Teaching Their Omega novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Interview
Lowen Pascoe walks into the Ingram Valley hiring interview, corrects the Alpha brothers' textbook pulse reading in front of their uncle, and takes the job on one condition: she teaches the brothers first.
The first question the Ingram brothers asked me was to define a heat in clinical terms.
I was sitting on a folding chair in a stone schoolhouse in northern Vermont, and my interview had already gone wrong.
"A heat is a three to four day period of heightened fertility and sexual receptivity," Declan Ingram read.
He read it from a thick blue book called the Handbook, and he did not look up once.
He was thirty-three, lean, with cropped sandy hair and grey eyes that stayed on the page.
"Please repeat that in your own words."
"In my own words, it feels like drowning in warm syrup while someone sets your skin on fire," I said.
"That's what a first heat is. You can't think. You can't stand up. You want to be held down and held up at the same time."
Declan's pencil stopped.
The younger brother laughed out loud.
Rhett Ingram was twenty-nine and enormous, with dark hair tied at his neck and a flannel shirt that had given up on the buttons at his chest.
He had been grinning at me since I walked in.
"That is not on page forty," he said.
"Then page forty is wrong," I said.
At the end of the table an old man in a tweed jacket turned his cane over in his hands.
"Miss Pascoe," said Osmund Ingram, the brothers' uncle and the chair of the valley Council. "Eight years on a clinic ward does not make a teacher."
"No," I said. "Eight years of sitting with women through their heats does."
"The Handbook has taught this valley's Omegas for thirty years."
"And two of last spring's students packed up and left the valley afterward."
The woman at the diner had told me that over eggs that morning.
Nobody at the table argued with it.
Rhett pushed back his chair.
"Handbook says we take a wrist reading," he said. "Two fingers, inner wrist, check pulse and scent. I've never done one on a real Omega."
He crossed the room and crouched in front of me.
He was warm and he smelled like cedar smoke and cold air.
He took my left hand and turned it over.
His thumb pressed my pulse, hard and flat.
"Not like that," I said.
"No?"
"You're pressing the vein shut. Lighter. Use the pads of your fingers, and stay still."
I put my other hand over his and moved it.
His fingers went light.
Every nerve in my wrist woke up.
My pulse jumped under his fingertips and I knew he could feel it.
"There," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant. "Now you can read me."
Rhett didn't laugh this time.
He looked at my wrist and then at my face, and his pupils were wide and black.
"You're fast," he said quietly.
"That's what happens when someone touches you right."
Across the table Declan's pencil snapped.
He looked down at it.
"Enough," Osmund said. "The Council reads the results of this class in six weeks, Miss Pascoe. If the students fail the Handbook's inspection, the Council returns to placement."
Placement meant the Council chose which Alpha each new Omega was sent to.
I had heard about it from a nurse who used to live in this valley.
She had said the girls called it the lottery, and nobody won.
"And if I teach my own way?" I asked.
"Then you teach a class of Omegas to disobey the Council on your first day."
"Then I'll need a bigger room," I said.
I stood up and shook out my cardigan.
I am five foot three and a size sixteen, and I have never once been able to look taller than a man in a tweed jacket by standing up.
I did it anyway.
"I'll take the job," I said. "Double the hours, a room in the house, and I write the syllabus."
Osmund's jaw worked.
"The Council will not sign that."
"The brothers run the class," I said. "The brothers sign it."
I looked at Declan.
He closed the Handbook very slowly.
"Done," he said.
Osmund left with his cane tapping on the stone, and the door shut behind him with a boom.
Rhett was still crouched at my feet, still holding my hand.
He looked like a man who had forgotten that he was holding it.
I took it back.
My wrist stayed warm for a long time.
"I'll show you to the house," Declan said, and he stood, and for the first time he looked straight at me.
His eyes were grey as a frozen pond and absolutely steady, and underneath them his hands were shaking.
"Miss Pascoe," he said. "Before you meet the students."
"Lowen."
"Lowen." He said it as if tasting something. "We have read every book there is on this. Rhett and I have taught this class for two years."
"I know."
"We have never felt one thing the books describe. Not once."
Rhett's grin was gone.
The room was very quiet.
"The students aren't the ones who need the first lesson," Declan said. "Teach us first."
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