So Abel’s plan to let the other packs think they’d punished him for stealing their True Omegas had worked out well—Abel was already pulling enough weight for two shifters, and maybe a bit more. It made sense to pass some of that on to Quin. And if it got them off the hook for Jason and Bax, all the better. Now everyone was happy. Well, except for Abel right now, it seemed.
A half hour later, Abel came back with the pups and Holland trailing behind with Noah on one hip. Quin dropped his novel and sat up, running a hand over his hair. Duke hid a smile. Quin had a crush on Holland that shone like the Wolf Star. Now, if only Holland would take him up on that.
Holland glanced at Quin, then turned just as swiftly away. “I’ll take Noah and put him to bed. Beatrice, it’s bath time. Do you want your fishies?”
“Fishies, fishies!” she chanted, hopping two-footed in a circle around him.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Holland said dryly, then exited with the two pups, though not before another subtle glance at Quin.
Yeah, time to give Quin a kick in the rear. If only Duke wasn’t just a little bit intimidated by him.
Quin was an unknown. Duke had never really known him, being quite a bit younger, but even now, Quin didn’t say much. And he took being Alpha seriously, even more seriously than Abel, and Duke thought Abel had been just a little obsessed with the job. So yeah, maybe better to let Abel be the one to poke that wolf. Duke was perfectly comfortable poking Abel, after all.
Abel sat Teca and Fan at the kitchen table to color, and retreated to the living room. “I have something to ask of you two.” He paused, and gave Quin a rueful look. “Damn. I keep forgetting.”
Quin grinned at him. “I won’t pound you this time.”
Abel shook his head. “You might want to. This was all set in motion during my watch.”
“Bram?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Justin caught up with him last night, while everyone was at the party.”
And Bram had been in heat.
Duke couldn’t help himself. “He broke into the house?” His voice near cracked with the effort not to yell. He’d kill him. Hunt him down and chew him to bits, one tiny piece at a time. How dare he?
Abel shook his head. “He was outside at the time, blowing off steam. Justin did go looking for him though.”
“And couldn’t be bothered to control himself,” Quin said flatly.
“And couldn’t be bothered,” Abel repeated flatly.
Duke felt sick. Poor Bram. What a horrible thing to have happen. “What are we going to do?”
Abel grimaced and glanced at Quin. “Nothing, I guess. Unless you have a better idea.”
“You’re not going to make him pay for it?”
“That was my first thought. Bram doesn’t want him, though. He was in tears at the idea of mating him.”
He doesn’t want him! A bubble of happiness rose in Duke’s chest, despite knowing that Bram didn’t want him either, until Abel continued, “But Bax and Holland both tell me that he can’t just have the pup and raise it himself. That the consequences for him and for the pack will be too high.”
Fuck. Yeah. “He’s right.” Duke felt the blood rush to his cheeks when the other two looked at him. “When I lived in Jordan Bay, there were a couple of omegas. And the crap that was talked about them, when the adults weren’t around… I was surprised that you guys let Bram run all over the place without a chaperon. I mean, they never went anywhere on their own in Jordan Bay.”
Quin was quiet for a moment. “So we set him up for this?”
Duke shrugged. “From the others packs’ point of view, probably.” He didn’t like to think of that, and, to be honest, he’d enjoyed Bram’s relative freedom here. In fact, it was that confidence that made Bram stand out from the other omegas. Enough that Duke would still mate him, even carrying Justin’s pup, if he thought Bram might feel something for him.
Not likely, old man.
Abel glanced over to check on the pups, then gestured to the two of them to huddle closer. “We’re going to look for someone outside walls, and see if he can stay with them. He’ll have to be hidden, because if the humans saw him, they’d know what he was, and I’d be worried they’d do something that he wouldn’t be able to protect himself from. When the pup comes, we’ll look for a family to raise it, here or in another pack. And Bram can come back and live his life. We’ll have to come up with a story, school, or going to visit relatives. Maybe say we’re giving him that roadtrip tour to visit other omegas that he’s been after.”
Quin looked surprised. “You think that will work?”
Abel scratched at his beard and looked anywhere but at the two of them. “What other option is there?”
Duke shook his head. “It won’t work. I mean, no one will say anything to your faces, but they’ll all know. Maybe here in Mercy Hills it might not occur to them, but if anyone outside this pack heard, it’d be all over all the packs faster than you could scratch an itch. And if the rest of the packs know, then they’re going to ask the relatives here about it.” Yeah. Because nothing was better than getting the best gossip first. “Maybe that lawyer could find a human family to host him? He could come back and say he didn’t want to do whatever he was away for. Might be better if his parents went with him. Less likely to be noticed.”
Abel leaned back and rubbed his hands over his face. “I wish… I don’t know what I wish. That it was different. That I knew what we were setting him up for. I didn’t want to be that Alpha, when I should have been putting my foot down about his behavior.”
“Hey, it’s not Bram’s fault!” Duke’s voice rose, and the pups stopped coloring to stare at him. Quin laid a veil of power over him, not force, but a warning of what he could do. Fuck, but he’s stronger than Abel. Duke took a deep breath, and controlled his voice. “Justin isn’t an idiot, not that way. If he could smell Bram, he’d have to know that Bram was in heat. And if you could keep your hands off Jason,” he pointed at Abel, “while he was in heat, then for sure if Justin says he couldn’t help himself, he’s a damn liar.”
The other two stared at him like he’d suddenly sprouted a second head, or had his tail wagging behind his human backside. Duke wrestled himself back under control and, in a more normal voice, added, “I just think that there’s a lot of ways that can go wrong. And why should he be held to a different standard than the rest of us? Why the heck is an omega’s heat,” he went bright red just saying the words, “so much more exciting than a regular one? It’s stupid.”
“Like alphas are?” Quin asked with dry humor.
Duke wished the flush in his cheeks would go away. “We can hurt someone if we don’t stop and think. And how are we treated, really, different from anyone else? Even delta pups who act up are punished. We’re all taught what we need to get along in the pack. I don’t see why we isolate the omegas so much. They’re just another kind of shifter.”
“I didn’t know you were such an intellectual,” Abel teased him, then sobered again and reached out to lay a hand on Duke’s shoulder. “You’re probably right. I’ve been putting off dealing with the prejudice against omegas, what with the baby, and the business and getting Bax up to speed on things we’re going to need him to do.” He glanced around them. “The house took more time than I planned too. But now that’s all settled. I’ll talk to Bax and Jason and Holland, and we’ll start planning a campaign to change the way people think about omegas.”
“There’s still Bram to deal with,” Quin said. “It’s all fine to go save the omegas, but what are we going to do with the one we have now?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The three of them bounced ideas off each other for the rest of the evening, stopping briefly for Teca’s bedtime, and then again later for Fan’s. Not long after Abel had settled Fan into his bed, Holland came out of Bax’s bedroom with a sober, red-eyed Bram. They disappeared out the front door, presumably Holland walking Bram home. Good. Bram shoul
dn’t be alone while this was going on.
Holland came back a few minutes later, stressed and angry looking.
“Bax is asleep.” He hovered in the doorway, his eyes flicking from the floor, to Abel, to Quin—where they widened slightly—then back to the floor.
“Join us,” Abel said, and cleared a small pile of well-loved stuffed animals from the end of the couch to the floor.
“Me? Why… Sorry.” Holland shook his head and squared his shoulders. “I know it’s different here, but it’s a hard habit to break.” He cast an uncertain glance at Quin again, though Duke thought it was only a little fear, and mostly a lot of nervous attraction.
Quin licked his lips, and it hit Duke that Quin was just as nervous as Holland. Oh, that’s where the wind’s blowing, is it? For a moment, Duke almost forgot Bram’s situation, but that wasn’t something easily ignored and it soon took over its place at the forefront of his mind. Even with Holland’s help, they weren’t coming up with anything new, anything that might help, that would let Bram continue on with his life as he had been living it. Every idea they came up with turned out to have flaws that made them suitable only for alphas or betas, and they quickly realized that there was a whole section of shifter society that had a different experience of life than they did.
After some discussion of the risks involved, Quin called the pack’s shifter lawyer, Garrick, and invited him over over to provide a non-omega-non-Mercy Hills viewpoint, swearing him to secrecy, then filling him in on the story.
“Absolutely! What a horrible thing. And we don’t dare even expose him, or Bram’s reputation will never recover.” Garrick looked sick, almost as sick as Duke felt about it all.
In typical lawyer fashion, he grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper to write down every idea they’d come up with and discarded.
“What do you think?” Abel asked. “Have you heard of anything, rumors, old stories from home that might help?”
Quin and Duke leaned in and listened intently.
But, if anything, Garrick’s contribution only threw a greater gloom over the room. “Honestly, I’ve never heard of a story like this where there wasn’t a quick mating after. I don’t think we can look for a solution inside the pack structure. I think we need to go outside it. If you’re okay with it, I’ll call Laine and see if he has any advice.”
With the group’s approval, Garrick called Laine, that human lawyer who’d helped when Jason’s old pack had tried to go through the human courts to hurt Mercy Hills, but the lawyer was even less help. “I can look into it, but if you can’t use shifters living outside walls, that means finding someone human to take him in. And I’m not certain, even if I could find someone who was comfortable living with an intelligent carnivore, if they’d stay comfortable once it came out how…divergent… his biology is. But I’ll ask around. It may take a while, though. I wouldn’t pin my hopes on this. But I will certainly try. What’s the time frame?”
It was a very small bright spot in what Duke considered a very depressing evening.
Garrick excused himself to head home, the phone still pinned to his ear as he and Laine discussed some case Garrick was helping him with. The legalese faded into the night, and the conversation once more turned back to Bram.
When they started rehashing the same ideas over and over again, Abel called a halt to the proceedings and broke out some of the pack-brewed beer for everyone. Holland took the opportunity to retreat to his apartment, his ability to move outside his traditional role apparently strained as far as it would go. Quin’s eyes followed him as Holland slipped out through the door into his apartment and then he took a long drink from his beer.
They deliberately kept to less tension-filled topics, until about four beers in, when Abel decided to break out the good stuff—rum he’d picked up on a trip outside walls. And that was when the conversation really got uncomfortable. The topic of the omegas came up, what to do with them all, the trouble-makers, the wallflowers, the others. There were a few who Quin wanted to see move on from Mercy Hills, and they tossed around ideas to find them mates elsewhere. Some, though, they were all in agreement on keeping. Wyn from Minnesota, Tait from California, Russel from Winter Moon, Seosamh from Salma Wood. And, of course, Holland’s brother Cale. Which brought the conversation around to Holland.
The level in the bottle was down to half. Abel asked, “Why don’t you court him?”
Quin looked startled, but Duke thought, in that free-flowing way of a person just drunk enough for inhibitions to have dropped, that it seemed like a reasonable question. A good one, even. He kind of wanted to know the answer too. “Yeah, why not? The two of you are obviously interested in each other.”
Quin grunted, and tossed back his shot. “Trust me. I’m not mate material.” He put his glass down and stood. “I’m heading home.” He walked to the door with the careful steps of someone who had drunk more than he was accustomed to. “I’ll see you tomorrow, we can talk some more.” And then he was gone.
The two men left stared after him.
“That was strange,” Duke said.
“He hasn’t been the same since his last tour overseas.” Abel poured himself another shot, then one for Duke. “I don’t know what happened, but I can’t get him to talk about it.”
“He should talk to someone. And he should ask Holland to mate him before I get tired of them mooning all over each other.”
Bax’s voice came from the doorway. “I don’t think Holland’s ready to risk another relationship right now. He’s got some…issues to sort out first.” He walked slowly into the room and sank onto the couch next to Abel. “Feels so good to be out of bed,” he said in a tone of luxurious enjoyment. “Rub my back?”
“Of course.” Abel downed his shot and turned to his mate.
“Uh,” Duke said, starting to feel awkward. “I’ll just show myself out.”
Bax winked at him as he left, and Duke realized that that had been the plan the entire time. Well, they had just had a baby—he’d definitely overstayed his welcome.
As he walked through the town, the chill of the night air helped sober him a bit. Not that he had been drunk, but he wasn’t entirely sober either. His mind went back to Bram’s predicament, and he wondered if things would have been different if he’d made overtures to Bram and his family. If Bram might not have been so restless on full moon.
The more he thought about it, the more his own mistakes began to shine like sparks in dry grass. He hadn’t done anything about them, and now they were getting ready to burn down Bram’s forest.
He couldn’t let that happen.
Be an alpha and fix it.
So that’s what he did.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Bax sent me home with a jar of that stuff Mom always put on my chest when I got a cold. He smeared it all over me, and told me to do some sniffing and sneezing—it would cover up my lack of scent. And that’s how I spent the rest of the evening, hiding in my room, smelling like the infirmary, and terrified to the point where I almost stopped being scared of the future. If only something would happen, so I’d know what I was up against and could do something, instead of living this endless half-life. I stopped thinking beyond the next half hour, reading and rereading my notes from Sex Ed, almost feeling the baby growing inside, like it was counting down the minutes until I became a scandal in the pack.
But at the same time, I couldn’t hate it. It wasn’t the baby’s fault at all, but mine, and it deserved the best I could give it. If that meant giving it away, then so be it. I hoped his or her new parents would love it as much as I already did. I was sorry it had to be born like this, unkeepable, a dirty secret that I would never be able to talk about, let alone hold in my arms. But if it meant we could both live, then that’s what I would do.
Late that evening, I heard a knock on the door, which was unusual once the word got out that I was in heat. Unless they didn’t know. But Alpha Norman—the Alpha before Abel—had drilled it into the pack as soon as they knew wha
t I was, and Abel had continued the lessons once my heats had started. I tried to listen in on what was being said, but the voices were too muffled. It was a man, for certain—for a moment, I thought it might have been Duke, but he didn’t have any reason to come talk to my parents. They hardly knew each other, except as adults. Quietly, I cracked open my door, but I could only catch a couple of words here or there. My name—which made me nervous. Night, full moon, a few more that weren’t that important. My heart sped up until my whole chest hurt and I wondered for a moment if I was having a heart attack. Then I heard my father’s voice.
“Bram, could you come down here please?”
My heart was going to explode, it was beating so fast, pounding so I could hardly hear anything else. I dragged myself out the door and trudged down the stairs like I was going to my own execution.
Dad was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, looking worried and angry and scared.
He knows. My heart sank. I wondered who’d told him, then realized it had to have been the people who’d knocked on the door. Had Justin told someone? Was the news of my downfall already spreading through the pack? What would it be like when I went back to work? Would people even let me look after their pups now? I liked my job, even if it was a bit annoying sometimes. I didn’t want to lose it, not until I knew what I really wanted to do with my life.
I came to a stop in front of him, and stared at my feet.
“Is it true?” he asked.
I nodded, but didn’t raise my head.
“Bram…”
“I didn’t mean it to happen!” I peeked up at him, wringing my hands because he looked so angry. I was afraid if I asked him for a hug, he’d say no, even though I desperately needed one. “I was outside playing ball because I couldn’t sleep, and I came back in the yard, and he was there.” I clapped my hands over my mouth to hold back the sobs. This was worse than I’d thought it would be.
Duke's Baby Deal (MM Mpreg Shifter Romance) (Mercy Hills Pack Book 3) Page 7
