Waking Up: The Omega of His Dreams Book 1
Chapter One
Henry
Henry was stuck in an elevator. Not in that sexy, confined with a stranger, nothing to do but learn more about each other and then bone sort of way.
No.
Henry was stuck on his way to his first solo call as building maintenance man, on his first day alone, during his first hour. The entire week before he had shadowed his uncle, had even learned a few names of the tenants, but they'd never gotten a call to the penthouse, which meant no one ever told Henry he needed a code to access that floor. There must have also been a second security system in place because when Henry tried to insert the last number of the code he used to get into the building from the parking garage, a long beep sounded and then the elevator wouldn't move. After pressing every other button on the panel and then trying for several minutes to reach Phil, the security guard, on the walkie-talkie, Henry quickly came to terms with the fact he would be forced to press the large, red, in case of emergency button bringing emergency services. The red fire engine would definitely include his father and, crap on a cracker, he didn't want that to happen.
That large coffee he'd had during breakfast wasn't helping anything.
Henry pressed the call button on his walkie and prayed. From what he knew of Phil, the man only seemed to work when someone was watching. Henry's father would call him an alpha by title, as opposed to by deed. Though Henry's father was also a traditionalist and believed an alpha needed to fulfill their true potential. "You think being a muscle head with a hot temper makes you an alpha, son? It's what you do that makes you an alpha. The loved ones you protect; the family you support. Who cares how much you can bench press if you can't provide for those you love?" Henry would not be telling either his alpha father or his omega dad about this little event.
"What?" Phil's annoyed voice crackled through the speakers. Despite having called him, the noise startled him.
"I'm stuck in the elevator, man," Henry said at half volume as if saying it quietly would be less embarrassing. Whatever, if enduring Phil's jokes was the worst of what he had to go through that would be fine.
It sounded like a seal choking through the walkie speaker, and Henry assumed that noise was Phil laughing. Finally, he composed himself enough to ask, "You what? How?"
"I got a call to go up to the penthouse to fix something, but the elevator doors wouldn't open. I need some code."
"Huh, the penthouse? I've never been up there. We don't patrol that floor. Aren't even cameras. Some rich guy's son lives up there, has his own security."
It would have been helpful to Henry if the guy also had his own maintenance. Henry stared at the panel of buttons, wishing the answer would present itself. Truth was, Henry excelled at fixing things. All through his primary alpha schooling, high school and then trade school he'd been a natural at looking at something broken and figuring out what needed to be done to make it work.
"…fire department will take at least an hour…"
"No!" Henry said into the walkie more forcefully than necessary. The very last thing he needed was the fire department. His father knew it was his first solo day, and if he heard the name of the location on the radio, he'd be the first one to show up. "I'll just…" He didn't want to call himself frantic at that minute—he was a grown man after all.
A grown alpha.
His father had found Henry's dad at Henry's age.
"I'll…just…Hello?" Henry yelled at the closed elevator doors. "Hello, can anyone hear me?"
No response. It had been a stupid plan. The doors were thick and as impenetrable as—
"Hello?" a muffled voice sounded through the thick elevator doors. The speaker managed to sound alluring and annoyed.
"Oh! Hello! You can hear me!"
"Obviously." There was definitely more annoyance in his voice now than anything else. Lucky for this guy, Henry was skilled at keeping a good attitude. His dad liked to joke he'd won best personality ever since nursery school.
"Yeah, so, I got a call to come to this floor but I don't know the code. It is my first day you see, and—"
"Where is Joseph?" the irritated voice said.
"Who is that?"
Henry imagined he could see the frustration in the other man through the elevator. From the sounds of him, Henry would put him in his mid-thirties, in a tweed suit, not that Henry could pick out tweed from a fabric line up. "The maintenance man. The other one. He always handled my calls."
The only other maintenance man to work this position was Henry's uncle, and he'd had the job for about twenty years. "You mean Roger?"
"Sure, I don't know. Not like I take my time learning the names of the help."
Henry reassessed what the owner of the voice looked like. Now he was older, hunched over, with an unfortunately large mole on the tip of his nose. Except, Phil had said the occupant was someone's son. Every man is someone's son, Henry.
"What?"
Had he said that out loud? "Nothing, never mind. Can you let me in? It's my first morning, and I'm sure the calls are lining up down there."
"That's not my problem. How do I know you aren't a criminal?"
Frustration began to build inside of him like droplets of water spreading over tissue paper. He felt that familiar alpha temper, the thing he'd been warned about since birth, that his father told him he always needed to be the master of. He closed his eyes and imagined what he wanted to have happen. The cranky old man would finally believe him. He'd tell him the code, Henry would fix whatever needed fixing and hopefully, never come up here again. "My name is Henry, and I have an employee number. I could give it to you, and you could call HR. They would be able to tell you—"
"Sounds like too much work." The voice didn't sound annoyed anymore, but bored. That made it worse.
"If you don't want me in there, that is fine. But could you at least turn off whatever is keeping me stuck in here?"
"I could."
Hope bloomed anew. Again, Henry congratulated himself for not letting his alpha temper flair. No good ever came from—
"But I'm not going to."
"Why not?" Henry asked with an edge that increased with his need to use the restroom. Damn that coffee!
"Because, if you are a criminal and I let the elevator down, you'll just go and come back with more criminal friends."
"Look, buddy—I mean, Sir. I don't know who you are," Henry spoke very slowly, enunciating each word clearly so the old man could hear it. "I know the world feels scary sometimes, especially as we age, but I am here to help you. If you don't want to trust me, I am fine with that too—"
"What do you mean, as we age?" This guy had a habit of cutting Henry off that got on his nerves. Truth be told, everything about this guy got on his nerves. Henry couldn't imagine the occupant was an alpha. Phil probably couldn't recite the names of three of the regular tenants in the building. This guy was likely an old retired beta who spent his days watching criminal type law shows and growing increasingly more paranoid.
"Sir, I meant no offense. I've seen my own dad go through it. He's a baker you see, and he can't lift those bags of flour quite as well as he used to."
Silence followed, so long Henry thought maybe the occupant had gotten distracted and left.
"How old do you think I am?"
Henry might not have known a whole lot about dating, but he knew a trick question when he heard one. "Isn't age just a number? It is more about how many life experiences you have and, Sir, I am sure you have a colorful plethora of memories to—"
The elevator doors opened with a soft ping and Henry noticed a few things at once. One, the elevators on this floor opened directly into the penthouse apartment rather than a hallway like on every other floor. Two, the apartment looked like it came out of a magazine, all gray and silver with wide open spaces and a wall of windows that not only let in a ton of natural light but looked out onto a breathtaking view of the city. Then his eyes landed on the man standing in the penthouse apartment, and Henry forgot all about his full bladder. The tenant wasn't old. That was obvious. He looked around Henry's age, in his twenties, with a mop of shockingly light hair and skin so pale it looked iridescent. His eyes might have been a normal shade of brown on anyone else, but in contrast to his hair and skin, they were extremely dark. He wore black lounging pants, an over-sized black knit sweater and looked at Henry with an expression that managed to be equal parts offended, amused, and irritated.
Henry knew he was gawking. In fact, he told himself twice not to gawk, and if he had time to tell himself more than once, he'd spent too much time gawking.
This man was a contradiction. Fragile, yet in a way that seemed like a trick to lure a person into putting their guard down.
"And while I do have a plethora of memories it isn't because I gained them while growing to a ripe old age."
Henry heard the man speak, but the shape of his red lips forming the words was too captivating for Henry to compute what the man said.
"What's broken?" Henry asked dumbly, barely remembering what he was doing there.
A shadow of pain fell on the man's face before it hardened into a haughty mask of disapproval. "Excuse me?"
Henry blinked away his distracting reactions. So this guy was intriguing, like a painting that the longer you looked at it, the more tinier details began popping out. Take, for instance, the way the man's eyebrows never seemed to move - as if frozen on his face. That seemed about right actually. This man, with his pale, crisp features and his spotless ice apartment, he was like a Snow King living in his snow lair. Even the temperature was at least fifteen degrees lower than it had been in the elevator. "Is it your heat? It's broken?"
Awareness dawned, and the man frowned, but only a little bit, as if his facial muscles could only move so far. "No. The heating is fine. I like a cold workspace, it helps the colors pop."
Henry didn't know about that but he did know it was his first day and he couldn't spend the whole time in one tenant's apartment. Even if he could spend hours looking at him while he made Henry's alpha urges stir. Henry had no illusions. He was an alpha in his twenties. Sometimes a television commercial made his alpha urges stir. And this guy, though clearly an omega--obvious from his body type to the way he spoke about color--was not his type. Henry preferred men, but men who weren't entitled, silver spoon fed brats. "So then, why did you call maintenance?"
"A bulb went out. In my workstation," the man said like Henry would at once understand the gravity of what had occurred in this place.
A dead bulb was hardly the stuff of excitement, Henry almost hoped for a nice, busted piece of machinery that would involve wires and ordering new parts, except he wasn't about to ask this snow king for a harder task. He grabbed his utility bag and stepped forward, but stopped, looking around the apartment. "Are we alone?" He'd been alone with omegas before. But as he had grown older, it became more and more indecent for him to be unchaperoned with an unclaimed omega. If he went into heat, who knew what would happen. Except, Henry knew exactly what would happen. Nothing. All that BS about alphas not being able to control themselves around omegas in heat was just that. Henry had been around plenty of extremely attractive omegas, some of them had even been attracted to him, and he had never done anything he regretted. When he met his true match and gave him his knot, he'd do so with a clean conscious. Henry didn't have plans on breaking that winning streak now but thought it polite to respect the customs—for the tenant's sake.
The corners of the tenant's red mouth quirked up like he held back a smirk. "We are alone, but we are safe. I've been on suppressors for years." That answered any question Henry had about how rich this guy was. Suppressors, even crappy ones, cost most people more than they made in a year. "There is no danger from me, and I assume, as an employee of Baudlin Tower, you've been vetted and had a background check performed."
Sort of.
Not really.
He'd been related to the last guy. Henry wasn't going to say that though. "Of course. If you'll show me where the light bulb is."
The tenant nodded curtly while also managing to look bored. He led Henry through the apartment and Henry did his best not to let his mouth drop. Henry wasn't poor. His childhood home was large enough to play a great game of hide and seek. He'd had a yard big enough to raise St. Bernards, his dad's favorite type of dog. But this place wasn't just nice. It was immaculate. Every surface was organized and decorated, ready for an impromptu photo session. In fact, Henry thought he recognized the hexagon shaped glass coffee table from the cover of a magazine that had come out that month. He didn't doubt that photo shoot had been performed here.
"If you would hurry," the occupant said impatiently.
Henry stepped through the doorway and blinked furiously. Extremely bright lights shone from the ceiling on bars that had to have been custom installed. They looked like stadium lights, but instead of lighting up a field, they lit up a huge white canvas that was nearly the size of the wall behind it. A tray of paint bottles sat, organized neatly on a table, with several containers of paint brushes and bottles of turpentine. Candles were scattered among the paint supplies as if he could possibly need any more light.
"Turpentine is extremely flammable. You really shouldn't keep your candles so close. You'll burn this whole place down."
His advice was met with silence. But, there was one question answered. This man was definitely an omega. And, an omega Henry's father would approve. Omegas brought beauty into the world, whether it was through children or the arts.
This room was even colder than the living room, odd since the lightbulbs had to generate a considerable amount of heat. The outer wall of windows let in the natural light, and even on a sunny day like today, it was no match for the rows of bright artificial light. "I thought you said there was a bulb out?" Henry said.
The man made a very annoyed sound. He had his arms folded over his front, though he was so thin, they nearly wrapped around his midsection as if his arms alone were keeping his body together. He peeled his limb away from his front to stiffly point. "There," he said, everything in his body and tone making it clear this answer should have been obvious to Henry.
Henry followed his finger to the last bulb at the end of the last row of lights. The bulb was illuminated, but there was a discernible difference in brightness compared to the others in the row. Not out, but slightly less bright. "That bulb's got a little more time on it," Henry replied.
The occupant had brought his arm back. It looked as if he was hugging himself in this cold space. He'd struck Henry as elderly at first, more because of his snappish nature than anything else. In the bright lights, it was impossible to ignore just how pretty he was, like a cursed prince from a fairytale. Hair white as clouds, lips red as berries and eyes that looked into—
"I don't have all day here; can you do your job and get out?"
—that looked into his crotchety black soul.
"The bulb isn't out, so…" Henry wasn't sure why he was being contrary. The man wanted the bulb changed, why not just change the bulb? He could save it to install somewhere else even. But this man's snobbish tone grated on his nerves. Henry didn't want to be just another hand of many that simply handed the Snow King everything he requested.
The man's red lips parted open in shock, and Henry's body took notice. He quite liked the sweet O shape of the man's mouth and could imagine a great many things he'd like to… Hold up. This man is appalling. The most interesting thing about him is that he is rich. That is so not your type!
Still, there was definitely a stirring between his legs. Henry moved to stand under the light. From this angle, it didn't even look dimmer. The man stood a little straighter, Henry expected to hear the cracking of his ice spine as he did. He wrapped his arms more tightly around his body and Henry could tell somehow he was about to be given a tongue lashing.
Oddly, he was looking forward to it.
"I understand you are new to your position and maybe you don't quite understand who I am and where you are. You are an employee of Baudlin Towers. My name is Willoughby Baudlin, son to Greg Baudlin. I can tell by your face you have maybe heard of me. This canvas here has the potential to be a beautiful Portland landscape that could sell for thousands in a gallery. Though I doubt you have ever spied an original, I am sure you have seen a Willoughby Landscape print in whatever half priced bin you usually shop at. Now, despite my first instinct, I chose to utilize this building's maintenance man in changing this bulb that is preventing me from painting. I had no idea the maintenance man would come with his own knowledge and training in regard to appropriate lighting levels, but I can assure you your opinion in the matter is moot. Change the bulb, or don't, but either way, I want you out of my apartment in five minutes."
That had gone about as well as Henry thought it would. He should change the bulb. There was no reason not to change the bulb. And yet, his hands fisted and his heart raced. He wouldn't call what he felt anger, he didn't want to hurt the other man, but he did want to touch him and find out if his skin was as cold as Henry imagined, or if it would be warm and smooth under his palm.
Except, this man clearly didn't want Henry anywhere near him. He wanted Henry to do just as he had asked, change a light bulb and get out of his life. Henry could do that. He would do that. And then later, after his first shift was over, he was going out and getting a well-deserved beer.