Under Siege: A Contemporary Mpreg Romance Bundle (Omega's Under Siege)

by Aiden Bates

  “You think so?” I asked, wincing at how vulnerable that sounded.

  “I know so. You have to know I talked to him.”

  “Well, yeah, you’re friends. I figure you talk to him all the time—”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. When y’all started dating in high school.”

  “Started? I didn’t think anyone knew when we started dating. Who else knew ?” I asked because I was sure we’d kept that a secret, at least in the beginning, though I was aware it had gotten around to people by the end. Everything always did.

  “Literally everyone, now, shut up. After I found out, I went up to him and asked him point-blank what it was he liked about you. I’d watched so many folks chase after you, and well, back in the day, you didn’t really mind being caught.”

  “Guilty,” I said.

  “But I could tell you were so fucking in love with this boy. He had you wound around his little finger. And well, I was worried for you. I was afraid he was going to take advantage of all that goodness in you and you’d end up hurt. You were always looking out for Mama and me, and it felt like the least I could do.”

  I reached over and gave Silas’s shoulder a little squeeze.

  “So, I asked him. And do you know what he told me he liked about you?”

  I shook my head.

  “He said, ‘I like that Roman always does what he thinks is the right thing. He’s honest, and he doesn’t yank me around. He’s earnest, and I love that about him.’ That’s what he said. He’s not wrong. You’re the last person I’d ask to keep a secret. No wonder you’re so stressed out about it, Roman. Secret keeping is so not your thing.”

  “But what if Teddy doesn’t want all of this? I know Teddy doesn’t want to be the kind of omega who is expected to conform to society’s rules, and he thinks popping out babies, marrying an alpha, is what’s expected. That’s not who he wants to be.” I knew all that because it was something Teddy said over and over.

  “Exactly. But that’s the thing. He needs someone, you, to tell him he isn’t alone with his opinions, that marrying you, having a family with you doesn’t mean he’s giving up on who he is, the man you love. He thinks he’s on his own. You need to show him he’s wrong.”

  “You think that will work?”

  Silas hummed in the affirmative. He got up and guided Jason to his shoulder before beginning to pat his back.

  “Go try it, and then watch what happens. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

  “Alright, then,” I said, feeling hopeful for the first time since the argument. I stayed on the ground until Silas nudged me with his shoe.

  “I meant that literally. Go. This one needs a nap and papa needs some fucking down time.”

  I chuckled. “You know, if you need a break, I could use some practice getting used to a baby.”

  I gave Silas a hug, and baby Jason a little kiss, then stepped outside. Though I’d wished I’d driven here last night, Somerset wasn’t too far from King’s Place, so I started walking back toward my part of town, and I used the time to think about how I was going to approach all of this with Teddy. I wasn’t really sure exactly how to show him it would be okay. Teddy was precise about things. Wouldn’t just take generalities on face value alone.

  Teddy was terrified of the way things were changing, and he must have felt like most of those changes were primarily going to affect him. I wasn’t going to be affected because of this. I mean, I might piss Logan off, but I’d probably get some congratulations, some slaps on the back, and some pretty lame ball jokes out of it. Regardless, my career was still intact, but Teddy could be fired. He could lose his position and the respect he’d worked hard to earn. He’d spent so much of his life striving toward his goal, and dammit, he deserved every bit of recognition he got for it and a whole lot more besides. I’d come along and flipped his world upside down. He was going to have to watch his body change and ache, and deal with all the leering from the alphas he worked with, and maybe the disapproval of the one father who’d actually stayed around for most of his life.

  In the face of all of that, it was hard to think of anything that would ease all those fears. There was nothing I could think of preemptively that was going to work. Like many times in my life, it looked like I was going to have to go in on a wing and a prayer and hope to hell it worked out in my favor. Why couldn’t everything be like the Army? I almost found myself wishing Teddy was just a little bit like every other omega; wanting not much more than a strong alpha who was prepared to look after him. Sometimes, a pretty face and a gun was all it took to solve a problem. Now, things were no longer that simple, which was a shame because that was all I really had going for me.

  26

  Teddy

  Okay. Okay. I could do this. I was smart, right? Smart Teddy? Whiz kid Teddy? Boy genius, youngest person to ever graduate from my college Teddy. I could reason through this entire situation logically and invent a solution. Being able to cry on Dad’s shoulder and to open up to him about some of what was going through my head had been useful, emotionally cathartic, cleansing. So cleansing, in fact, that this morning, after my nausea had passed, I’d nervously cleaned my entire apartment as a way of burning off frantic energy.

  God, where was Roman? How was Roman? I must have started to text him a hundred times or more after Dad had left last night. I must have had my thumb hovering over Roman’s name on my contacts list to phone him another hundred times, but I didn’t have enough courage to press the damn send or call button. What if he didn’t want to talk to me? What if he didn’t want to hear from me? He was pretty damn mad when he’d stormed out.

  What if Dad wrong about Roman most likely wanting to be a presence in the baby’s life?

  I paced and tried to gather my thoughts, gesturing madly as I uttered hypothetical conversations to myself, rehearsing how I would react to different situations.

  I practiced how to break the news to Naomi that I wasn’t on the team anymore. I practiced breaking the news to Roman that I wasn’t going to Montana. I practiced resigning in front of Wilcox. I practiced accepting Roman’s marriage proposal, and I practiced telling Charlie, Silas, and Benny that I was going to opt for the single parent route. It all sounded plausible, but it all sounded wrong. Incomplete.

  I lacked the distinct feeling of solving a complicated equation, landing on the most elegant of solutions and finding that everything suddenly clicked into place. None of these pieces were clicking together at all, and some of them still seemed irreconcilable.

  As I paced, I caught my reflection in the full-length mirror in my bedroom and stopped in my tracks. I’d never changed out of my sweats, and so instead of the lean, clean-cut, put-together Teddy I usually saw, now there was a man with a slightly swollen abdomen, white-yellow skin from incessantly throwing up, and a wrinkled brow from constant anxiety and stress.

  I sighed. Things were easier before. They may have been superficial, one-dimensional, and lonely. But they were certainly easier if you didn’t consider all the variables. If my simulator had taught me anything, it had definitely taught me that.

  “Listen, Lima Bean,” I said to the reflection of my belly in the mirror. “I don’t care what you are. You can be an alpha or an omega or a girl, and you can be into whoever you want to be into, it won’t matter. I’ll love you. And your Daddy will love you. I just hope that whatever you are and whoever you are, you get to be you. All of you. Picking parts of yourself sucks, Lima Bean, and I hope by the time you get old enough to care, the world will have gotten over its incessant need to make people pick. Maybe you can be a career girl who only dates omegas, or a house omega who only dates career omegas, or a house alpha who dates girls. I don’t know. I hope you don’t have to choose, that’s all.”

  After a moment I thought better of my idle wishing. “I know we have a woman President, and an omega VP, so the world is changing. It’s not all about alphas, but more needs to change, and Daddy and I will work on delivering the kind of world that let
s you be all of you. Just you watch. We’ll work on it. Somehow, we’ll work on it.”

  As if I were soothing Lima Bean after forcing it to partake in such a difficult conversation, I instinctively rubbed at my stomach. Of course, conversations with Lima Bean were still a little one-sided, but at least I’d stopped pacing. That’s when I noticed the room was stuffy, and the fact that I hadn’t been out of the apartment since yesterday was getting to me.

  What I needed was air. Fresh air would re-oxygenate my brain and then, surely, surely, I’d come up with a solution I could live with.

  I changed into clothes I didn’t mind being seen in and made myself look presentable in case I ran into anyone I knew. It was bad enough Benny had noticed my pallor and loss of weight, I didn’t need half of Fort Greene noticing too. Prepared to re-emerge out into the world again, I grabbed a sweater off the coat rack and opened the door—and came face to face with a very taken aback Roman who was holding his hand as if he’d intended to knock. He quickly and embarrassedly tucked his hand into the pocket of his jeans, started to blush, and looked off to the side.

  “Hi,” he said, simply.

  “Hi,” I answered him in the same uncertain monotone.

  Roman nodded but said nothing else. I still had my hand on the door handle as I watched him shift his weight uncomfortably on his feet once or twice. I coughed slightly. He cleared his throat. I sniffed, and he sighed. Resolutely, neither of us said anything, perhaps each hoping the other one would start us off.

  “Okay…” I said at last, feeling a little more ridiculous with each silent moment that passed as we awkwardly stood on either side of the lintel.

  “Okay,” Roman answered, though what was okay, I wasn’t exactly sure.

  Suddenly, we both burst into speech at the same time.

  “Did you tell—”

  “I hope it’s okay, I told—”

  “I’m sorry. You go first,” I said, waving him on.

  “No, no.” He shook his head. “You go. Go on.”

  “Fine. Did you tell Dad about us?”

  “No!” Roman’s eyes widened in terror. “Jesus Christ, does he—”

  “Yeah. It’s okay though. I guess he figured it out. What he didn’t already know, he found out yesterday. From me, that is. We talked, and he seems…okay with it. Weirdly okay with it, actually.”

  “Good. Good, good. That’s good,” Roman said, nodding and blinking quickly as though he were still trying to assimilate the information that Dad wasn’t currently out there, conducting an old-fashioned manhunt for the alpha who had put a bun in my oven.

  “Wait, then, who did you tell?” I asked, circling back to when we’d tried to speak in tandem just then.

  “My brother.”

  “Oh god, Roman!”

  “I’m sorry. I know I wasn’t supposed to but it all just… It all just came out.”

  “No, it’s fine, it’s not serious,” I said.

  At this point, with Dad okay with it and half of our various friends and family members having guessed or been told, I supposed there wasn’t too much point in keeping it a secret at all.

  “It’s just that Silas has probably already booked a venue for some kind of combination wedding/baby shower, that’s all. Those three are no doubt waiting around the corner to jump out with balloons and streamers right now.”

  “Wedding shower?” Roman asked sharply and suddenly.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t mean…um…”

  “No, you’re right,” Roman said quickly. “That’s about the long and short of it. He did mention he was going to murder Benny for not saying anything as soon as he knew. But I tried to tell him you didn’t want Benny telling anyone, so hopefully, he doesn’t really murder Benny.”

  “Good. Yeah. Hopefully Benny stays among the living,” I agreed, once again feeling the awkwardness of unspoken things building between us.

  “Can we talk?” Roman asked, evidently feeling the tension, too.

  “Sure. I was going to go out for air, but…you know…you said you were going out for air yesterday, so maybe you’ve had enough air,” I said, weakly trying to make light of the situation. “You certainly got your chance to air out all of our personal business,” I muttered just loudly enough to let Roman hear me.

  “Uh. Right,” Roman said, apparently not finding my decidedly anemic attempt at a joke funny. “Listen, if now’s not a good time, I can always—”

  “No! No, it is. It is a good time. I was just trying to… Never mind, come on, let’s go on a walk. It feels like I haven’t been outside in days.”

  Roman fussed a little about whether I should be out and whether maybe it would be better on my feet if we stayed indoors, but I was having precisely none of it, and pretty soon we were heading toward Arlington Square and the park where we’d had the first of several awkward conversations to follow.

  “So…” I said, venturing a stab at starting us off once we’d arrived at Eaton Park East.

  “Nope,” Roman said gently but decisively.

  We stopped, and Roman motioned toward one of the benches, which I took as my cue to sit. I sat down by myself while Roman chose to remain standing, almost as though he were performing for an audience of just one. Or, two, I supposed, even if Lima Bean couldn’t quite appreciate performance art just yet.

  Roman paced three or four steps in front of the bench. Then, he stopped and rubbed his hands together.

  “I need to tell you something, and I need to say it first and all in one piece. So can you please let me talk, and let me get to the end of it without you stopping me? Then it’ll be your turn. You can talk and I’ll be quiet and let you get to the end of what you need to say. Whatever it is, I’ll accept it. I just… I really need to go first, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, and though I already wanted to say something, I was determined to respect what he was asking me to do. So I crossed my legs and nodded to show I was ready when he was.

  “Okay.” He shoved his hands in his pockets but let his posture adopt an almost ‘parade rest’ stance, and then fixed his eyes on the empty part of the bench beside me.

  “I love you.”

  I immediately regretted agreeing because I suddenly had things—important things—to verbalize, but I caught myself in time, biting my lower lip to stop from ruining the moment.

  “I love you, Teddy. I know I said it before, but I need you to know I mean it. I love you. So much. You were all I could think about when I was in Malmur. On those nights when the temperature dropped, and I’d be trying to find gloves to layer onto other gloves because it was so cold, thoughts of you kept me warm. Or when I’d be out patrolling and my feet would ache, and I was cooking alive inside my gear, it was you who kept me going. And when I was laying in the hospital bed, waiting for the nurses to come peel layers of my skin off me every day, the thought of seeing you when I got out was the only thing that made it bearable. You gave me a reason to live.”

  I swallowed quickly, blinking back the mist threatening my vision, all while trying not to say a damn word.

  “In fact the only thing I love more than you is the idea that, right now, as we speak, you’re working on making another you. Or, hell, I hope it’s another you. I’ll love it all the same, but I think we’re gonna be in serious trouble if it’s gonna be a little me.”

  I’d just been thinking the opposite, actually. Who wanted a scrawny, precocious little runt like me when there was the chance to have a baby like Roman?

  “But whatever it is, I want to be there for him or her, and for you. So… You tell me how you want to do this. I can get Silas to help me fall down the steps just hard enough to break my damn leg or I can get Garret to shoot me in the foot. Whatever it takes. Hell, if for some reason something like that didn’t get me discharged, I could just stop showing up or cuss your Dad out or something.”

  I bit down harder on my lip. Roman was seriously suggesting starting a fight with my Dad to get discharged, and I couldn’t help but love him all
the more for it.

  “Naturally, it’d be better if we stayed on Master Sarge’s good side and then, maybe, he could just do his best to keep me here, like you said. But the point is, Teddy, I’ll do whatever it takes. We’ve already proven we don’t do long distance very well, and I want to be with you. I made up my mind that night I drove you home after Silas’s party, so now the only thing that could keep me from you… Is you.”

  He at long last brought his gaze up to my face, his eyes searching as if he were trying to gauge my reaction.

  I couldn’t help but smile broadly. Roman was never more endearing and disarming than when he was expressing himself. There was something so sincere, so genuine, so inherently reliable about Roman that it was impossible not to want to believe him, want to believe in him and whatever he said.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said.

  Roman looked a little disappointed and confused, which wasn’t what I’d intended.

  “No, I mean, listen. Ever since I was a kid, people have told me my life was going to be centered around an alpha, but I was never going to have any of the privileges of being an alpha. I was raised by an alpha, I was raised around alphas, I was told that if I was going to work, it was probably going to be under an alpha. I was going to be sought after by alphas, and eventually, I would give up my life in order to have more alphas with an alpha. I didn’t want that. I still don’t want that.”

  Roman bowed his head before I’d finished. He seemed like he was resigning himself to being rejected right then and there, but I continued.

  “I was so dead set against being the kind of omega who wants that kind of life that I forgot to let myself get excited about you and me and the baby. I’m serious when I say I don’t want my life to be centered around just an alpha. But you’re not just an alpha. You’re Roman. You’ve always been more than just an alpha, and it wasn’t fair of me to see you as a symbol of everything that’s tried to keep me down before I saw you as you, as you really are. It wasn’t fair to you, and it wasn’t fair to me. I was even willing to trade all of this so I could keep on working for SynergyNow, even when I know they don’t give a shit about me. They’re ‘the alphas,’ the random, faceless alphas who only see me as an omega, and I’m not doing myself any favors by pretending that working with them is all liberated while being happy with you is somehow less worthy.”