Desire Me If You Can [Novel] - Chapter 17

“Dane!”
“What? You were here?”
“Where were you? Why are you so late?”
As soon as Dane Striker appeared, the gathered team members bombarded him with questions in shock. But instead of answering, Dane simply threw something onto the floor.
Thud.
The sound of a heavy body hitting the floor echoed. Seeing this, they instantly forgot their questions, their faces draining of color.
A stunned silence fell, as if time had stopped.
Grayson Miller was lying unconscious on the floor.
His massive, limp body looked like a giant, powerless beast. Thick arms, a body covered in hard muscles, and a physique much larger than the average man. The sight of this monstrous being lying there, defenseless, made their minds go blank.
“Wh-wh-wh-what the hell is this?”
“That’s Miller… Grayson Miller, right? What happened? Why is he like this?”
“Did you hit him, Dane? What happened?!”
As the team members screamed in panic for various reasons, Dane simply replied curtly, his face still creased in a frown,
“I don’t know. He just suddenly collapsed. Maybe he’s anemic or something.”
Anemic? Don’t be ridiculous!
A man over two meters tall and weighing well over 100 kilograms couldn’t possibly be anemic. No one would believe that. But the fact remained that Grayson was now lying unconscious on the floor. So they all came to the same conclusion.
This bastard knocked Miller out again.
Wilkins, who was clutching his throbbing head and sighing deeply, asked,
“You didn’t run into Miller, did you?”
“Probably not?”
Dane answered carelessly, making Wilkins’ temple throb.
“Tell me for sure! Miller didn’t see you, right?!”
“Probably not?”
As Wilkins was about to explode at Dane’s continued half-hearted replies, Ezra intervened.
“What happened? At least give us a rough explanation!”
As everyone looked at him anxiously, Dane answered with the same indifference.
“Nothing much. I was having sex in the storage room, and this guy suddenly opened the door, watched for a bit, and then collapsed.”
The listeners mentally inserted the words “after I hit him” between “watched for a bit” and “collapsed.”
Hmm, now it made sense.
Having roughly pieced together the situation, they acted swiftly and in unison. One of them linked arms with Dane and said sternly,
“You weren’t here today, understand?”
Another shouted as they turned to the others,
“Everyone heard that, right? Dane was never here today!”
And as if they were of one mind, they all started pushing Dane toward the exit.
“Okay, you need to leave, quickly. Nothing happened today. Okay? Got it?”
“We’ll take care of the rest. Go, now! Hurry up and get out of here!”
Dane stood there, bewildered by their urgent words.
What the hell is wrong with these guys?
Is there a problem?
Surely, the same people who wanted to give Grayson Miller a “fiery” welcome wouldn’t suddenly be worried about him, right? They were overreacting.
Unconcerned with his colleagues’ urgency, Dane remained stubbornly unmoving, making Ezra, who was
burning with impatience, cry out desperately.
“He’s looking for you! So get out of here before he sees you!”
However, his words only fueled Dane’s curiosity. Instead, he stopped and asked back.
“Me? Why?”
Seeing his handsome face creased in a frown, Wilkins explained,
“You knocked Miller unconscious back then, didn’t you? Miller came here looking for you.”
Dane froze for a moment. As his eyes flickered with a rare uncertainty, Ezra quickly added,
“Miller is looking for the person who knocked him out. We said we didn’t know, so you have to play along. You weren’t here, got it? Now go, get out of here!”
They kept pushing him, and Dane, having no choice, finally left as he was told. The remaining team members quickly cleaned up the scene. Fortunately, the other people inside the bar, thoroughly drunk, hadn’t noticed the commotion happening among them. While they themselves had also had quite a bit to drink, the situation before their eyes had sobered them up.
“Let’s move him first. Ask the owner if there’s somewhere we can lay him down.”
“I’ll go ask!”
At Wilkins’ instruction, Ezra rushed off to find the owner. The rest of the team members awkwardly gathered around the two-meter-tall man, each taking a limb, and carried him away.
Even then, Grayson remained unconscious. The air around him was thick with the usual scent of his pheromones, now mixed with the lingering scent of an unfamiliar Omega, but the drunken team members didn’t notice.
When Grayson regained consciousness, blurry figures looking down at him with concern came into view.
The ceiling lights blurred in his vision, and the surrounding noises sounded distant. His ears were ringing,
and his body felt heavy and sluggish.
What… what’s going on?
Before he could fully come to his senses, voices around him erupted all at once as if they had been
waiting.
“Miller, are you okay?”
“Are you feeling uncomfortable anywhere? The doctor will be here soon, so just wait a little longer.”
“What happened? Were you not feeling well? Could it be a pheromone imbalance…?”
Questions poured in, but Grayson couldn’t answer any of them. This was because he, himself didn’t understand the situation at all.
“Wait, we should wait for the doctor…”
The men hurriedly tried to stop him as he attempted to sit up, but he ignored them and stood, brushing off the dust from his clothes. As the team members fidgeted nervously, Wilkins finally appeared.
“Miller, what the hell happened? We found you collapsed in the hallway and brought you here. Do you
know what happened?”
The team members inwardly tensed at his anxious question.
What if he had seen Dane’s face?
They desperately hoped that luck would be on their side one more time as Grayson grimaced instead of
answering.
“I don’t remember.”
“What?”
They all looked at him with a mixture of worry and confusion. Grayson, feeling their gazes on him,
snapped irritably,
“I don’t remember, anything. What happened?”
The gathered men looked at each other and kept their mouths shut.
Thank goodness…!
A relieved silence fell, and Grayson cursed under his breath.
“Fuck.”
No one spoke as they watched him run a hand through his hair roughly. In the awkward silence, Grayson
was the only one who seemed agitated, biting his lip and lost in thought.
What the hell happened?
***
Grayson thought irritably in the car on his way home. No matter how much he racked his brain, he couldn’t remember anything. The last thing he recalled was leaving the welcome party, opening the door to what he thought was the restroom.
He couldn’t remember anything after that. He had definitely seen someone inside. He couldn’t even recall
their gender, let alone their face. All he could remember was the faint scent of an Omega’s pheromones.
And the incredibly tempting, ample breasts.
(You must have tripped or something.)
That’s what the team members, who had been waiting for him to wake up, had said. The CCTV footage
installed in the hallway showed Grayson opening the door and collapsing a few seconds later. The people inside, apparently a couple, came out and checked on him, then left hand-in-hand. A while later, the man returned alone, picked Grayson up, and carried him down the hallway, out of view. Given that the two
were alone in that room, it was obvious what they had been doing.
It’s the same person.
He was certain. It was the same as last time. He lost consciousness the moment he smelled the Omega’s pheromones. It was definitely the same person back then. The method was the same too.
The problem was that he couldn’t remember anything about what happened. He knew that Extreme
Omegas could induce pheromone shock in Extreme Alphas, causing memory loss or loss of consciousness.
But to be hit with the same trick twice…