Page 55 of Duke's Baby Deal
I was still bored. “I could dry them, you know.”
He stopped dead and turned to give me what I’d started calling ‘the Look’. “You set one foot off that couch except to go to the bathroom, and I’ve got a big bottle of wood glue in my shop that will fix that.”
The big meanie. I was about to complain some more, to see if I could get him to let the dishes soak and come back over here, when there was a knock on the door. Company!
Duke set aside the frying pan he was washing—boy, I hoped that was the last dish and not one of the first ones—and went to open the door. “Hi, come on in. He’s out on the couch. Let me grab the chairs.”
Bax and Abel walked across the little apartment and greeted me. Bax was, as Duke had predicted, carrying Taden, and Abel held Noah. Bax took the chair that Duke pointed him too, but Abel crouched down in front of the couch. In his free hand, he held a couple of heavy cloth bags.
“The rest of the pups are back with Holland,” Abel said. He put Noah on the floor and emptied out the smaller of the two bags, dumping a dozen small wooden blocks on the floor before taking a seat.
Noah squealed and grabbed for the blocks.
“Duke’s present for Taden’s birth, but Noah seems to be getting more use out of them,” Abel commented, reaching up to accept a mug of tea from Duke.
“The present was for you guys. You needed something to distract him.” Duke handed another mug to Bax with a “Sorry, I don’t have coffee.”
“That’s fine. I like tea too.” Bax smiled and sipped from his mug, Taden held securely on one knee with his other hand.
I watched the two pups hungrily, while mine punched and fought inside me, as if they knew that someone else was getting the attention that was rightfully theirs.
“When do you go for the next ultrasound?” Bax asked.
“Next week.” I was excited and nervous and apprehensive. Did I want boys, or girls, or what?
“It would be nice to have one of those machines here,” Bax mused. “Don’t you think, Abel?”
“I liked the surprise,” he said, and leaned over to kiss Bax on the cheek.
Bax laughed and bounced Taden on his knee. “Speaking of surprises, show Bram his.” His eyes were bright with excitement and, if I read him right, relief too. What was it that they had brought?
I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Abel opened the other bag he’d brought and reached inside to pull out…a laptop! He passed it over to me, then dug inside the bag again. “Bax really doesn’t have time anymore to work on this, and he thought this would be a way for you to keep earning pack credits, even when you’re on bed rest.” He handed me a small, rectangular device, with a tiny grayish window on the front. “On here, and on the USB drives in the bag, are the interviews that Garrick did with the old ones in the pack. There’s a binder in the bag too, with things he copied at the university, and a book that was written by a human about our history.” He showed me how to turn on the recorder, and I jumped at the voices coming out of it.
“Oh, wow,” I said, and even I could hear the wonder in my voice. “This is so cool. Why didn’t you use a phone, though?” I’d recorded things on my phone before.
“I didn’t want the information stuck on one person’s phone, or a bunch of people.”
I turned the recorder off, but kept a careful grip on it. “What do you want me to do?”
Bax leaned forward. “I was transcribing all the interviews, and making notes of any stories about True Omegas, and looking for links between them.” His voice was earnest, and when I looked up, I could see how important this was to him. He licked his lips, as if he were nervous. “I—we—need to know what Jason and I are, what it means. Why people think we’re so important. What we can do, and what wehaveto do to keep ourselves safe.”
Oh. “Wow, uh, okay. You sure I’m the person you want doing this?” I found it hard to believe that even another omega would put that much trust in me.
It wasn’t Bax that answered, though, but Abel. “Don’t forget, Bram. I’ve seen your school marks. I know you can do this and find the connections we need found.” He reached out a hand, and it took me a moment to realize he wanted to shake mine. “Deal?” he asked.
“Deal,” I said in a stunned voice and shook his hand, like I was an alpha or something. I had a job again. Not only that, but it was an important job. Abel wouldn’t give this to someone who would screw it up, because both Bax and Jason and—possibly—Taden depended on the information I would find.
Oh my.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
One week later, and we were on the road again. I was in the back, stretched out as horizontally as I could be with the seatbelt on. Duke was driving and Abel was in the passenger seat. I had my earbuds in and was listening to more of the taped interviews while the alphas talked business or whatever it was that entertained alphas. Well, I knew what entertained Duke, but I couldn’t jump him in the van with Abel here, and it wouldn’t be nice to tease him.
Besides, I was feeling kind of icky, between the never-ending nausea and being in the van and with the pups gaining weight like they were going for a world record. I honestly kind of wanted to be left alone to mope a little, though the thought of finding out if we were having girls or boys lightened my mood a bit. And Duke was going through one of his ‘we really shouldn’t, because you aren’t getting anything out of it and besides it might hurt the babies’ spells, even though I thoughtIwas getting something out of our marital sessions, and just thinking about that pissed me off, so I went back to listening to the old ones talk.
This one was really interesting.
Well, no one in my immediate family was omega, but I had a second cousin in Green Moon who turned out that way, a girl, so we didn’t know until she was in her teens, although everyone said they’d always known, because she was so good with the pups and she had a real knack for taking a piece of beef that should have been turned into a shoe and making something edible out of it. But she was sweet, and no one ever wanted to cross her, because you’d feel like a piece of raccoon shit for days until you’d fixed whatever you’d done wrong. But if you ever wanted something to run perfectly, she was the girl you came to first. Especially matings, because nothing ever went wrong when she was in charge, and so people came to her all the time, until she had to start saying no, because her eighth baby near killed her and she was never the same after. Her pups did well, though. Strong and healthy, and they never had the unlucky accidents that happened to other pups.
