The constant throbbing in my head was a reminder that even a little alcohol when you rarely drink is enough to throw your system out of whack, and the constant throbbing on my shoulder was a reminder of how brazen I’d been the night before.

My cheeks flushed as I remembered my first sight of Sam naked, on the floor, trying to cover his impressive equipment.

I gently touched my mating mark, hidden by the slightly too large turtleneck Justin had so graciously lent me. Good lord, the last twenty-four hours had certainly been a comedy of errors.

Feeling the weight of someone’s attention on me, I looked up to meet Sam’s warm brown eyes, almost the color of caramel, and glanced away as the need and hunger within me flamed anew. All I wanted was to push him back in that bedroom and ignore the rest of the world for however long it took for me to feel sated.

“Are you too warm, Dean?” one of the omegas asked me. Daniel? Dylan? No! David. He was the one with the slightly terrifying twin brothers. “You look a little flushed.”

I shook my head, certain my cheeks were only becoming more red. “I’m good.”

“Are you sure? Maybe you’re coming down with a cold after walking through that blizzard yesterday.”

“He just walked up the driveway, hon,” his mate Boomer said. “Come on, Dean’s a grown-ass man. You don’t have to take care of him like one of our pups.”

“I’m not infantilizing him, Simon Chiarelli, and if you think—”

“Presents!” Justin called out, derailing the potential argument, and thankfully pulling attention away from the reason my cheeks were so damn red.

The pups had already opened their stockings while the adults got their first round of caffeine in, and the first batch of cinnamon rolls had already been demolished. The tantalizing aroma of sizzling bacon permeated the air, but the scent of apple pie overrode everything else for me.

What did Sam think about his mate slipping into his bedroom, propositioning him, and then slipping out before dawn? If I’d been in my right mind, I would have realized how that might look to Sam. How that might make him feel. As if I just wanted to use him.

Or maybe he didn’t feel that way because he was an alpha?

No, I knew better than that. Theoretically. Theoretically, I knew that alpha and omega stereotypes were a bunch of bullshit, and that some people corresponded to the expected personality of their designation, but just as many didn’t. I didn’t conform to many expected omega stereotypes. Sure, some I did. I was on the smaller side, but not weak. I worked out both because it was good for me and I liked the challenge. I was a nurturer, absolutely. That fit the omega stereotype. But I wasn’t submissive. Quiet, shy, sure. But really only around strangers.

My eyes darted to Sam again, taking the time to examine him as he helped Allan unwrap his present. He was better with kids than he thought he was. And I just needed to talk to him about last night instead of worrying about what he might be feeling. I needed to figure out what he was actually feeling.

“Dean?”

A present was shoved into my hands and I looked up in surprise.

Justin was muffling a laugh. “I called your name three times, son. And I can’t imagine how you missed me with my landing-light pants.”

“No one better be landing in your pants except me,” Ray shouted across the room.

“Dad!” Noah admonished.

“Come on, Ray!” someone else said. “Little pitchers!”

Justin just shook his head and tapped the wrapped box in my hands.

“Sorry. What’s this?”

“Well, it looks like a present.”

I flipped the box over. There was no tag. “Who’s it for?”

Justin sighed and shook his head, muttering, “I swear, the newly mated are worse than thirteen-year-olds. It’s for you.”

I flushed at his comment about being newly mated, but either he’d said it quietly enough no one noticed, or everyone just pretended not to hear. Given Ray’s excellent hearing about the landing-light pants, I had to assume the latter. Great. “Thank you.”

The wrapping paper made me smile—I wasn’t sure whether Justin had special ordered it, or if he’d managed to find it somewhere, but it was Santa’s sleigh, only instead of it being pulled by reindeer, it was pulled by nine wolves, and the one in the front had Rudolph’s red nose. I opened the wrapping carefully, sliding my fingernail under the tape and doing my best to keep the paper intact. I wanted to keep that.

The kids around me had no such qualms as they tore into their presents with wild abandon.

I opened the plain cardboard box to find an embossed leather journal. The front was a mosaic-like wolf face, and the blank pages enticed me to fill them.

Tears gathered in my eyes, and I did my best to blink them away as I looked up at Justin. “I always—”

“Buy a new journal every year,” Justin finished for me. “I know. I’ve seen your stacks on your desk. And plain journals are fine, but something told me you might want something special this year.” He looked over his shoulder toward Sam. “And it seems my instincts weren’t wrong.”

My eyes lingered on Sam as Justin stepped away to finish distributing presents. He was opening one of his own. Like the kids, he had no worries about preserving the paper, and just tore it off in chunks. I smiled with him as he opened his box. I didn’t even need to see what it was—just the fact that it made him happy made me happy.

I took a deep breath. I had to talk to him as soon as we could find a moment of privacy in this chaos. I’d be a mess until I found out where I stood with him.

I excused myself to the bathroom to freshen up and give myself a pep talk, and when I opened the door to leave, Sam was there.

He pushed inside and closed the door behind him, leaving the two of us pressed against each other in the small space of the half bath.

“Hi,” I said, my voice breathy with the combination of anticipation and fear and desire.

“Hey,” he said, cupping my chin and kissing me gently. “I was lonely this morning.”

A smile crept out of my heart and onto my lips. “Oh?”

“Mmhmm. I thought one of the benefits of mating was you had someone to cuddle with every morning.” One hand trailed down to rest above where he knew my mating scar was, and I realized that I could just see the pink edge of the mark I’d given him.

I pulled the collar of his shirt to the side to see it fully.

“Yeah, that’s your claim,” he whispered, the words seeming to shiver up and down the length of my body. “When are you going to show off mine?”

“You’re not annoyed with me coming in last night? Or sneaking out this morning?”

Sam pressed his hips into mine, backing me into the sink, making sure I could tell how not annoyed certain parts of him were. “Not annoyed about you sneaking out. A little sad, maybe. But last night? Damn, Dean. You were hot. So confident. You knew exactly what you wanted. Is that just tipsy Dean?”

“Not always.” A sassy smirk tweaked the corner of my lips. “When I’m very, very comfortable with someone, confident Dean comes out.”

Sam’s eyes flashed. “I can’t wait to see that.”

Instead of making some quippy comeback, I just surged onto my toes, pulling his head down for a more passionate kiss, a kiss of relief, of joy, of claiming. Our bodies had known we were meant to be together, but until this moment, my mind hadn’t quite caught up to the fact.

I backed Sam up until the back of his legs hit the toilet and he sat down with a thump. I climbed onto his lap and tore off the borrowed turtleneck, leaving me in just the black tank top I’d worn as an undershirt yesterday, baring my mating mark to the world and, more importantly, Sam.

“Damn, short stuff, you know how to take an alpha to his knees. Or his ass, as the case may be.” He reverently pressed his fingers against my mark. His touch made the mark burn in a way that made me hiss at the need surging through my body, and I captured his lips again, his arms locking around my back, holding me close.

“I know how to make my alpha do a lot of things,” I growled when we pulled back to take a breath.

Sam’s eyes darkened. “Short stuff, I’m just old enough to feel a little old-fashioned about my omega having ever been with another alpha, and just young enough to be thankful for whatever sonsabitches taught you to be this sexy. But I better not ever find out one of their names or I’ll probably go caveman on their asses.”

His tough, protective alpha attitude made me giggle and ride the bulge underneath me harder.

“Dean,” he groaned. “You’re going to get me in trouble with Ray.”

“I’m pretty sure I have Justin’s explicit permission to do whatever I need to during this honeymoon phase.”

A knock on the door interrupted us from finding out which of us was going to win that battle—it would have been me, though—as Pax’s amused voice said, “I don’t want to be interrupting anything, but I gotta warn you boys, if you don’t get in the kitchen and claim some food in the next two minutes, there might not be any left. Now, it’s your choice, but the cooks said we had to warn everyone, no exceptions. But I’m not one to stand in the way of true love, so you just let me know if me and my shiny knife need to guard you from further interruptions.”

I smothered my laughter in Sam’s shoulder.

“I’m tempted to take him up on his offer,” Sam said, but at that moment, my stomach betrayed me with a loud growl, and next thing I knew, I was standing on the floor, and Sam was opening the door.

Pax smirked. “I figured you for a food over sex guy.”

“My omega is hungry,” Sam growled, pulling me toward the kitchen.

“I would have picked sex,” I whispered to Pax, emboldened by my alpha’s unquestioning acceptance of me.

“Me too,” Pax whispered back.