Second Chance: M/M Mpreg Alpha Male Romance

by Aiden Bates

  At the same time, this was family. This was him, starting a family. Maybe his parents had learned better in the past ten years. Maybe they'd outgrown their harmful traditions. Maybe they'd welcome a new addition to the family tree.

  Maybe it didn't matter, since they were still in Sandusky and he was here, with Ty.

  He had time to think about it, he supposed. They weren't telling anyone until they had the ultrasound and knew that everything was right with the pregnancy.

  Ty came home on Wednesday with a little key on a chain. "So, I know both of our places are too small to move in together, and we can't exactly break our leases. We're stuck until the beginning of May, if you even want to move in together."

  Ben clenched his jaw. "We're a family now, Ty. We might be doing things a little backwards, but we're still going to hit all of the steps. I promise. And we're going to live together, and raise our baby together."

  Ty nodded, eyes down. "I'm sorry. It's just… a baby isn't the only new thing to get used to, you know? I've spent the past ten years being told, knowing, that I'd never find an alpha because of what happened." He put a finger against Ben's mouth when Ben opened it to object. "Which doesn't mean what you did was the wrong thing. It's just the fallout, and it meant that I was still single when you came back into my life. So now I get to be with you, and I'm happy. Like I said before, it's just not like a switch, you know? I can say, 'Yes, I'm with Ben, and we're going to be together and we're going to raise our baby together and I'm going to belong with him forever.' But it's hard to make myself believe it, deep down, because of everything that other people told me for so long. I'll get there. Possibly with lots of cuddling and sex."

  Mollified, Ben laughed. "So the key is for…"

  "Well…" Ty bit his lip. "I figured we could do the next best thing, until we could find a two-bedroom. Maybe use one apartment as our sleeping space and one for eating and cooking and stuff like that."

  Ben laughed out loud and took the key in his hand. "That's a fantastic idea. We might not want to give up our leases, that way. It kind of gives us more square footage."

  "You might be right." Ty chuckled and kissed Ben, wrapping his arms around Ben's waist. He rested his head on Ben's chest. "Is it stupid to say that I've missed you all day?"

  "No, of course not. I've missed you too, and I don't have a flood of weird hormones in my veins to drive it." He held on closer to his mate. "I just love you. I love you, I love the baby, and I love that we're going to spend the rest of our lives together."

  "Hell yeah we are." Ty chuckled and led them both over to the couch. "So hey— there's an obstetrician that works with Gray House. He has lots of experience with omegas, and I've spoken with him about some of my clients and he's never been judgmental about them before. I gave his office a call today and he's taking new patients."

  Ben blinked. "That's great news, but is he good at what he does? Does he have privileges at any of the good hospitals? Is he going to be able to help you out if things get complicated?" He put his arm around Ty's shoulder. "I trust you, and I trust your judgment. I just worry, you know? You're my omega."

  Ty's breath caught in his throat. "Say that again."

  Ben drew his eyebrows together in confusion. "You're my omega?"

  "Yeah." Ty closed his eyes and pressed in close against Ben. "That sounds good. I like that."

  Ben gave a soft laugh and kissed the top of his omega's head. "I love you. Anyway. You're my omega, and it's my job to worry, you know? I just want to make sure you're safe and healthy."

  Ty beamed at him for a second. "I know it is. Dr. Sar is pretty amazing. He's got a fantastic track record with omegas, to include a few with some pretty severe complications. Not that there are any reasons to expect complications with me, I've been careful to keep myself as healthy as I could, but you know."

  "Okay." Ben carded his fingers through Ty's hair. He knew how much Ty loved that. "So what's the catch?"

  "They don't think it's useful to do a sonogram until the end of June." He looked up at Ben. "Can you wait that long to tell people?"

  "I can try," Ben said after a moment struggle. "I mean I'm not going to lie. It won't be easy, but we agreed that if people find out they find out and it's not the end of the world."

  Ty kissed him, with nothing chaste about it. "True." He grinned. "I have to admit it's hard not to talk about it, though."

  Ben laughed. "At least we're in the same boat there!"

  Chapter Seven

  Ty and Ben had agreed not to tell anyone about the baby, who Ty had taken to calling Bean because according to all of the less bizarre baby websites he'd checked out that was more or less what the baby looked like right now. Not talking about Bean to people not involved with making Bean was easy when it was just the two of them wrapped around each other in Ben's big, comfy bed. It was less easy when he was signing for a delivery of pretty peach-colored roses at work and no one knew why but him.

  Penny kind of knew why. She understood that Ty and Ben had gotten even closer over the past month. She had no idea that Ty was pregnant but she understood that he was happy. She could see the way that he all but floated in to work. She could see the flowers, see Ty's face when he got texts from Ben in the middle of the day. The one thing that she couldn't see was any physical evidence of a claim, like a bite or scar, and she didn't like the lack of those things one bit.

  "Come on, Ty," she said, flopping down into the chair by his desk during a quiet moment. "You're practically glowing. It's not like you to get this into a guy. What's really going on, hm? When's Mr. Ben going to claim your perky ass?"

  Ty blushed. "I don't know. Sometime in February, maybe? March?"

  Penny dropped the pen she'd been holding. "What in the world could you want to hold off for that long for? You can't be waiting to get younger!"

  Ty laughed. If only he could tell her! "Don't be absurd. But you know, there are complications. Old stuff. New stuff, family stuff. I mean he does still have a family. He's going to want to deal with them at some point, right?" They hadn't talked about Ben's family, or how to deal with them. It was up to Ben, of course, but Ty was fine if Ben never wanted to reach out to his family at all. While Ty's own family weren't part of the equation and never would be, Ben's was more of a variable and that made him a little uneasy. Still, he trusted Ben. "We don't want to rush things, and we don't need to rush things. We love each other. That's enough for us. We don't need to step over the line and seal ourselves to one another forever to commit to each other, you know?"

  "I guess. I thought that was natural, though?" Penny turned round, doubtful eyes onto Ty.

  He squirmed. Penny was his best friend, and he desperately wanted to confide in her. He wanted to get past the recriminations so that she could gush with him about baby things. Ben was great, and he was getting even more excited for Bean than Ty was, but he wasn't all that into stuffed things and baby clothes. "Lots of things are natural that we don't do anymore, Penny," he reminded her in a prim tone. "I read a book that suggested that the English court during the Restoration used to relieve themselves in the corner of the room."

  "Gross!"

  "Right? We don't need to give in to our bodies' more basic instincts every time, you know?" He stuck his tongue out at her, even as he hated himself for the evasion.

  "I guess that makes sense." She wrinkled her nose at him. "Weirdo. Why do you even know the personal lives of English people during the Restoration, anyway?"

  "Read it in a book once. I'm not always picky about my reading material. At least I wasn't before grad school." His eyes fell onto his flowers again. "Hey, did things ever work out with you and Sue?"

  "Um, yeah, for a little while. We split up a couple of weeks ago. Obviously it didn't make a huge impression on me, because I didn't even think about telling you." She rolled her eyes. "The passion just wasn't there. It certainly wasn't there enough for pretty bouquets of roses to show up at the office once a week." She laughed and waved a finger at him. "Y
ou need to tell Mr. Ben that he's setting an impossibly high standard for other spouses and SOs. I got a complaint from Ginny's husband last night, just so you know. An actual complaint."

  Ty rubbed at his temples. "Seriously?"

  "Yup. Said your new man was 'setting unrealistic expectations and that the two of them need to keep things private where no one else can see them.' That's a quote."

  "I guessed as much, from the way you suddenly changed your voice for the rabid walrus sound effect. What an ass. Why is she with him?" Ty picked up the contents of his in box and sighed.

  "Untold charms," Penny said, returning to her seat.

  They got through the next two hours, plugging diligently away until the first kids arrived from school. They probably didn't have more than a week left of classes, so they'd probably be sitting through their finals now. That would explain the haggard, worried faces and the snappish tempers as clients found seats and pulled out their school bags.

  Ty would have preferred to stay at his desk and maybe take a nap, but he couldn't do that. These kids were his responsibility. Besides, none of them had anyone else who could help them, even the ones who had someplace else to go at night. People like Penny and Ty had helped Ty when he'd been as young as those kids, and they'd helped him right into a full ride to college. It was his turn to help these kids.

  He moved among the kids, sitting down to help with a paper here or extra math problems there. Getting a little tutoring in seemed to help calm some of the kids down. Once they felt more confident and more in control of their own outcomes, they didn't feel the pressing need to lash out. That gave Ty a moment to talk about study skills and the importance of both sleep and taking breaks during study time, something that all of the clients seemed to get some good out of.

  By four, everyone had settled down for a while. That was when Ty's phone rang. "Gray House, Adolescent Services," he answered, keeping an eye on the kids.

  "There's a bomb in your building."

  Ty sat down. His veins felt like ice. "Excuse me?" He waved to Penny to get her attention. When she finally came running over, he scrawled a note to her on a sticky pad and let her know what was happening. "Can you repeat that?"

  "I said there's a bomb in your building. At Gray House. A bomb has been hidden in your building."

  Crap. They'd had training for this, they'd gone through some kind of protocol, but there was a world of difference between hearing some cop get up in front of a room full of people and talk about something and actually having some deep, rough voice on the other end of the phone talk about bombs in your workplace. "Okay. Okay," he said again, trying to compose his thoughts as Penny scurried to her desk and picked up her own phone. "Where is the bomb?"

  The man on the other end of the line scoffed. "Ain't telling you that, buddy. Anyway, I didn't put it there, so I couldn't say. But I do know that there's a bomb in your building."

  Ty saw Penny speaking into her phone. Her hand was cupped around the mouthpiece, trying to give herself as much privacy as she could. "So the bomber just, what, told you to call? Or you're doing it on your own?"

  "The first one. Don't ask me why he'd want to bomb your building and tell you about it; I don't ask him why he does things. Not my place."

  "He probably didn't tell you why he decided to bomb Gray House then, either." Ty tried to keep his voice down too, but he wrote down every detail that he could as he spoke.

  "Nope." The stranger placed extra emphasis on the "p" sound, like a big wet pop.

  "Do you know if it's on a timer or a trigger?" Panic welled up in Ty's chest.

  "Not sure, buddy. I didn't see him make it. I don't even know if he's the one that did make it, you know? He just showed me to a phone, told me to call your number and said to let you know that there's a bomb in the building."

  Ty frowned. "My number, as in my direct line?"

  "That's the one. Look, I don't know how much time you have. You might want to get all those kiddos out before things get ugly, you know?" The voice on the other end hung up.

  Ty stuffed his notes into his pocket and carefully shut down his laptop. "Okay, kids," he said in a loud, calm voice that didn't shake at all. "We're going to go hang out outside for a little while."

  Most of the kids packed up their things. A few groaned. "Can't we just hang out in here?" whined Andrew. "It's hot out there and it makes my hair frizzy."

  Stuart rolled his eyes and gave Andrew a little shove. "Suck it up, buttercup. Your hair will get over it." He took Ty's laptop bag. "I'll carry that," he said in a quiet voice.

  Ty let him. He had other things to worry about.

  It took four minutes for the police to arrive. The first officers on the scene went from department to department, calmly and quietly evacuating the different sections of the old building. Ty watched it happen as the bomb squad vehicles rolled in.

  The bomb squad men swept the building, checking the client rooms and the bathrooms and even the air ducts for any sign of a bomb. They found two boxes without labels, which they detonated in controlled explosions in the parking lot. The boxes turned out to be filled with glitter and compressed air.

  "A hoax," said the squad leader, with a grim set to his jaw.

  "Not one by us, sir. The record will show that the call came in from an outside line." Ty's hackles had already risen at the suggestion of wrongdoing.

  The leader held up his hands. "Trust me, buddy. We see this all the time. Maybe there's a conference room where you and I could talk about what you saw?"

  Derek Wing, the agency director, joined them. "We can all talk in my office." He put a hand on Ty's shoulder. "I'm not leaving him alone for this."

  The bomb squad man shrugged. "Not a problem."

  They made their way back into the building and up to Wing's office. The bomb squad leader introduced himself as Sgt. Smith. "Like I said before, we see hoax bomb threats all the time. One time we even got a bomb threat that was called in to the wrong number by mistake. That one was a pain in my ass, let me tell you. I'm not accusing you of making the hoax. I'm saying that someone did a hoax bomb threat on you or your agency. The call came in not to the agency line, but to Mr. Ostry's direct line. That's a big clue right there Do you have anyone with a personal grudge against you?"

  Ty sighed and hung his head. Damn Hartmann, anyway. "Yes. And it's also a grudge against the organization." He looked at Wing. "There's a developer who's been trying to get the city to take Gray House by eminent domain for years. He's expressed interest, vehement interest, in a man that I'm seeing." He swallowed. "He didn't take rejection well, not on either count. My boyfriend's union has had to threaten action against the developer to deal with the harassment there and he's been harassing the Gray House kids on their way to and from Gray House."

  Wing cleared his throat. "The rats, Ty?"

  "Rats?" Smith paused, pencil in the air.

  "Yeah." He told Smith the story about the decapitated rats and why that was significant. "I filed a complaint with police, but they couldn't prove that this guy was behind it. They basically told us that we were on our own, especially because the motive was unclear. His lawsuit is technically against the city, not us."

  "Technically." Smith snorted. "Does a lot of good, I'm sure. Anyway. What can you tell me about the phone call?"

  Ty pulled his notes out of his pocket and recounted his conversation with the caller. "For all I know it could have been some guy that he pulled in off the street."

  "No, I don't think so." Smith shook his head. "The caller had some kind of relationship with the hoaxer. He talked about how it wasn't his place to ask about things, he 'doesn't' ask why the guy does things. Not didn't, but doesn't. It's an ongoing relationship. He knows our boy, and that's the important thing here. The thing is, even making a hoax bomb still counts as terrorism." Smith grinned, showing all of his teeth like a shark. "That's something people forget. When we nail this guy, and we will, he's going to go away for a good long time. Do you know who would have done
this?"

  Ty sighed. "It will have been Richard Hartmann's idea," he said. "But he wouldn’t have been the one who placed the fake bomb. We've got a restraining order; someone would have noticed him in here."

  "Don't worry about that right now. We'll figure that out. Right now, you just tell me everything you can about the caller. Did he sound familiar?"

  "No." Ty ran his tongue ring against the back of his teeth for a moment. "No. He didn't sound at all familiar. His voice was deep and had a little rasp in it, like a smoker. I could hear something in the background, like a printer."

  "So our boy was in some kind of office, probably." Smith nodded. "Did he have any kind of accent?"

  Ty scratched his chin. "Northern, maybe? Like Chicago?"