Page 2 of Duke's Baby Deal
Fan ran up to Mac and jumped on his back. “Ride?” he asked. Fan loved the pack’s Head of Security. Probably because, when Mac was off-duty and with family, he was a big goofball.
Mac laughed. “Only until Macy’s old enough to want on.”
Fan nodded in that old-man manner he sometimes had. “I’ll be too old then.” He scrambled up to sit on Mac’s shoulders, his legs dangling down on each side of Mac’s neck. It seemed like he was going to ride in human form today—quite often, he’d change into a wolf and stand on Mac’s back while the man did his push-ups. Duke made a note to remind Abel that, even though he wasn’t Alpha anymore, with all the potential for challenge that carried, he could still come out and work out with his friends.
Bram stormed up. “Fan! What did we talk about yesterday?”
“I’m not far,” Fan said, in a tone that told Duke he knew he’d been bad.
“We’ve talked about this,” Bram said and crouched beside him. His back was to Duke and Duke was caught between admiring Bram’s slim build, and wondering if Bram turning his back had been a deliberate slight.What the hell did I do this time?
Bram lowered his voice and said in a reasonable tone, “You have to stay with the daycare pack, because I can’t always leave them to make sure you’re all right.”
“But I’m with Mac,” he said reasonably. “He’s Pap’s friend.”
“He is, but you’re supposed to tell me. I’m responsible for you when Dabi and Pap aren’t around. Okay?”
“Okaaaay,” he said.
“I don’t mind watching him,” Mac said. “I’ll bring him back when we’re done.”
“You don’t have to.”
“It’s fine. Jason would call it good practice for me, so I don’t break Macy.”
“Like you would.” But Bram smiled at him before he stood up with a ‘don’t blow it’ nod for Fan and glanced around the group. Duke thought his eyes might have rested a moment extra when they hit Duke, but then he was gone again, running off to watch over the pups, trailing his own pack of alphas behind him. Duke suppressed a growl, something he didn’t even have to think about doing any more. He was old enough to know better and, well, if toying with Duke made Bram happy and got him the alpha he wanted, Duke could be content with that. He’d make himself be content with that.
Diego was running the workout today, his first time, and he called out the commands like he was in the army, though he was only just eighteen. Duke grinned and put all thoughts of Bram aside—or at least tried to. He kind of wished he had a pup to ride on his shoulders like Fan was riding Mac. He liked pups, and the extra weight was good for muscle development. Killing two birds with one stone, in a way.
From under his eyelids, he watched Bram coax all the pups down off the climbing bars to play Wolf Gets the Rabbit in the clear space beside them. Duke smiled and turned back to the grass beneath him. He had lots of good memories of playing Wolf Gets the Rabbit and all the other puppy games when he was small. A couple of scars, too, from slightlytooenthusiastic puppy games.
The push-ups ended, and he took one last wistful glance at Bram and the pups, then rolled over onto his back and laced his fingers behind his head. Diego began calling out the pace, and Duke closed his eyes and concentrated on the growing burn in his stomach muscles as crunches turned to rocking v’s, then to leg lifts, then back to crunches again to start the cycle over. Some of the younger ones, the ones who cut corners on the exercise or who had only just begun to work out with the Security team, began to complain and a few even stopped, flopping flat on the grass until they’d caught their breath. Duke grunted and worked harder in response, squinting ‘why are you lying around?’ looks at the malingerers. A few of them grumbled, but they started working again, and Duke went back to trying not to think about Bram. Maybe Mac was right. After all, they didn’t have to mate right away, just spend time together and get easier with each other. Sometimes he thought he intimidated Bram, but with Bram’s personality, it was hard to tell. Maybe he needed to dial back on the alpha a bit. Though that was tough, working Security. It kind of got to be a habit.
But yeah, that might be some of it.
Duke sighed and lay back on the grass after his last crunch to stare at the clouds. He was a stupid old man, even at only twenty-eight, to be looking for excuses like that. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Bram and wishing either Bram was older, or he was younger.
“Go on over and ask him,” Mac said lazily from beside him. He had Fan balanced on his feet, holding him up in the air while Fan giggled and squealed. “Don’t be a coward, Duke.”
“Right. Like he wants someone a decade older than him for a dance partner. And I’m just being realistic.”
Mac tried balancing Fan on one foot and had to catch the laughing pup as he fell off.
Duke snorted in appalled amusement. “No wonder Jason worries about you breaking Macy.”
“Naw, she bounces real good.” Mac lifted Fan up on top of his feet again. “You never know until you try. Look at me and Jason. And there’s nearly as many years between us.”
Man, how he wanted to. Just hearing Mac tell him to try was nearly enough to send him barreling across the grass to body slam the younger alphas out of the way. But Mac’s omega was exceptional, way older than his actual twenty years, and despite Mac trying to convince him that the eleven years between them didn’t mean anything, Duke was skeptical. Bram was…Bram. And Duke was himself. And as much as it drove him wild to watch Bram cozying up to the younger alphas, he knew in his heart that it was best for both of them.
“Seriously,” Mac said, refusing to take Duke’s silence for the wishful no that it was. “You can’t know until you ask him. And it’s just a dance.”
He could ask. What would it hurt? Above them, the clouds twisted and reformed, from islands, to turtles, to something unrecognizable. Felt kind of like him, if he thought about it. He’d been aware of Bram, like most of the pack were, on the periphery of his life ever since Bram had been born. After all, he was Mac’s cousin, and Mac had been both proud and worried and baffled when it had happened, which meant he’d talked a lot about this omega miracle. But sometime since Bram’s sixteenth spring, Duke had realized that his interest in Bram had changed its shape, kind of like the clouds had, and Bram wasn’t just Mac’s interestingly different little cousin now, but someone who was just…interesting. But what would a seventeen-year-old want with a man who’d turned twenty-eight?
“Well?” Mac said, as annoying as summertime mosquitoes. “The worst he can do is say no.”
True. But still… “He’s not even eighteen yet. Maybe in the spring.”
Mac made a sound of disgust, then carefully dropped Fan onto his feet and sent him back to the daycare pack. He sat up and tossed a handful of grass in Duke’s face. “You’re going to give the other guys a six month advantage?”
