Page 19 of Duke's Baby Deal
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 coulddosomething, 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.
