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The scent patch was peeling.
Buck knew it the second the engine doors opened, boots hitting the station floor with a heavy thud. The adhesive had given out somewhere between the warehouse fire on Crenshaw and the four-alarm call on Figueroa. Twelve hours of sweat and soot and friction, and now the damn thing was flapping at the corner like a sticker a kid had slapped on crooked.
So annoying. It was times like this that Buck wished he wasn’t born an Omega. If he were an Alpha, hell, even a Beta, he wouldn’t have to smack a patch over his mating gland just so others won’t instinctively treat him like he was a helpless, dainty Omega instead of a six-foot-two solid firefighter.
Whatever, his hand flew to his neck, pressing the patch flat. Their shift was ending, anyway.
Buck waited until the rest of the team were out of the engine, waving off calls of his name so he could spray the cabin with scent neutraliser and hope no one caught his scent.
Too late.
Eddie Diaz stopped mid-stride three feet away, duffel bag sliding from his shoulder. His nostrils flared. His dark eyes—those annoyingly calm, annoyingly deep-set eyes—went wide, then narrow, then dark in a way Buck had never seen before.
Great. Of course, of all people, it had to be him.
Buck snapped, “What the hell are you staring at, Probie?”
Eddie didn’t answer. He took a step closer as if hypnotised.
Buck’s prey instincts flared at the look in his eyes. He refused to turn away from a predator, backing and backing away until his spine hit the cool metal of the engine. It was just his luck that they were sandwich between two giant vehicles.
The station bay hummed around them—fluorescent lights buzzing, a radio crackling somewhere distant, Bobby’s voice muffled in the captain’s office—but all of that noise seemed to fold into a tunnel, because Eddie was still moving toward him, and Eddie’s jaw was tight, and scent suddenly everywhere.
Smoked cedar and spiced chocolate. It was the first time Buck had smelled him so clearly underneath the mandatory suppressant. There was something darker underneath it, something that made Buck’s throat click dry on a swallow.
“You’re an Omega,” Eddie said. His voice had dropped half an octave. Not a question.
“No shit.” Buck pressed harder on the malfunctioning patch. “Keep your voice down.”
“Why are you hiding it?”
“I’m not hiding anything. I just I don’t want every Alpha in the LAFD sniffing around my business.” Buck pushed off the engine, putting shoulder into it as he tried to shoulder past. “Especially not you, Diaz.”
Eddie’s arm shot out. His forearm braced against the engine beside Buck’s head, not touching him, but caging him in with about two inches of hot California air between their chests. His head leaned forward, inhaling over Buck’s shoulder, open mouthed like a wild dog.
“Smell you again,” Eddie said, low and rough. “That’s not just Omega.”
“Get off me.”
“That’s mine.”
The word landed like a slap. Buck’s stomach dropped, then clenched. His inner hindbrain—the part he’d spent six years training, suppressing, ignoring—let out a sound that wasn’t quite a word. He hated it. He hated how his body swayed forward half an inch before he caught himself.
“You’re delusional,” Buck managed to scoff. “Did you knock your big head somewhere on the scene?”
Eddie’s arm didn’t move. “I’m right.”
“Yeah, right. What are the odds that this near mythical, one-in-a-million phenomenon would just happen to us of all people?” He snorted. “That shit only happens to some old couples in bumfuck Ohio who’d love each other since they were, I don’t know, 15 or something. It doesn’t happen to people like you and me.”
“Then why is your scent doing this?” Eddie stepped closer. His hand pulled down his shirt collar, his jaw tight as his own alpha gland was visibly throbbing against tan skin. “Tell me you don't feel the pull.”
“I feel attraction,” Buck snapped, tipping his chin up defensively. “I’m an Omega. You’re an Alpha. We work a high-stress job, we—we’re covered in adrenaline, and my patch tore. Of course my biology is reacting. But that doesn’t mean it’s this.”
He gestured fiercely to his own throat, to the peeling adhesive.
“Think about it logically, Diaz. If every person I’ve ever been attracted to, every person I’ve ever wanted to sleep with was a soulmate, my neck wouldn’t be bare right now. I’d have been claimed and settled three times over by the time I turned twenty-five. This is just... high compatibility.”
Eddie tried to talk again but Buck slapped his arm off the engine, walking away from the Alpha. His glands were throbbing under the failing adhesive like a second heartbeat.
No.
No, this was not happening. Not with Diaz. Not with the guy who’d transferred in three months ago and immediately made Buck look slow and sloppy and mediocre just by existing next to him. Eddie with his perfect rope-tying technique and his stupid calm under pressure and the way Bobby kept saying “watch how Eddie does it, Buck.” Eddie with his infuriating competence and his even more infuriating refusal to rise when Buck baited him.
And now this.
“We need to talk,” Eddie said.
“We really don’t.”
“Buck—”
The locker made a metallic bang when Buck swung it shut. “What do you want, huh? A bonding ceremony? A little house in the Valley?” Buck’s voice pitched ugly with sarcasm. His heart was hammering so hard he could hear it in his ears. “We hate each other, Diaz. Chemistry doesn’t change that.”
“I don’t hate you.” Eddie’s gaze flickered with something that for one unguarded second, looked like hurt. Despite himself, Buck felt a twinge of guilt at the kicked puppy look on the probie’s face.
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“You’ve been hazing me since my first shift.”
“Because you’re—” perfect at everything and you don’t even try and it’s not fair— “annoying.”
Eddie’s mouth twitched. “Right.”
They stood there, locked in a stalemate as old as alpha-omega biology and twice as stubborn. The patch gave another millimetre of grip. How did Buck know that? Well, because Buck suddenly caught another wave of Eddie’s increasingly potent scent and his knees nearly betrayed him.
“Fine,” Buck said. “Fine. You want to prove it’s real? You want to do the whole destiny thing?”
“I didn’t say destiny. I said—”
“One night.”
Eddie blinked. “What?”
“We fuck.” Buck squared his shoulders, tipping his chin up. “We fuck, and you’ll see it’s just hormones. Just scent and biology and nothing special. We’ll get it out of our systems, and Monday morning you’ll be back to being the probie I can’t stand, and I’ll be back to being the guy who outranks you.”
The air between them changed.
Eddie’s arms uncross from his chest but he didn’t step back. His expression was unreadable. It made Buck’s bravado feel suddenly thin, like a sheet of ice over warm water.
“You want to have sex,” Eddie said slowly, “to disprove a soulmate bond.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You think bad sex is going to convince you we’re not bonded.”
“There it is.”
Eddie laughed. One infuriatingly attractive exhale through his nose, not at all amused. “You really don’t know how this works, do you?”
“I know exactly how this works.”
“Then you know that if the bond is real”—and Eddie’s voice dipped into that lower register again, the one that made Buck’s fingers curl against his thighs—“I’m going to fuck you so well you’ll forget your own name.”
Silence.
Somewhere in the station, a door opened and closed. Hen’s laugh echoed and faded. Buck couldn’t breathe.
“We’ll see about that,” Buck heard himself say.
---
The thing about Omegan suppressant patches was this: peeling them off after a fourteen-hour shift was a kind of relief that bordered on obscene.
Buck stood in his bathroom, shirt gone, and worked a fingernail under the lifted corner. The adhesive gave with a wet, sticky sound. Air hit his naked gland and he shuddered, gripping the edge of the sink.
His scent bloomed into the room. Honey and orange blossom. That’s what his first girlfriend had called it—sweet, with a little tang underneath. Something that made Alphas stop mid-sentence.
It was almost enough to distract him from the fact that Eddie was coming here.
“My place, two hours after the shift ends.”
Buck didn’t know why he said that.
He didn’t want to sleep with stupid Eddie and his stupid campfire scent. He’d only been desperate for control when he said that. Yeah, nothing m
Buck stared at himself in the mirror. Pupils blown wide enough to swallow the blue. A flush creeping up from his collar and staining his throat. He looked wrecked already, and Diaz hadn’t even touched him.
The knock came a few minutes later.
Buck didn’t bother with a shirt because he wanted to show Eddie that he was in control. They were at his house and he decided when he was taking his shirt off. Huffing silently, Buck crossed the apartment in three strides and pulled the door open.
Eddie stood in the hallway wearing dark jeans and a henley that hugged his shoulders like it owed him money. His hair was damp—just like Buck’s—presumably from a shower. He filled the doorway; not just physically, but in scent, in presence, in the way Buck’s whole body seemed to lean toward him without permission.
Buck felt a little foolish.
“You’re early.”
“You’re not wearing a shirt.” Eddie’s eyes tracked down Buck’s chest, then back up. “This still a bad idea, or are we past that?”
“Still a bad idea.”
“But we’re doing it.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
Eddie stepped inside. The door clicked shut behind him, and Buck was already moving, already reaching, already fisting both hands in that stupid henley and dragging Eddie’s mouth to his.
The kiss was not gentle. Buck refused to. Instead, it was a collision of teeth and tongue and the frustrated snarl of three months’ rivalry looking for somewhere to go. Eddie kissed like he did everything else—methodical at first, then devastating. His hand found Buck’s jaw. His thumb pressed into the hinge of bone, tilting Buck’s head exactly where he wanted it.
Buck made a sound. High and involuntary. He’d never made that sound before in his life.
“Bedroom,” Eddie said against his mouth. “Now.”
They didn’t make it neatly. Eddie’s back hit the hallway wall. Buck’s shoulder clipped a picture frame. There was laughter tangled in with the panting now, the absurdity of it breaking through the tension—they were fumbling, clumsy, two grown firefighters who hauled bodies out of burning buildings and couldn’t manage a twenty-foot walk to a mattress.
Then Buck’s knees hit the edge of his bed and Eddie’s hands were on his belt, and the laughter stopped.
“Last chance,” Eddie said. His voice was wrecked, gravel scraping silk. “You want to call this off, say it now.”
Buck’s answer was to drag his jeans down himself.
What followed was not what he’d expected.
Buck had assumed—arrogantly, stupidly, the way he assumed everything—that he’d be in control. That he’d prove his point through sheer will, through detachment, through not-feeling-it. He’d lie back, let the alpha do his thing, and afterward he’d say see? Nothing special and that would be the end.
Eddie did not let him lie back.
Before Buck could even settle into a posture of indifference, Eddie was over him. The sheer weight of him was a physical shock, pressing Buck deep into the mattress. Eddie didn't touch his waist yet; instead, he buried his face straight into the crook of Buck’s neck.
His mouth found the bare, raw skin of Buck's exposed gland. He didn’t just smell him; he sucked a hard, bruising bruise right over the thrumming pulse point, his sharp canines and tongue scraping against the sensitive heat.
A violent jolt of pleasure snapped straight down Buck's spine. His hips jerked off the mattress, back arching like a bow.
"E-Eddie—wait—" Buck choked out, his hands coming up to grip Eddie’s shoulders, intending to push. But the second his skin met Eddie’s bare neck, the rare, rhythmic vibration humming under his own skin synced with Eddie's pulse. It felt like a circuit closing. The strength evaporated from Buck's fingers, his palms dragging uselessly against Eddie's broad back.
"Shut up, Buck," Eddie growled against his throat. His voice was lower than Buck had ever heard it, a heavy, commanding Alpha rumble that vibrated directly against Buck's collarbone.
Eddie’s hands moved, mapping him with a confident, territorial certainty. His calloused fingers traced Buck’s areolas, waking his flat male nubs into hard peaks, pressing hard enough to leave internal heat behind, before sliding lower. He gripped one of Buck's thighs, lifting it, pushing it back until Buck was completely open, exposed, and vulnerable under him.
When Eddie's fingers slid between his cheeks, there was little resistance. Buck was already slick—soaked through with a thick, sweet excess of presentation fluid that his body had been producing since the moment the patch started peeling in the station bay.
Eddie slid one long finger inside him, then a second, stretching him with an ease that made Buck's brain short-circuit.
“You’re soaked,” Eddie growled, his breath hot and damp against Buck’s thigh as he leaned down, watching his own fingers work into Buck’s heat. “You’re practically begging for it. And you still want to tell me the bond’s not real?”
Buck desperately tried to form a retort. He wanted to say it's just biology, you asshole. He wanted to snap something bratty and defensive to clear the thick, heavy cloud of smoked cedar and honey settling over his mind.
But his body betrayed him. As Eddie's thumb pressed firmly against the sensitive bundle of nerves just inside his opening, the witty comeback died. What came out of Buck's mouth instead was a high, broken whimper—a thin, keening Omega sound that he would have been mortified by if he had any higher brain function left.
“That’s it,” Eddie muttered, the last vestige of his untouchable locker-room calm fracturing. His own pupils were completely blown, turning his dark eyes into black wells. “Let it go.”
Eddie’s mouth was on him then, and Buck stopped tracking time.
The sensation was immediate, wet, and incredibly hot. Eddie sucked him down deep, his tongue swirling around the crown with a fierce, demanding hunger that didn't leave room for Buck to breathe. Buck’s hands flew to Eddie’s hair, his fingers tangling in the damp strands, intending to pull him off—or shove him deeper, his fried brain couldn't even tell the difference anymore.
And Eddie wasn’t letting him just lose himself in the oral work, either. While his mouth drew desperate, trembling gasps from Buck’s lungs, his calloused hand slid underneath, back to the slick heat between Buck’s thighs. Two fingers, then three pushed inside Buck all at once, driving deep and stretching him wide.
Buck screamed into the empty bedroom, his head thrashing against the pillows. Eddie curled his fingers, deliberately hooking against that sensitive, throbbing knot of nerves just inside, and Buck’s world completely tilted. His inner omega surrendered the last of its defences, opening up, pulsing around Eddie’s fingers, practically begging for the real thing.
Eddie felt the shift. He pulled his mouth away with a wet, sticky sound, leaving Buck’s length glistening and twitching in the cool air, and immediately surged back up the bed.
He didn't wait. He lined himself up, his thick, heavy alpha length pressing against Buck's slick opening, and drove home in one smooth, devastating push.
Buck’s vision went completely white.
The sheer, staggering fullness of it stretched him to the absolute limit, filling the ache that had been vibrating in his bones.
It was good. Buck had some good sex before but this?
It was better than good. It was the kind of sex that belonged in biology textbooks as a cautionary example of what happened when compatible pheromones met stubborn idiots who’d been repressing their instincts for months.
Eddie found angles inside him that made Buck’s vision spot white. Eddie’s rhythm was relentless, building, climbing, and Buck’s legs wrapped around his waist without his conscious input, and Buck’s hands fisted in the sheets, and Buck’s voice—his own voice, the one he used to shout on calls—was babbling.
“Please. Please, please, I can’t, it’s too—Eddie—”
Eddie’s hips snapped forward. The base of him was swelling. Buck felt it, felt the pressure stretching him impossibly wider, and his mind went blank and bright and silent.
The knot locked.
Buck could feel the pulse of Eddie’s heartbeat syncing up with his. Thud, thud, thud, like they were two creatures connected by the same heart. Tears dropped against his temples. He finally got what Maddie’s romance novels meant when they said, when you know, you know.
Eddie’s forehead dropped to Buck’s shoulder and Buck’s arms automatically went up to wrap around his Alpha. Eddie nuzzled into his hair, kissing the pink splotches on his browbone and licking the salt off his temples. Buck’s heart did stupid somersaults with every touch.
When Eddie pulled away slightly, his breath came in ragged bursts. “You feel that?”
Buck couldn’t speak. Could only nod, trembling, as the knot pulsed inside him and his omega instincts—the ones he’d spent years denying—purred with satisfaction. It was funny to think that just a few hours ago, he had been so adamant that Eddie was wrong. Now, the Alpha would have to pry him off with a crowbar to get Buck off his skin.
“That’s not just sex,” Eddie whispered.
And for once, Buck, who was stranded somewhere between fury and bliss and the terrifying certainty that Eddie was right, had no answer.