Lola & the Millionaires: Part One

by Kathryn Moon

  “I have to get started on this makeup before I get fired,” I answered, shaking my head.

  “Here,” Bomber said, standing up from his chair and offering it to Rake. “That way you and Baby can compare alphas and things Lola fails to tell you.”

  “Oh wow, you’re dead to me,” I said, glaring at Bomber.

  “So tell me about Leo,” Baby said, settling into her chair. “Also tell me about Wes. Wes, you smell delicious. If you aren’t bonded—”

  “Kitten, say one more word. You have plenty of alphas,” Bullet growled.

  This was fucking chaos.

  “That’s interesting. Lola also finds Wes’ scent delicious. She described it as Sex on the Beach,” Rake said.

  “This is why no one lets omegas out to play,” Wes grumbled.

  “Definitely the sex, yes,” Baby said with an authoritative nod. “I’m getting syrup too. I wanna lick him.”

  “Baby,” Bullet growled.

  “You, lay back. Close your eyes. I’m doing your face, and I’m starting with that loud ass mouth of yours,” I snapped at Baby.

  Her back straightened and she tilted backward, lips twitching. “Yes, alpha,” she replied in a purr.

  I huffed, and Rake cackled, his perfume curling provocatively around my head. I was going to be dizzy with the scents by the time I was done with the two of them.

  “She’s a fuckin’ handful and a half,” Bullet said to Bomber, who hummed in happy agreement.

  “Want me to wash you off?” I asked as Baby returned to my station after being promptly removed from the gauzy twisting dress she’d worn for the shoot.

  “Nooo, leave it,” Baby said, eyeing herself in the mirror, lip pouting and revealing the decorative enhancement I’d given to her bonding bite. “I kinda love it, and it’ll either flip Green and Scorch out completely or drive them wild. Either way, I’ll have fun. So…”

  I swallowed hard and studied the brush I’d been cleaning as if that could keep Baby from asking too many questions. Bomber was with Bullet and Wes near the door of the studio where the photos were being taken. Rake was inside working with a gorgeous model who had alopecia and let us give her an intricate crown with the highlighter.

  “Are you happy?” Baby asked.

  I looked up, a little surprised by the question. I’d expected more along the lines of her wanting to know about the pack, about how I was doing near alphas maybe, or even another omega.

  “I…am, yeah,” I said, nodding. “It’s a whole process, I guess. It’s more stressful than just shutting out the rest of the world, but…”

  “It’s good to be alone when you need to be alone. But I think it’s better to find people you can be happy with,” Baby said, sweet and simple.

  I nodded and relaxed, dropping my supplies in my case and shutting it. I leaned onto the counter of the desk, letting my shoulder rest against Baby’s, happy to have hers lean back against me.

  “So what’s it like to have sex with an omega?” Baby blurted out.

  “Ohmigod, babe. Seriously? You are an omega,” I said, laughing and glancing around us.

  “I know, but I don’t get to have sex with like myself, I mean, not like that.” She frowned in thought and then shook her head. “Anyway, tell me. Tell me, or I’ll ask Rake himself.”

  “You’ve gotten very uncooperative in your old age,” I muttered. I glanced at the door. Wes wouldn’t hear me, right? Oh well, Baby would never let it go. “So do you…like, come a lot?”

  Baby’s eyes lit up and she squealed softly, head nodding wildly.

  In for a penny, I thought, taking a breath. Anyway, it was nice to do this with her again. Be weird and gossipy and silly together like we used to. Even if things couldn’t be exactly the way they were before Baby’s heat came in, it was good to get some pieces of my old life back

  Twenty-Four

  Cyrus

  Matthieu and I had barely made it to the family room, and I was planning on breaking off to go and paint, when Rake came racing out of the kitchen, eyes wide.

  “Good! You’re finally home. Come on, I’m calling a family meeting,” he said in a breathless rush.

  “Rake, I—” Matthieu started.

  “It’s important,” Rake called, turning immediately back to the kitchen.

  My lips twitched with a smile, in spite of the interruption to my plans. Whatever Rake was excited about, his enthusiasm was usually infectious. I followed my omega to the kitchen, Matthieu at my back with a weary sigh. Things at Designate were tenuous at the moment, now that we’d learned about Wendy’s insurrection, and I suspected Matthieu was carrying the majority of the burden privately rather than alert the board yet.

  I blinked as I walked into the kitchen. I’d assumed when Rake said ‘family,’ he meant whoever was on hand. Our pack wasn’t often all home at the same time—let alone in the same country—but it seemed like lately, we’d been more available to one another. Still, it was a shock to see Wes home before nightfall.

  “What’s this about?” I whispered to him as I slid up to the counter.

  “He’s been keeping us in suspense,” Wes muttered back.

  Leo and Caleb were sitting on the stools, Leo’s arm around Caleb’s shoulders, and Matthieu took a spot at the corner. Rake stood across from us, bouncing on his toes and all but glowing in the spotlight of our attention.

  “All right, you have us,” Caleb said, amusement twisting his lips. “Now what is this about?”

  Rake took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and met each of our eyes before speaking. “I want Lola to be pack.”

  My brow furrowed at the words, and I expected to see the same confusion on the other’s faces. Wes was impossible to read, as usual, but I thought I was seeing a glimpse of something like relief on Caleb and Matthieu’s faces. Leo looked equal parts elated and worried.

  “Is that even possible for her?” I asked, staring at the others.

  “What do you mean?” Rake asked, his smile faltering as he stared at me.

  My eyes widened. “Well…she has her…”—Don’t say issues—“aversions to alphas.”

  Rake made a sound of dismissal, his hand waving through the air. “That’s just a matter of time, don’t you think? I mean, she likes all of you,” he added with a shrug.

  “But if she isn’t bonded,” I tried again.

  “She would be accepted,” Matthieu said with a surprising amount of readiness. Our heads all whipped in his direction, and even Rake looked surprised to hear the words. Matthieu blushed but held our gazes. “Our pack has never been conventional. If Lola accepted an offer that came without alpha bonds, why should it make any difference to us?”

  Rake sighed and nodded. “Exactly, although I think, with time—”

  Leo held up his hand to halt our omega’s words. “Wait, Rake. You know I’m as much in favor of this as you are, but when are you planning on bringing this up with her?”

  “Tonight,” Rake said, with a firm nod. “That’s why I’m glad you were all on time for once. She’ll be here soon and—”

  “No.” This came from all of us. Well, all of us but Rake. His mouth fell open, and his face twisted with offense.

  “What? But—”

  “Rake, Lola isn’t ready to hear this yet,” Leo said, leaning forward, his eyes wide. “I absolutely agree with you. I want her to be pack. She belongs with us.” I wasn’t sure if Leo meant him and Rake specifically or us as a whole. “But I don’t think there’s any version of this offer that Lola is prepared to accept.”

  Caleb cleared his throat and nodded at Leo, continuing to reason with Rake. “She’s only just getting to know the pack, and her progress is wonderful already, but I agree with Leo. It might be difficult for her to see a future with us at the moment.”

  “There’s no rush,” Wes said, catching Rake’s eye.

  Rake grimaced. “I mean…there kind of is. We leave for my heat tomorrow and I…I want Lola there.”

  Silence fell in the wake o
f that announcement, and it wasn’t until I saw Rake’s crestfallen expression that I realized I was shaking my head. “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to organize my thoughts as quickly as I could so I could give Rake a better answer than the flat ‘no’ on my tongue. “I don’t object to the idea. Just…I just can’t imagine her saying yes.”

  “Would you want Cyrus and I out of the nest, love?” Caleb asked Rake.

  “No! No, of course not, I just…” Rake sighed, and his shoulders sagged. His elbows landed on the steel island, and his hands covered his face.

  “My instincts say Lola is pack,” Matthieu said in the quiet that followed. It was a big announcement. Matthieu was unofficially the head of our household, our pack. He could overrule us if he chose, although that wasn’t how Matthieu led us.

  Not us, I realized. Just me. I was the only one who didn’t seem to be prepared for Lola to join our family. I liked the girl. I understood her appeal. She was just…fragile at the moment. Maybe our pack would give her strength. Or maybe, if she wasn’t ready for us, we would become an oppressive weight on her shoulders as she tried to shape herself for us.

  “So do mine,” Wes said.

  Rake’s hands dropped from his face, expression brighter. Wes rarely made any waves in our pack. He and Matthieu making this declaration was an interesting twist too. It should have been Caleb and I supporting Rake; we were his bonded alphas.

  “I would like to see Lola in our pack. I just want her to be ready to accept,” Caleb said.

  Which left me. Rake’s eyes found mine, hope winking along our bond. He was trying to keep his end quiet too, to avoid influencing me. That alone told me how seriously he was taking this discussion. Rake was not above wheedling and begging when he wanted something.

  I moved around the island, wrapping my arms around Rake’s shoulders and pulling his back to my chest. His scent was so thick right before a heat, and it drew out an automatic response in me to suck and fuck and drag him off to a nest. I stamped that down and focused on the discussion.

  “Invite her to the heat,” I said slowly. “If she comes, I think Caleb and I can behave ourselves.”

  “Of course,” Caleb said quickly, almost eagerly.

  Rake was giddy, but I pushed caution back to him as I nuzzled his temple and kissed his nearly feverish skin. “I like Lola, but I’m not prepared at this point to call her pack,” I said gently. “And I don’t think she’s prepared either. So can we table that for now?”

  “Yes,” Rake said with a quick nod.

  I sighed and kissed his throat. Leo’s phone chimed on the counter and he flipped it over, a smile mixing with a little tangle of worry on his brow.

  “She’s on her way here.”

  Rake’s grin was nervous, and he stared back at Leo. “You better coach me on how to talk to her about this, so I don’t blurt everything out at once.”

  I was meant to be painting. Or maybe not meant to, but that had been my goal for the night. At least until Rake snuck out of Leo and Lola’s embrace and came slipping into my bed, needy and frosted in their scents.

  Leo’s scent had never done much for me, too soapy. But Lola’s?

  I’d been licking it off Rake recently. Does that mean I want her as pack? I wondered. I enjoyed women, enjoyed falling in love with women, especially ones who guarded their emotions. But I didn’t have the best track record of romances with women. With anyone who wasn’t Rake, actually. Was I impossible, or did I have bad taste?

  I stared down at the neglected palette of colors I’d prepped, and then back at my canvas, grimacing at the shadows of buildings waiting to be illuminated. A cityscape. How original, I thought spitefully. This is why I was still at Designate in middle management. Not that I wanted Wendy’s job like Matthieu had been hinting. But I was never going to break out of the magazine and into galleries with cityscapes.

  “Oh!”

  I spun on my stool to find Lola in the doorway of my studio, her eyes wide and traveling around the room, taking in the clutter and the canvases and the art on the walls. She blushed as she met my eyes, her smile more cautious than the one she wore at work.

  “The door’s always been closed before and I wanted to snoop. Sorry,” she said, grinning a little.

  “Snoop away.” I jerked my head in invitation, watching as she stepped in without hesitation. Rake was right. Lola had already overcome a lot of her fear of the alphas in this pack. Still, I was sure she was a long way from imagining herself taking a permanent place with us.

  “I didn’t know you were a painter,” she said, moving slowly around the room. “Oh, Cyrus! You painted the angel on the stairs didn’t you?”

  I sat up a little straighter at that. “I did, ages ago. I’m surprised you noticed.”

  “The brush strokes are the same. It’s absolutely beautiful,” she said, spinning and beaming at me.

  It hit me then like a punch to the gut, a craving for her. If she had been any other girl, any one of the ones Rake had been interested in in the past, I would have reached out for her and dragged her between my thighs. I could’ve dug paint smudged fingers into her hair and scratched my teeth along her jaw until she was whining and begging for me.

  But she was Lola, so I kept my hands to myself.

  It wasn’t the first time I was attracted to her. Lola was stunning and had a kind of crystalline femininity that tempted me. But it was the first time it came with questions bigger than the usual physical ones. Is this girl pack?

  I was lost in my own head when she stopped at a stack of paintings, pulling one forward to peek behind at the next.

  “Is this…is this Wendy?” she asked.

  I cleared my throat and slid off my stool, moving to stand at her side. She didn’t flinch, even when my arm brushed her shoulder.

  “You’ve found my old lovers,” I said, studying her expression as she looked up at me.

  She had Rake’s scent all over her, and I wondered what he was doing if Lola was out of his bed.

  “You paint your lovers?” she asked, a wicked little grin on her face.

  “I paint my break-ups.” I leaned in and Lola remained still as I moved the paintings out of their usual stack so she could see a few sitting side by side. I pointed to the one I’d painted of Wendy, trying not to look too closely and get lost in old emotions. “It reads left to right, like a sentence. All the optimism of the start of a new relationship. The way the person kind of shines to the point you can’t even see them clearly,” I said, gesturing to the bright glow of the left side of the portrait’s face. “That kind of midland clarity of falling in love where you think you know the person’s faults but embrace them anyway. And then…”

  “When the glow wears off,” Lola said, crouching down to look closer at the wince in Wendy’s gaze on the right side of her face, the cruel turn of her mouth, the almost wolf-like angle of her cheek.

  “Normally, I am pretty self-forgiving of my wayward romances. Wendy was an especially great mistake on my part. I never learn not to rush.” I hadn’t waited to see what Wendy wanted from our connection, and when I realized...things had started to fracture quicker than I could reach to hold them together.

  “Because you work for her,” Lola said.

  “Because she wanted me to leave Rake. To leave my pack.”

  Lola gasped and looked up at me, and I stepped back from her as she rose up. “But you’re bonded!”

  “Yes,” I said. It had been an impossible ask, and something I might’ve seen coming if I’d been even the tiniest bit more cautious. I’d learned some care since then, at least.

  Lola frowned and then glared down at Wendy’s portrait again. “She strikes me as someone that wants the world to prove to her how important she is, rather than deciding so for herself.”

  My eyes widened, and I stared at Lola. “You’re a good judge of character then.”

  Her face went pale and her eyes dropped to the floor. “No. I’m really not.”

  She needs us. Lola needed us to
prove to her that not all alphas were monsters, but also that some would recognize and cherish her value. And she needed time to prove to herself that her trust in us was well-placed. Maybe she related to Wendy’s fight for validation, but instead of injuring others, the only harm she’d done had been to herself.

  “You’re so talented,” Lola murmured, glancing around the room again and then up to me, grey eyes direct. “But these are painful and moving.”

  I grew warm at the compliment. My packmates had seen my work and encouraged me, but there was something about someone who had made no vow to support me that made the weight of the praise heavier.

  “If I was going to show any of my work, it would be these,” I said, and then shrugged. “But I’d probably end up in a lawsuit if I tried.”

  Lola’s lips twitched. “They’re not very flattering, no. I don’t think break-ups often are.”

  I hummed my agreement and moved back to my seat to give Lola space. No, mostly it was to resist the urge to find an excuse to touch her. “I’m surprised you escaped Rake’s clutches for the night,” I said, and wondered if that was crossing a line.

  Lola blushed but shrugged. “I needed a minute. Leo has him distracted until I get back. You know he’ll end up with you eventually.”

  Rake wasn’t going to get much sleep until the heat broke this weekend. “He invited you to join us for the weekend,” I said, as if it was just a trip to the country, and not a heat with a pack.

  “He did,” Lola said slowly, eyes sliding back to the floor.

  She turned him down. I realized it with a surprising pang of disappointment. Maybe the others weren’t so far off with their feelings for Lola. Heats were pack-only events, and I hadn’t expected to be let down by the idea of Lola not being there. But it was there, a little sour note that told me our family wouldn’t be complete if Lola was staying in the city without us. I bit my tongue before I said as much.

  “I should get back to them,” Lola murmured, a little shy pinkness in her cheeks. Her eyes glanced at my canvas and then up to me. “You should paint the city like you paint your love affairs. I’d like to see that.”