My virtues as an omega were few, although my mother thought it likely I would survive childbirth and then most certainly outlive Mr. Evans. Small mercies, I thought, and then batted it away before I could feel dire and trapped again. But my worst deficiency of all was something not even rouge or a fierce set of laces on my stays could cure: I had almost no perfume. Sometimes, I really wasn't sure I had any at all, or if I just had a not unpleasant and nearly human sweat.

I tucked my nose to my shoulder now, found a hint of a sweetness, and my eyes stung. I squeezed them shut and hurried away from the mirror.

Be a mouse. Hide from what frightens you.

And the best means of hiding was…

Damn. My mother still had my book. I could retrieve it from her and subject myself to the persistent and painful topic she'd latched onto for the evening, or sink into the desperate thoughts that took all my strength to keep away.

I stripped down to my stays and chemise, fingers loosening the laces automatically, my steps wandering toward the window.

The view of the alpha's castle was a black shadow against the nearly set sun, the sky over the sea smeared in vivid golds and burgundy. There was a dark shape in the sky, sailing into the wind. A dragon—the alpha, of course—flying home after unsettling us all. From this distance, he looked more like an irritating thorn in the landscape than the imposing and powerful figure he'd been in Lady Gertrude's salon.

With one eye closed, I poised my fingers with his silhouette between them and then pinched them shut, imagining squishing him between my giant's grip.

I snorted and turned away, searching for one of my other discarded books to pass the evening.

Better stories in books than in life, I reminded myself. Happier endings too. Although, perhaps the alpha might stir up a little more trouble in the next month. One could hope.

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Chapter TwoRONSON

“What do you think of her?" I asked my half-brother, Niall, not bothering to lower my voice as we paced the edge of Hugh Gamesby's broad and meticulously manicured gardens. No one would mistake to whom I referred, and I didn't care. The rumors would've started the moment I walked into the room two weeks ago, and the rumors were right.

Niall frowned, eyes searching the party at the heart of the maze. Bringing Niall, my father's bastard, had stirred up talk, and our walk out of earshot would give the crowd time to release their flurry of shock. It wasn't as though any of the betas and omegas in attendance were unaware of Niall's existence. Perhaps some of the well-sheltered young women. No, Niall was a subject much discussed on Bleake Isle, most especially our friendship. He was half-human, his mother a maid my father had availed himself of so frequently, he'd managed to get the woman with child, when only an omega ought to have served for that particular purpose for an alpha. Niall was an aberration, and also the only man on the island I trusted completely.

"She's a little small." Niall squinted at Adelaide Brys's bright hair shimmering over the tops of the shrubs. "And I'm not sure riling Hugh Gamesby is your smartest move. But otherwise, she's perfect," he said, very blandly.

I grunted in agreement. "My mother was small. And I've hardly ridden her skirts. Hugh hasn't marked her yet."

Niall's frown only deepened. "Then he's up to something."

"Maybe he's more interested in plotting against me than he is in securing her. Maybe he already has someone else picked out," I said, but I agreed with Niall's suspicion.

"Do you like her?" Niall asked.

"She's…perfect." I repeated his own summation with a shrug. "To say she's the best of the lot would be doing her a disservice."

Adelaide was beautiful, charming, intelligent, and talented, and her mother had taken great care at our recent dinner together to inform me that Adelaide had been given control over every detail of the evening. She knew how to run a house and plan a menu. Her father said she'd been practicing her nests since she was a girl. The rut with her would be not just a relief, but a pleasure—a pleasure I could imagine vividly when I was near her, her floral perfume heady and dizzying. Spending a rut in an omega's nest was a tantalizing prospect. Even with the frenzy safely weeks away from starting, I was eager.

Adelaide was the obvious choice. The best choice. A choice that would suit me perfectly.

And if Hugh Gamesby did manage to talk the girl into a quick fuck—he would have prettier words for it, I was sure—to secure his claim, I wouldn't feel a real loss. I frowned and turned my stare forward as the knowledge resurfaced again, in spite of my best efforts at stamping it down.

I'd been careful in my pursuit of pleasure thus far, hiring willing humans for company, rarely and carefully. I didn't repeat my father's rare siring of a halfling like Niall, much as I was glad to have him in my life. It was hard enough for omegas to birth dragons; humans were even more ill-suited to the task.

I wanted to leave this year's selection with an omega. I was determined to. And for all Adelaide's extreme charms, I couldn't shake the understanding that if she weren't so obviously perfect for an alpha, I would easily choose someone else. She would be wasted on a beta, but I wouldn't miss her.

"I'm not eager to put a woman to death in childbirth," I said suddenly.

Niall's pale eyebrows rose. He had my father's coloring, shimmering copper through wheat gold, pale skin freckled from the sun. His wings were strong enough for flight, but he had no true dragon's form. Still, he looked more like the heir than I did. I had my mother's dark hair and easily suntanned skin.

"I know," Niall said. "You're worried she's too small?"

No. I worried the opposite. I worried she'd survive for many decades to come, which was every bit the cruel and brutish thought most of the isle gentry expected from me, modeled by my father. But I worried that Adelaide, for all she was the obvious right choice, might actually be the wrong choice and I would end up stuck with her.

"Who is that?" Niall asked.

Even when he nodded in the direction of his query, it took me a moment to spot the woman under the trees, well out of the shelter of Hugh's garden and tucked in the wilds of his estate proper. I frowned, staring at her, her head bent down toward a book, body stuffed in a dress just too small for her sturdy frame and one shoe kicked off, stockinged foot wiggling against the grass.

It occurred to me after a long study that I'd seen her before.

"No idea. One of the omegas' maids, perhaps," I said.

She looked up as we neared her, gaze distant and lost for a moment, as if she hadn't resurfaced from the pages she'd been studying, before latching onto us, eyes widening first in terror and then a flat kind of shock, like she was surprised to see us anywhere near her.

"Catch your eye?" I teased Niall in a hiss.

He didn't flinch or scoff. He wouldn't, because only an ass would've found me funny. "She's the most interesting person here," he said.

The woman seemed to have realized we were passing her, not approaching, and was now only giving us the occasional furtive glance, attention returning eagerly to her book.

"I think she's an omega," Niall said.

Was he attracted to the woman? Niall wasn't a prolific seducer, but I'd seen him interested in women, and they hadn't been awkward, studious, plain girls with limp brown hair.