The Omega's Secret Baby (Oceanport Omegas Book 1)

by Ann-Katrin Byrde

“Of course I do.” He kissed the side of my head. “I just hope Jake’s not too disappointed when he finds out his other dad isn’t a hero.”

  “Yeah, me too, but, you know… a regular dad who’ll be here for him is better than any absent hero.”

  Matt’s smile seemed a little more confident now. “I hope you’re right about that.”

  Yeah, me too.

  20

  Matthew

  The next day, we took Jake to the zoo in the neighboring city. Eli had suggested we have some sort of family day together before we talk to the kid in the evening, and I wasn’t opposed. I’d always liked to go to the zoo as a child, and Jake seemed to be enjoying himself too. He’d asked for a hat that looked like a lion, and he wore it proudly while pressing his nose to the terrariums with the snakes.

  “These are so cool!” he said, voice filled with awe. Kid seemed to have a thing for reptiles.

  Eli took my hand and pressed it. “Thanks for taking us here.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. This is what parents do, right? I’m just glad you got the day off work.”

  Eli waved dismissively with his free hand. “Let’s not talk about work. I’m starting to think I bit off more than I could chew with the whole fashion show thing.”

  “Oh, you’re doing it?”

  “Yeah, at the end of next month. You want to come?”

  The end of next month. Suddenly I got the feeling that Eli was only asking to see if I’d really still be around by then. I leaned in to give him a quick kiss. “Sure, I’ll come. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Eli smiled at me. He looked so genuinely happy that my heart skipped a beat just seeing him like that and knowing I’d put that smile on his face.

  This, more than anything, told me I’d done the right thing by divorcing Danielle.

  Jake ran up to us. “Did you see that snake? It’s huuuge!”

  “Show me,” Eli said as our son dragged him to the reptiles.

  My phone rang as I watched them go. Caller ID told me that it was my sister on the other end of the line. I grimaced as I took the call. “Hello?”

  “Where are you?” she demanded. “You need to come home right now.”

  “Why? What’s going on?” She sounded almost frantic, and that wasn’t like her. Something had to be wrong. I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “Father had another heart attack.”

  Another? “What do you mean another heart attack?” I’d never even heard of the first one, but if that was what had happened, no wonder everyone was so concerned.

  “Will you just come home?” She hung up before giving me a chance to respond. Typical. But in this instance, I didn’t even blame her. She was stressed. After all, Father had just had a heart attack.

  Oh God.

  Slowly, that information was really starting to sink in.

  “Matt?” Eli shot me a curious look. “Everything alright?”

  Oh no. Things were so not alright. “My father had a heart attack,” I said quietly, so Jake wouldn’t hear.

  “Oh God.” Eli held a hand in front of his mouth. “That’s terrible.”

  “Yeah.” I took a deep breath.

  “How is he?”

  “I don’t know. My sister just called. She wants me to come home immediately.”

  “Of course. You need to go. I’ll tell Jake that we’re leaving.”

  “Oh no. You stay.” No reason the day had to be ruined for all of us. I got my wallet out of my pocket and opened it. “Here, take a cab home when you’re done,” I said, handing Eli one of my credit cards.

  “That would cost a fortune!”

  I shook my head. “I don’t care.” Money had always been one of the few things not missing from my life. If it could ensure that Eli and Jake got to enjoy their trip to the zoo then there was no better use for it. “I need to go. About Jake, I—”

  “Forget about that for now. Just call me after you know more, okay?”

  “Yeah, I will.”

  I only hoped that I would have good news to share.

  Traffic absolutely sucked that day. It took me almost an hour to get to my parent’s mansion after leaving the zoo. I found my mother and my sister sitting together in the downstairs living room, but no sight of my father.

  “What happened?” I asked, coming in. I hadn’t even taken my shoes off.

  My mother looked at me, but didn’t say anything. I’d never seen her so pale.

  “It’s just as I told you on the phone,” my sister said, turning to me. Her face had lost its color as well, but she seemed to be having a better grip on things than our mother.

  “Well, where is he? Did they take him to a hospital? Why aren’t we there?” What were we doing sitting around here? How could they take it?

  My sister shook her head. “He’s not at the hospital.” Taking a deep breath, she stood and looked me in the eyes. “There’s nothing a hospital could do for him, Matt. He’s…”

  It was like she couldn’t get herself to finish the sentence, but I got a good idea what she was trying to say. But that couldn’t be right. I’d walked past my father just this morning and he’d been fine.

  “No,” I said. “He’s not…”

  My sister pressed her lips together so tightly the skin around her mouth went white. “It happened very quickly and very suddenly.”

  I looked to my mother, but she had nothing to say. She just sat there, staring at her hands. Had she loved him after all? I couldn’t help but wonder. But even if she hadn’t, the two of them had been a couple for nearly thirty years. Losing him must have come as a shock to her, no matter whether he’d been the love of her life or not.

  “She hasn’t said anything since they took him away,” my sister informed me. “Honestly, I’m not quite sure what to do, but I’ll stay here tonight. My husband’s watching the kid.”

  “Thank you.” I tried not to sound surprised at her act of kindness, but didn’t quite manage.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I’m only doing what I have to do as member of this family. It’s my duty to see that all of us are taken care of while Mother is grieving and you… I hope you know what you have to do.”

  What did I have to do? My head felt heavy, and thoughts were slow to form and even harder to process. I’d just heard that my father was dead. I didn’t want to come across like a fool to my sister, but I was still in shock while she’d had at least a little time to come to terms with what had happened. Hell, she’d probably even had time to prepare herself for the possibility that this might happen, while I’d been left in the dark.

  And I couldn’t help but wonder what I’d done differently if I’d known.

  Would I have spent more time with old man?

  My sister poked me in the chest. “Do you know what you have to do?”

  I rubbed my face with the heel of my hand. “What do I have to do?”

  “Go back to Boston and wrap up your business. Find someone to put in charge of the hotel there, because you’re moving back here. You have to take Father’s place.”

  Really? I’d always thought we were competing for that. “Don’t you—”

  “I don’t want the job,” she cut me off. “I’m happy with my life the way it is, thank you very much. What I want is for you to keep the company going so it’ll still be there when my son is old enough to take over.”

  So that was her endgame.

  I took a deep breath. “I need a few minutes to myself,” I said, turning to leave the living room.

  “Matt,” my sister stopped me. “Just please remember that this family doesn’t work unless each of us plays their part.”

  My eyes wandered from her to our mother, who still sat shell-shocked. Suddenly, though, she returned my gaze. She didn’t open her mouth, but I felt like she was telling me something with her eyes. Please do as your sister says.

  I left the living room feeling like I’d kicked a blind puppy by not responding to either my sister’s words or
my mother’s silent pleas. But I just couldn’t think about all this right then. My family expected me to jump right into action and be the strong leader I’d always been told I had to be—and I felt like I was letting them down by needing time to process first.

  Was I just a total failure as an alpha?

  I was certainly failing to fulfill my family’s expectations of me.

  I hadn’t managed to make my marriage work, and the only child I had was my illegitimate son no one even knew about yet. I wasn’t planning to keep Jake a secret forever, but I knew my mother wasn’t going to be jumping for joy when she heard of her newest grandchild. I’d wanted to come clean about all of this in the next couple of days. Now I wasn’t so sure whether that was a good idea, considering the state my mother was in.

  Was my sister right and I was just being selfish by wanting things that had never been in the cards for me?

  I didn’t know anymore. Maybe yes. Maybe not. It was so difficult to think clearly. I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling another migraine building in the front of my head.

  I inhaled, exhaled, and wondered why the world couldn’t go back to being as simple as it had been when I was a teen. I’d known my place in life then—even if I hadn’t always loved it.

  And then I’d met Eli. He’d made my life more complicated. But it wasn’t fair to say that without mentioning that he’d also made it a lot brighter. He’d made me dream in color where I’d only seen black and white before. But still, everything he’d made me want was just that. Dreams.

  And yet, I would have given a lot to go back to that time. To dreaming.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I was calling Eli.

  He answered almost immediately, had probably been waiting for my call. “Hey, you. Is everything alright?”

  No, no, it wasn’t, but hearing the soft cadence of his voice let me breathe a little easier. “He’s… passed,” I made myself say.

  Eli was quiet for a moment, taking this in. “I’m sorry,” he said then, and I knew that he meant it, even though he hadn’t known my father. Eli was like that, feeling other people’s pain like his own. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Was there? There was only one thing I could think of, and as soon as I’d thought it, the words had already left my mouth. “Could you stay the night with me? At the cabin, like we used to?” Didn’t even have to be the whole night.

  Eli hesitated. Of course he did. He had a child to look after and a job to return to in the morning. This was an unreasonable request. “Matt… You know I’d love to, but… No, you know what? We’ll do that. I’m going to get Griff to watch Jake. He won’t mind. Not in this case, I’m sure.”

  “Really? That would mean a lot to me.”

  “Hey, I’m here for you, okay? I just need a little time to get things in order here. Say we’ll meet up at the cabin in two hours?”

  “Thank you, Eli.”

  He hung up after telling me not to worry about it. I put the phone back in my pocket, feeling a little bit lighter than I had before. Maybe it was only for a little while, but I couldn’t wait to escape from here and lose myself in the omega I loved more than anything in the world.

  21

  Matthew

  Eli arrived at the cabin a little later than me, but I didn’t mind, grateful that he’d come at all as I listened to the crunch of his shoes over the fallen snow outside. We were lucky the roads had been cleared.

  I opened the door to let Eli inside and he brushed some snow out of his hair as he entered. “Oh good, you got a fire going,” he said.

  I tried to smile at him, but it was hard to get my mouth to move in that position, as if something was weighing down the corners of my lips. “I want you to be comfortable.”

  “Yeah?” He closed the door behind him and took off his boots. “I thought I was here to make you comfortable.” That said, he took me by the arm and made me sit on the couch with him, as if he was the alpha and I the omega. That wasn’t typical behavior for him, but I didn’t mind, because I needed someone else to be in charge for just a moment, and somehow, he seemed to sense that. Eli was amazing like that. He’d always had a feel for just the right words to say, just the right things to do to make me feel at ease. I didn’t know if that was an omega thing or an Eli thing. I suspected the latter, though, even if Eli himself would have insisted on it being the former. He gave himself too little credit.

  “Thank you for being here with me,” I said.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” he responded, draping an arm around my shoulders and kissing the side of my face. “We need to support each other if we’re going to be a couple. And if we’re going to be raising Jake together.”

  Jake. Ugh. I groaned. We were going to tell him about me today, and I’d forgotten all about those plans.

  “It’s okay,” Eli said, as if he could tell what was going through my mind. “We’ll talk to him some other time. It’s not your fault your father died today.”

  I took a deep breath, because those words were still difficult to hear. As if the fact that my father had passed away became a little more true every time someone talked about it. “I know it’s not my fault, but I feel like… it shouldn’t bother me so much. And that thought alone is horrible, but we really weren’t that close. It’s like…” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to find the words to describe what was going on inside of me. “It’s like I’m mourning what I didn’t have, a relationship that could have been, but that wasn’t. If that makes any sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense.” Eli ran his fingers through my hair in a soothing way. I still had a headache, but his touch was doing wonders for that, the way it always did. “You’re regretting that you didn’t share a closer bond with your father. There’s nothing weird about that.”

  “Maybe. Yeah.” I sighed. “He told me that alphas couldn’t raise kids, you know? That we don’t have the right instincts, and that’s why we need women. Or omegas, I guess.” I rested my head in my hands.

  Eli stroked the hair in the nape of my neck in a way that made me shiver, even now. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve seen the way you are with Jake. You love that kid, and why wouldn’t you? He’s the best.”

  Somehow, with those words, the playful tone of his voice and the absolute trust he placed in me, Eli managed to get a low chuckle out of me. “I do love that kid.”

  “See? Nothing to worry about.”

  Oh, there were so many things to worry about. But this omega could make me forget all of them, even if just for a couple of hours, and that was what I wanted tonight. What I needed.

  I leaned up to place a kiss on his lips. He welcomed the gesture without reservation. And as I closed my eyes and listened to the crackling of the fire place, feeling the softness of his lips against mine, I did feel transported back in time. We were back where we’d started all those years ago. Only this time, more than ever, I wanted to make Eli mine. I wanted to leave a mark that everyone could see in the morning. So that everyone would know who this omega belonged to. I’d never felt the need to claim as strongly as I did now. It was a bit scary in its intensity, even to me, but even so, I had no inclinations of curbing it.

  I was lucky, really, that Eli didn’t seem to mind when I dug my fingers into his shoulders and trailed my lips down his neck to graze the sensitive skin there with my teeth. He gave a low sigh and let his head fall back, as if granting me permission. And his skin smelled so sweet. As if calling out to me. There was no way I could have held back. Letting my instincts take over, I sucked at the skin, and I bit. Not deeply enough to draw blood, but deep enough to leave dents.

  Eli hissed, and tangled his fingers in my hair, pressing me even closer to himself, as if this was what he wanted too. He was too much. Everything I’d ever wanted in a mate, and more than I deserved. Swallowing the emotions welling up in me, I let go of his neck and kissed the spot behind his ear instead.

  “I love you so much,” I rasped. Another way this day was different f
rom the past. I’d never told him that I loved him back then. I should have, but I didn’t.

  Eli turned his head to meet my gaze. “Do you?”

  “More than I could ever put into words.” I pressed my lips to his again, my hands finding their way underneath his sweater and his shirt to skate over his skin. He raised his arms, as if inviting me to rid him of the fabric. An invitation I would never turn down.

  Thank God I’d gotten a fire going, because it wasn’t long before we’d both lost half our clothes.

  “I love you too,” Eli whispered, sliding his hand over my naked chest. “From the first time you brought me here… until now. I never stopped. Not truly.”

  I pressed him into the soft leather of the couch, kissing his chin, his jaw, his neck. “I should never have left you.”

  “I forgive you,” he murmured, reaching out to undo my belt as I straddled his hips, feeling something hard and hot in his pants. The scent of his arousal was strong in the air, mixing with my own as Eli opened my fly.

  We didn’t waste any more time on words after that. I pulled some lube and a condom out of my pants before discarding them, and then I focused all my attention on stripping the omega beneath me as well.

  Eli was handsome even with his clothes on, but there was no sight more beautiful than having him naked and willing before me. His eyes dark, his skin flushed, and his cock straining toward his belly as if asking for touch.

  Every time I saw him like this, I fell in love all over again. In love and lust. That same need to possess as before came over me again.

  “Turn on your belly,” I told him, and as soon as he complied, I kissed his lower back, feeling the flames of desire within myself burn brighter with every whiff of his scent I breathed in. I wanted to have him. But I didn’t want to hurt him. Not unnecessarily. So I made myself coat my fingers in lube and prepare him for me. He opened up without a hitch, spreading as well as he could in the little space we had.

  “Want you,” he said on a sigh as my fingers brushed his warm inner walls. His words were followed by a needy sound he made in the back of his throat—and which translated the height of his desire to me even better. It was a struggle, really, to not just grab his hips at that point and ram into him.