Reece: Undercover Alphas, #4

By L.C. Davis

A bullied omega who rose from the ashes of his pain comes face to face with the Alpha who helped make his youth a living hell.


Ellis, an imposing man with long, firey hair and a strong temperament to match, never fit in with other omegas no matter how hard he tried. An easy target in his formative years due to his inability to blend in with the others, Ellis did everything in his power to get through high school in one piece only to suffer immeasurably at the hands of bullies. One horrific event hardened his heart forever, and as soon as he was able to, he threw himself into Alpha-level work and sank every bit of his soul into his father's company. The distraction saved his life, but giving his all to a company leaves no time for romance, which the burdened omega has convinced himself he doesn't need--or want.


The world Ellis has sheltered himself within is turned upside-down when he receives news that Roman Enterprises plans to absorb the company that, for all intents and purposes, has become Ellis's one love. As fate would have it, the initial meeting brings Reece Roman, an enemy from the past, back into Ellis's life. Ellis has every reason to hate him, but Reece is desperate to prove himself a changed man, and the omega can't shake the feeling that there's always been an undeniable bond between them...


---


Reece is the eldest son of Lionel Roman, the CEO of Roman Enterprises. He may be an Alpha, but he hasn't had an easy life. The death of his mother influenced many of his decisions, including the decision to marry a woman he hadn't imprinted on. He loved her with all he had, but his heart still belonged in part to a man in his past--Ellis, the beautiful, headstrong omega Reece had imprinted on as a teenager. The same omega Reece took part in bullying in high school and failed to protect when the bullying escalated to levels he was blind to.


In order to alleviate himself of the guilt he had over not being able to give his whole heart to Janie, Reece managed to convince himself that he hadn't imprinted on Ellis at all, and when she died in childbirth, Reece withdrew into himself even more, pouring all his energy into being the sole parent of their daughter Anika. All of those long-buried feelings return to the surface when he encounters Ellis again, and the circumstances of their meeting are far from rosy. All Reece wants is to show Ellis that he's not the Alpha he used to be, but Ellis' defenses are an iron fortress and Reece is sure he has no hope of breaking down the walls he helped fortify.


Can Reece right his wrongs and save Ellis's heart, even if it means sacrificing his desires to be the omega's mate and being there for him as his protector and friend instead? Or will the bond they've shared for more than half their lives prove unbreakable in the end?

This is a 56k enemies to lovers contains mature subject material and may have a rough road leading up to the inevitable happily-ever-after. See inside cover for content warnings. Readers 18+ only.

• Language: English
• Publisher: L.C. Davis
• Release date: Dec 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393031932

Book preview

Reece

Good news, my father announced, striding into my office like he still owned it. The older Alpha had scaled back from his micromanaging tendencies considerably ever since taking a new mate and adding a surprise baby to the family, and those days, he worked more in his home office than the one downtown. Nonetheless, I would find a way to live if I saw a bit less of him at work. Old habits died hard, especially when you were a self-made billionaire who’d created a vast corporate empire out of nothing.

You remembered the importance of knocking before you enter a room? I offered, setting aside the compliance reports I had been reading before the interruption.

No, he said flatly. He dropped a file on my desk, grinning the same way he always had when his kids were about to open a particularly sought-after Christmas present. Remember Stover Electronics?

Now that was a name I hadn’t heard in years. It was hard to forget when I’d known the Stover brothers most of my life. One of those relationships was more tumultuous than the others, and whenever I thought of Ellis, the shy, awkward kid who always ate alone and sat in the back of the class, I felt a pang of guilt. I’d been a different person then, and not a good one.

Before I’d met my late wife, I had been a selfish, arrogant prick who only cared about himself. What she’d seen in me then, I would never know, but she made me want to be a better man and she guided me with patience and grace until I was as close as I could get to the husband Janie deserved and the father I wanted to be to our daughter. She’d been gone for years, but she’d left her mark on me. Some days, knowing that I had to keep being the person she’d molded me into, if only for our daughter’s sake, was all that kept me going.

Some days, a name from the past made me realize just how far I’d come with Janie and just how far I had left to go without her. Ellis Stover’s name was a reminder of the deepest depths I’d sunk to before I hit rock bottom.

Yeah, I said, clearing my throat when I realized my dad was giving me that look. The one my entire family had been giving me ever since Janie’s death. They sell electronic parts to manufacturers. They were our tech wing’s biggest competitor on the east coast, outside of Silicon Valley.

Not anymore, he said proudly.

What happened? They go bankrupt or something? I asked, opening the rundown in the file. As far as I could tell, the numbers were strong enough. Not great, perhaps, but there was nothing that indicated an immediate downward spiral.

No, Martin Stover died.

I stared blankly at him.

Which is a tragedy, of course, he added. I loved my father, but sometimes, he fit the soulless corporate stereotype a bit too well. Then, he’d turn into a giant teddy bear around his family and dispel all the notions the tabloids pushed about him. But in the wake of that tragedy lies an opportunity to continue the proud legacy he built in a way that benefits his employees as well as our corporation.

Uh-huh. Nice save, I snorted. I thought he was leaving the business to his kids.

He did, but they’ve agreed to sell. He hesitated. Well, all but one.

Please don’t say what I think you’re about to say… Who? I asked against my better judgment.

Patrick and Brayden are on board, but Ellis is adamantly opposed. His brothers have agreed to part with their shares, but that would leave Ellis holding the majority shares, which makes the acquisition complicated, at best.

What do you expect me to do about it? I know nothing about tech shit.

No, but you know Ellis, he said entreatingly. You were in the same grade, weren’t you?

We didn’t really run with the same crowd, I muttered. I’d always run with the asshole jocks while Ellis hadn’t really had a crowd at all, but there were some parts of my past that I preferred to keep there, even from my father. I’d never been as obsessed with his favor as my brother Gray was, and we butted heads far more than any of the others, but I still didn’t want him to see me as the person I’d been fourteen years earlier.

Be that as it may, I’m sure you can convince him to see that the deal we’re offering is more than fair. You’re good with people. Take him to dinner, explain the terms, get him to sign the papers.

If only it were that easy. I knew the only way I was getting out of it was by admitting that showing up in Ellis’s life after fourteen years was only going to guarantee that he refused to do business with us at all. And maybe that I’d end up with a glass of water in my face when I deserved so much worse.

Before I had the chance, dad’s phone rang. He answered it immediately, since he had an infant daughter and a newly pregnant mate at home. He’d gone from having us hound him constantly about the importance of carrying a cell phone at all to being glued to the thing. Hello? He paused and a grin eased across his face. That’s wonderful news. Thanks.

Something told me that wasn’t a call from Luis to announce that my baby sister had just taken her first steps. I awaited my fate as he hung up.

That was Ellis’s secretary. He’s accepted your dinner invitation. You’re meeting at the new Japanese restaurant downtown tonight at seven.

Since when did I make a dinner invitation? I challenged.

He gave me a look. Just go and work your magic. It can’t do any harm.

He left before I could tell him how incredibly wrong he was. Some walks down memory lane only ever wound up at a dead end, and this was one of them.

Ellis

It wasn’t every day you got asked to dinner by your high school nemesis. On the one hand, I was surprised he had the gall to show his face around my father’s company at all. On the other, there was nothing Reece Roman could do that would surprise me.

They said no one was the same person they were in high school, and I decided I’d find out soon. Either way, despite my initial reaction to respond to his invitation with a resounding, screw you, there was a certain appeal in the way the tables had turned. Now I had something the great Reece Roman wanted, and he was willing to lower himself to having dinner with a commoner to get it.

Reece and I had a history as long as the one I shared with the town I’d grown up in and planned on never leaving. For most of that history, I’d barely been a blip on his radar, but my childish crush on him throughout grade school had blossomed into infatuation that ended abruptly in sophomore year of high school. Reece’s life was like a perfect mirror of mine in every way, as if we somehow existed in parallel universes where everything that had gone right for him had gone wrong for me. In fact, our literal mirror reflections were just about the only thing we didn’t have in common. He’d always been tall, broad, dark, and handsome with the money to wear the latest trends and a letterman jacket on top of them. I was a scrawny, freckled ginger who stumbled over his words, and sometimes his own feet.

Our fathers were both men who’d made their own way in the world, but his was a multi-billionaire while mine had to take out a second mortgage on the family home just to keep his small company afloat. We’d barely managed to hold out against Roman Enterprises’ gradual takeover, but my father always was a stubborn man. He always said that even though my brothers were the Alphas, I was the one who took after him. We were alike even in that regard, except that Reece’s younger brothers adored him while Patrick and Brayden had always viewed me as a tagalong. The irritating younger brother who could do no wrong in our father’s eyes, even if the rest of the world disagreed.

While Reece brought the school to victory at his football games, I sat on the sidelines and did my homework. At least until I stopped going to the games at all. The last day of Freshman year, I remembered being so elated that Reece had finally acknowledged my existence. Sure, it had only been to ask when the assembly was being held, but it was something. I’d gone off to help my dad at the factory that summer convinced that next year, things were finally going to be different. I’d shed my braces, traded my glasses for contacts and grown out my ginger locks into a less nerdy style. My summer job on the assembly line and puberty had worked in tandem to make me a slightly less lanky and awkward version of myself by the time I arrived back at school. Sure, I wasn’t anything like the girls Reece usually dated, and rumor had it, he’d never so much as looked twice at a guy, but there had always been something in my heart that said, He’s mine. Maybe he doesn’t see it now, but one day, even if it takes years, he’ll feel it, too.

Looking back, I was an idiot. It should have been obvious then to a kid with a perfect GPA and a few credits’ worth of college classes, but it wasn’t. Call it love, call it obsession, call it naïveté, but I’d only had eyes for Reece for as long as I could remember. When I first walked back through those double doors, I was on top of the world. All it took was one day to drag me right back down to the bottom.

I could still remember the look in his eyes when they’d met mine for the first time all summer. He’d gotten even taller over the break, and he already looked like a senior rather than the sophomore we both were. I had known with one glance that I all my summertime hopes and dreams were the product of delusion, because no ‘90s romcom makeover could make a guy like him think twice about a guy like me.

Except he stood there staring at me for long enough that the other kids in the hall had started to notice. The look on his face was blank, but it wasn’t anger or the apathy I was so used to seeing every time he looked right past me. For the first time in the fifteen years I’d been a satellite in the orbit of his perfect world, Reece Roman was actually seeing me.

His friends had noticed, too. Drew gave him a nudge and made a crack about him staring like a lovestruck idiot only in far less civil terms, and Reece’s trance turned to ice. He shoved Drew against a locker, slung his backpack over his shoulder and stalked down the hall.

We were scheduled in the same first-period English class, a fact that had been the reason for much rejoicing all summer. When I’d entered the room to take my seat, Reece was gone and he’d never shown up. I learned later that he’d transferred out of the class and two of the others we were supposed to have together. The only one he couldn’t get out of was gym, but that was only because there weren’t enough of us in the lower grades to make more than one class.

Reece ditched the first P.E. period, and the other kids were already whispering about the possibility that his absence was connected to whatever had happened in the hallway. I was still struggling to process it myself, and for the first time in my academic career, I found myself the center of attention.

Anonymity wasn’t nearly such a bad deal, as I soon discovered.

Before long, the whispers became rumors. Word traveled fast that the richest, most popular guy in school had imprinted on one of the nerdiest, weirdest kids from the wrong side of the tracks. It didn’t matter whether it was true or not, or whether either one of us had even been in the same room since. It was enough in the land of folly and farce to qualify as a done deal.

In the beginning, I felt worse for Reece than I did for myself. After all, it wasn’t like I had any room to go down on the social ladder. A few people even started to say things like, At least he’s not an ugly duckling anymore, as if they needed a reason to justify Reece’s supposed interest in me. I did my best to deny the rumors to everyone who would listen. Kids who hadn’t so much as talked to me for years suddenly wanted to sit with me at lunch. Under any other circumstances, I might have found the sudden escape from social outcast status to be a godsend, but my adolescent heart still beat only for one Alpha and the idea of causing him pain, even if it was only by association with me, was unforgivable.

The kids who did see me, the ones who took it far enough to shove me and strike my books out of my hands every chance they got, started to back off. After all, no one wanted to risk crossing Reece Roman’s omega on the off chance that the rumors were true. I got to enjoy that reprieve for a couple of weeks, until fate in the form of Mr. Simon, the P.E. teacher, decided to pair us together for drills.

That elicited all the knowing looks and whispered taunts one might expect from a room full of teenagers with nothing better to do than create drama where there wasn’t any, and I could feel Reece getting progressively more pissed off as time went on. We were throwing the medicine ball when Drew purposely beaned me out of nowhere, sending me to the ground.

Aren’t you gonna help your boyfriend up? the other Alpha taunted.

Reece looked down at me while I was still nursing my bleeding lip. I remembered watching the war behind his eyes as he considered his decision, and the sting when he made it. With a snort, he left me on the gym floor and walked back over to his buddies.

That was the day things changed. When the rumors that Reece had imprinted on me got twisted into a far more sinister theory that I was stalking him and simply couldn’t take no for an answer. Until then, I had lived in some no-man’s land where no one was quite sure what to do with me. I was still the nerd no one particularly liked if they noticed me at all, but the potential that Reece did like me kept them in limbo. Once the narrative was set and I was painted the villain, the bullying went from occasional taunts and light shoving to constant gossip, disgusted glances and the odd black eye if I lingered too long on my way home from school.

I started walking home with my brothers, even though I was too embarrassed to tell them why. The twins knew about the rumors, but in their senior year, the lowly concerns of sophomores scarcely made it to the upper echelons of their elite world with any kind of clarity. They couldn’t be there all the time. As the sophomore year I’d held out so much hope for wore on, the rumors my mother promised would fade with time only materialized further, taking on a backstory so complex I was almost impressed.

I wasn’t just stalking Reece, apparently. The entire summer, I’d been writing him love letters and sending him locks of my hair. I’d taken obsession to the point of sickness by flinging myself at him and apparently, my sole desire in life was to bear his love child.

Reece never actually participated in the physical bullying, but he never made an attempt to set the rumors straight, either. His crew picked me as the favored target of its pranks, and he seemed to take glee in proving his disdain by taking part at every opportunity. I couldn’t be sure if he was the one who’d come up with the incredibly original moniker of stalker freak, but I had quite literally caught him red-handed spraying it onto my locker.

It would have been so much easier if I could have said that my feelings for him had turned to disgust, but they hadn’t. Every prank