The omelet was ready, and I checked out my father’s expression as I slid it in front of him, but it seemed he hadn’t noticed any sign that I was coming into my first heat of the spring season. I’d have three, if past experience was anything to go by. But it meant most of this week I’d be trapped in the house, unable to go to work, unable to have the tutor visit. Fuck. And I had just started this new job.
Mac stood up, startling me. He noticed—he could hardly have missed the spatula flying across the room—but he didn’t comment. Instead, he padded quietly over to the sink, put his plate in, and started running water in for washing.
“I can do that,” I said, throwing the spatula in as well.
“Make yourself some breakfast. I’ve washed dishes before.”
“You’re a guest.” That wasn’t the reason. I just wanted to look after him. Well, this is a fine situation to get yourself in. Hopefully it’s just the hormones. But I had a disquieting feeling that it wasn’t.
“Today I’m your pack animal. I’ll wash, you eat. Or do I have to pull rank?”
He could. Mac ranked pretty high in the pack here, though he didn’t show it off. But I couldn't let that sit, especially with my own confused emotions. “That’ll only work for so long.” I was pretty sure that my own rank would match the Alpha’s, in some weird side ranking, once we were mated.
“It only has to work now,” he said in that maddeningly calm voice, and he put his hands on my shoulders and physically moved me back to the stove.
Probably just as well. When he put his hands on me, the shock of desire made me gasp, and the outlines of his hands burned on my shoulder for long minutes after. My hands shook as I cracked eggs into the bowl and beat them frothy, though by the time I got to slicing the apples they’d stopped and I could handle a knife without worrying about cutting myself.
Mac washed the dishes while I cooked, and as soon as I’d emptied my omelet onto a plate, he took the frying pan and the spatula from me and washed them as well. Then he sat at the table, sipping at his coffee and watching me eat while I tried not to spill food down my front or drop everything on the floor.
I realized I hadn’t asked him about the omelets. “What did you think of breakfast?”
“Hmm.” He took a sip of coffee and appeared to think about the question. I didn’t think he was playing with me—I found him easier to read than the Alpha. “Too rich for every day, but it would be nice on special occasions.”
Since that was my own opinion of them, hearing him say those words made me very happy, and my worries about my upcoming heat faded into the background. “I don’t make them often. It just felt like a day for them.”
“First day with the new garden? I can see why.” Mac smiled at me then and I nearly dropped my fork. While I was trying to recover my dignity, he leaned forward and nudged my plate. “Finish up so I can wash that while you brush your teeth.”
And I did.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mac watched Jason happily tying lengths of heavy wire around the poles they’d spent the first part of the morning setting into the garden soil. The omega was in his element, carefully measuring the distance between the rows, then the distance between the poles within the rows, gauging the angle of the sun and lining everything up so that the plants got the most light possible.
The omega stood on tiptoe, tying the last of the strands of wire around the top of a pole. His t-shirt rode up, and Mac had to bite the inside of his lip to stomp on the feelings that strip of pale flesh roused in him.
“You have a fantastic micro-climate here,” Jason commented. Almost burbled, Mac decided. It was something he’d noticed Jason doing when he was happy, this off-the-cuff running commentary on the many things that seemed to delight him about the place.
“What’s a micro-climate?” he asked, not because he cared, but because Jason cared, and he found he liked cultivating that joy as much Jason took pleasure in cultivating his plants.
As Jason clipped off the end of the wire, he explained, “It’s an area of slightly warmer weather inside another one. Like, if the average summer temperature is seventy degrees, then a micro-climate might have an average temperature of seventy-five.” He settled back down and the t-shirt dropped back into place. “It’s why I think we can grow those tall greenhouse tomatoes here. The soil is good, the air is warm and there isn’t much wind. All they need is proper support and we’ve just provided that.” His smile shone, easily as bright as the sun if anyone wanted to ask Mac’s opinion.
While they collected their tools and the scattered lengths of left-over wire, Mac read himself a stern lecture on the pointlessness of mooning over his Alpha’s future mate. Though the way Abel was going about it, Mac wouldn’t be surprised if Jason called the whole thing off.
Or maybe he wouldn’t—Jason was the kind of guy who kept his word. If he said he’d do something, he did it. He was reliable, to the point of obsession. Mac hadn’t heard any complaints from his tutor, and he made a point to ask every morning when he dropped her off, checking to see how the young omega was settling in. If anything, her comments were exactly the opposite—always prepared, always cheerful, and he stuck it out even when he was having problems. Plus, there was his residence here at Mercy Hills to consider.
The problem Mac had with it, aside from his own personal interest, was that, on the rare times that Abel actually spent time with Jason, the omega turned into an entirely different person from the one he was with Mac. He became uptight and nervous. Anxiety made him clumsy, and he folded under the least pressure. But—he never stopped trying. Mac had a feeling that, unless Abel broke the agreement, Jason would go through with the mating, no matter how uncomfortable he was. And that thought left Mac feeling oddly weary and more than a little unhappy.
They piled everything into the back of the truck. “Did you want to go with me to the greenhouse?” They didn’t have the tomato plants Jason wanted in their own greenhouses, but Mac had set one of the Inventory Control crew to hunting down the plants outside the enclave, then sorting out the appropriate permits for them.
“When are you going?” His expression wavered between excitement and trepidation.
“Travel permit is dated Monday.”
“Oh.” Dismay won out over the other expressions on Jason’s face.
“What’s wrong?”
Jason fidgeted at the side of the truck, drawing in the dust on the side of the box. “I…uh, I have my tutor that day.” He glanced up at Mac and sighed. “No, I’m lying.” His cheeks turned pink and his eyes focused everywhere except on Mac. “I’m, uh, I’m coming into…season.” The last word was almost a whisper.
“Oh. Oh!” Well, that explained why Mac hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Jason all morning, to the point of stumbling over some of their supplies at one point. A sense of relief washed over him and he was able to commiserate with Jason over missing the outing without too much awkwardness, except for the normal awkwardness of talking about such an intimate bodily function.
“What really frustrates me,” Jason said, his hands on his hips and a frustrated look on his face, “Is that I’m going to lose a bunch of time here, and there’s still things that need to be done before the tomatoes can be transplanted, and this is going to put me behind by at least a week.”
“It doesn’t have to. I can take a few days and help out. If you’ll figure out what needs to be done, then write it out for me. Step by step, okay? I’m not a gardener.”
“Really?” Jason’s face lit up. “I’ve never had anyone offer to help me with anything, except maybe another omega, but they’re usually so busy keeping up with their own responsibilities, it’s hard to find anyone to help.” Doubt crept into his expression. “You’re serious about this, right? I mean, I don’t mind if you don’t want to. I don’t expect any help. That only starts after I’m mated.” He looked down and poked at a clump of grass with the toe of his sneaker. “I know where omegas stand in the scheme of things.”
&nb
sp; “I mean it.” And, because he now knew that the feelings he’d been having for Jason were hormonal, he reached out to give the young omega a hug. It sent a shock of desire through his body, and stirred all his protective urges, but it wasn’t real.
Just hormones.
Jason stiffened, then relaxed into Mac’s hold, his arms coming up automatically to wrap around Mac’s waist. They stood there, until Jason suddenly twitched and stepped back.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t lean on you like this. Please don’t tell the Alpha.”
“Isn’t that what friends are for?” It was interesting, and mildly unsettling, that Jason still called his mate-to-be by his title. Mac was going to talk to Abel about this tonight. By this point in time, they should be comfortable talking about each other by first name, but Jason very obviously felt some major status difference between them. It was no way to start a mating.
“I’m trying to be a good omega for him.” And just like that, the happy young man from this morning, the one who’d laughed and dug in the soil and discussed several years’ worth of plans with Mac, was gone.
Yeah, Mac was going to have a talk with Abel.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sunday evening, Mac dropped over to the Alpha’s quarters. Top floor of the highest building in Mercy Hills, it was a software magnate’s perfect hideaway—wired for every possible purpose, with furniture so comfortable a wolf could spend hours slumped in it while they worked on a particularly difficult problem. Mac knew it was possible, because he’d seen Abel do it. The Alpha put in most of his day running the pack, and running the business. Coding was entertainment for him, and stress relief, and Mac knew exactly where to find him.
He used his personal security code on the elevator and rode it up the twelve floors that made up GoodDog Software’s home base. He turned right out of the elevator—left were the guest apartment, and meeting rooms where potential human customers might come. If they were brave and sufficiently money conscious to recognize that hiring the shifter company was more cost-effective and got them a better product than going with the next best competitor. Eighty-five cents on the dollar, Abel had explained to him once, was the going rate for shifter labor. It pissed him off royally, and Mac was expecting his mood would be no better tonight.
A quick knock, just in case Abel was doing something Mac shouldn’t see, and then he walked in. He found Abel right where he expected, sitting in a huge beanbag chair, while the projector in the ceiling shone on the wall, showing lines of what Mac called gibberish, and Abel called the future.
Mac pulled a chair over and straddled it, leaning his arms on the back. “How did it go?”
“We got the contract.”
“And?” There was always an ‘and’. Or a ‘but’.
“They tried to undercut us. Again.”
“What did you do?”
Abel shrugged, tapped two keys, then did something else that popped up a message on the screen. “Damn. What the fuck is wrong with this?” He put his keyboard aside and leaned back, the Styrofoam beads crinkling beneath him. “I told them that if they wanted to pay that much, they’d take what they got, and there’d be no support after, no matter how badly they broke it installing the thing. They caved.”
“Good. Come run with me.”
“It’s not full moon.”
“When did we ever need the moon?”
Abel glanced around the room, and Mac could almost hear him listing off all the things he should probably be working on.
“Just half an hour, get the cobwebs out of your brain,” Mac said in a cajoling tone. And I want to talk to you, and you’ll need to be in a good mood for this.
Abel stared at him for a moment, then grinned. “Fuck it all, why not? I’m already a century behind on everything, why not add another half hour? You know what, let’s make it a full hour. Might as well be shot for a sheep as a lamb, right?”
“That’s the spirit.”
They stripped and changed to their wolf forms, panting with glee as they pushed the elevator’s buttons, leaving all their human cares behind. They raced out the building, heading east, toward the small woods and the pond near where Mac had first found Jason.
Rabbit. Mac sniffed around where he’d smelled the animal, then yipped softly at Abel to come smell too. Abel jumped on him, knocking Mac to the side, and then they were off, the scent-trail of the rabbit only an excuse to run and jump and play puppy games with other. Play-fighting amongst the trees, then trying to pick up rabbit’s trail, losing it, finding it again, then deciding to have a bit of fun with the security team on duty that night.
Mac knew he shouldn’t have done it—it wasn’t responsible, or proper behavior for the head of security, but he justified it as training. It was easy to get slack when the walls were that high, and the computers did most of your work for you.
He and Abel split up, slinking along the outside walls of the building. Abel headed for the garbage cans outside the front door. Mac stationed himself right underneath the window of the room with the monitors and the control panel for the sensors and cameras, and waited.
Abel’s taking his time about this. All of a sudden, a horrendous racket broke the evening’s silence, the rattling clang of the garbage cans bouncing off the steps even louder than Mac had expected.
Shouts and the rattle and clash of chairs being knocked over as their occupants fled were Mac’s signal to pounce. He jumped up, huge front paws on the windowsill, and gibbered and howled at the shifters inside, making easily as much noise as Abel had. Then he took off at full speed for the cover of the trees. Abel was about ten yards ahead of him, his darker fur making him hard to see in the half-moonlight.
They hid just inside the edge of the woods, watching until the furor died down, then drifted away, back toward their other lives.
Upstairs in Abel’s apartment, they flopped on a stained, fur-covered rug in the corner of the room and slowly changed back to their human forms.
“Fuck, that was fun. Why don’t I do that more often?” Abel asked. He scratched at his beard and grinned. “Did you have that planned? Was that all the new guys?”
“Most of them. Not planned, no, but I saw the opportunity and thought we might as well go for it.” He chuckled. “You’re getting slow, sitting behind a desk all the time. Took you long enough just to knock over some garbage cans.”
“I took a shit on the step too, a good one, right in front of the door.”
Mac let out a laugh that still held more than a little of his wolf in it. “I wonder what they’d say if I told them it was their Alpha that did that? Can’t wait to hear the stories tomorrow night.”
Abel frowned at him, then his expression cleared. “Right. You’re going outside to pick up plants for the omega tomorrow day, aren’t you?”
“I am.” And here was his opportunity. “I wanted to talk to you about him.”
“Oh?” Abel stood up and headed around the corner to the kitchen.
Mac followed him. “Don’t you think you should be spending more time with him than you are?”
“I’m busy. You know that. I just don’t have the time.” Abel handed him a beer, one from the little start-up brewery a couple of shifters in their pack were running, and headed back into the living room.
“You’re getting mated,” Mac said, two steps behind him.
“Slow down, there. I never said I’d mate him.”
What? “Hold on, what do you mean? I saw the contract.”
“Yes.” Abel watched him for a moment, then shook his head. “You didn’t really read it, did you? Come on, it’s in my office somewhere.” He led them through a door in the corner of the living room, into the office he used as the head of both the pack and the software company. He rummaged in one of the drawers of the desk, his beer dripping condensation onto the wooden surface.
“Your staff is going to kill you for that,” Mac remarked, nodding at the ring of water forming around the bottom of the bottle.
“Fuck.”
Abel picked up the bottle and wiped at the surface with his forearm. “Don’t tell on me, okay?”
“Like they’d say anything to the Alpha.”
“You’d be surprised what they say to the Alpha. ‘It doesn’t suit your status. No, you can’t have simple. No, you can’t have affordable. You have to show the world blah, blah, blah.’” He turned around with a sheet of paper in his hand. “Here’s the contract we signed.”
Mac took it, but ignored it for a moment in favor of his friend. “You sorry you fought for the position?”
Abel waved him back into the apartment. “No. I don’t know. I just feel sometimes like I’m missing out on life, you know? I’ll be thirty in the fall. There’s got to be more to life than paperwork and fencing with the human authorities.” He flopped back down on the beanbag chair and began fiddling with his keyboard again.
Mac grabbed a cushion off the couch and tossed it on the floor beside him. He scanned the contract, coming to an abrupt halt at the section which read ‘mate within the Mercy Hills Pack’. You had this in mind the whole time, didn’t you? But why hadn’t Abel made this clear to everyone? Maybe he’d only just decided.
Mac still wasn’t sure Abel mating with Jason was a bad idea, and his friend had been so close-mouthed about the whole deal that Mac didn’t really know what was going on inside that head. Maybe a little push was in order… “Why not mate with the omega? He’s a good kid. He’s smart, and just listening to him, I think he’d be an asset to the pack. Put him in charge of the gardens.”
“I’ve thought about that. If we can keep him.”
“If you mate him—”
“I’m not planning on it. Except in an absolutely worst case scenario.”
Finally, an answer. Though it was an answer that pissed Mac off on Jason’s behalf. “What the fuck? If you’re not going to, then why are you stringing him along?”
“I didn’t plan to. Then I noticed how—reserved he was with me. And how much more relaxed he was with you.” He rolled over on the chair and pointed his beer bottle at Mac. “If I suddenly told him he’d be mating, say, you, what do you think would happen?”
Mating the Omega (MM Gay Shifter Mpreg Romance) (Mercy Hills Pack Book 1) Page 7
