struggling with the other one. My fingers find the strap—the tiny, delicate buckle that was clearly designed by someone who has never worn heels in their life—and fumble. The leather slides through.

“Why do they have to make these shoes so goddamn complicated?” I mutter, staring at the strap like it’s a hostile encryption system.

“Let me,” Max says. His voice is quiet and I look up. He’s standing over me, one hand on the car door.

I should say no. I should buckle my own shoe and walk myself to the door and maintain the distance that keeps us both safe. I should do all the things that ten years of training and self-preservation have taught me to do when an alpha gets this close.

“Okay,” I say, before I can change my mind.

Max moves and I hold my breath.

He does it without the slightest indication that a man who runs a billion-dollar company might consider kneeling on dirty ground in a five-thousand-dollar suit beneath his dignity. He just goes down. One knee, then the other. Like the gravel is exactly where he should be.

He takes the shoe from my hand. His fingers brush mine in the transfer—the lightest contact, skin against skin, lasting half a second—and I feel it in my spine, like a current running from my fingertips down through my chest and into my stomach. I swallow, my heartbeat loud in my ears.

He takes my foot, his hand cupping my heel, his fingers wrapping around my ankle—long fingers, warm and completely steady.

My foot looks small in his hand. Small and pale against his broad palm, the size difference almost obscene. The physical reality of alpha and omega, his hand large enough that his fingers overlap. I stare at it. And the image of it—his gentleness, the sheer unlikely tenderness of Max Cavill holding my bare foot like it’s fragile—makes my throat tighten.

He slides the shoe on slowly, guiding my foot into the opening with a patience that seems so at odds with everything I know about him. His thumb grazes the arch of my foot and my breath catches before I can stop it—a small, sharp inhale that escapes before I can cover it up.

It’s such a small thing. But no one has touched my feet like this before. No one has ever handled any part of my body with that kind of care, as if my foot were something worth being gentle with.

He takes the tiny buckle between his fingers. Threads the strap through and fastens it, his touch unhurried.

He adjusts the strap. Checks it. Then his thumb traces a slow circle on the inside of my ankle—one revolution, two—where the skin is thin and the pulse runs close to the surface, and I don’t know if it’s deliberate or unconscious but I can feel it everywhere. In my ankle, in my calf, in the heat pooling at my center, in the breath I’m holding.

He’s on his knees and I’m above him. Our positions reversed from every interaction we’ve ever had—every conversation and argument where his height and his authority filled the room and I had to fight to hold my ground. And he looks like a man who has never knelt for anyone in his life deciding that here, on the gravel, in front of me, is exactly where he belongs.

His green eyes are dark and steady, and it feels impossible to breathe.

I should say thank you. Get out of the car. Walk to the residential wing in the heels he buckled for me and close the door and be alone and safe and untouched.

My hand reaches for him before I realize what I’m doing and I touch his hair. My fingers slide into the dark strands at his temple. Just my hand in his hair and the feel of it, thick, soft, warm from his scalp, threading between my fingers.

I’m sorry about your mother, Max.

I can’t say it. But I can do this.

Max’s eyes close.

His lashes dark against his cheekbones, his lips parting on an exhale that sounds like it hurts. His whole body goes still under my hand, and then something in him gives. A loosening in his shoulders, a tilt of his head into my palm, like he’s leaning into it without meaning to.