Page 57 of Heat Lightning

Slam!

Kneading dough was therapeutic. It helped me exercise my pent-up anger, sort of like when Mom would ask me to get the ice ready on Thanksgiving by dropping the bag against the concrete driveway until it was all broken up.

Folding, throwing, and slamming dough down on the counter never solved my problems, but it always made me feel better. Plus, it made my shoulders look fantastic and resulted in hot carbs. Was there anything more delicious?

Don’t answer that, I inwardly growled at my omega as the Masked Man’s scent lingered, thick and heady, on the back of my tongue. That horny little shit was the reason we were in this predicament in the first place.

I threw the dough against the counter again. Slam!

Besides, I wasn’t angry. Not at all. Why would I be? This wasn’t ‘I’m upset’ bread; it was ‘we have too much butter’ bread.

There was a sale on the good French stuff; how was I supposed to resist?

Slam!

And so what if I hadn’t spoken to the Masked Man in three days? No more texting, flirting, or phone calls. Na-da. Zip. Zilch.

Slam!

It wasn’t like I expected it. I’d told him to leave. Popping up outside my window unannounced again would be psychotic. That kind of stalking behavior was a major red flag.

Yeah, because everything else about him is all ‘green means go.’

Whatever. In the end, staying away was what I wanted.

Slam!

How gentlemanly of him to listen.

Slam!

I imagined what his face would look like if he’d tried to pet Jeffrey’s belly. Maybe I’d tell him to give it a go next time we saw each other.

Whenever the fuck that was.

Slam!

Annoyingly, my heat symptoms dried up with his absence. It was beginning to give me a complex.

Maybe it was just a fluke. ‘Correlation doesn’t mean causation,’ and all that. Maybe my heat was coming back naturally, and it had nothing to do with the annoyingly good-smelling—murdering, stalking—alpha.

Slam!

I should text him and tell him not to worry about any of it, after all. It would be worse, though, to find out he hadn’t cared in the first place.

Slam!

Maybe he already had a mate. I hadn’t really given him a chance to explain himself. Maybe there wasn’t a host of other omegas, but just one—a hot, badass, black belt-carrying omega warming his bed every night that he was aching to get back to.

Someone who could eat silly, naive me for breakfast.

Slam!

My omega snarled. That was worse. So much worse.

His behavior didn’t really align with that, though, which I chose to let upset me even more. How dare he also be a hypothetical cheater? He didn’t deserve such a mate.

If he actually decided I was worth his time and texted me, I’d make sure to start a fight about it.