Page 10 of The Omega's Alpha
“I just have to put the pasta on. We can eat whenever you want.”
“Bax!” Abel called down the hallway. “Do you want to eat now or take the pups outside?”
“Noah’s hungry,” Bax called back. “And Taden’s not done yet. But I can feed them if you want to play ball with the older ones.”
“He can have a drink and a cracker,” Holland put in. “That will keep him happy until Taden is done. Should I make garlic bread?”
“Why not?” Abel said. He went to the refrigerator and extracted a jug of bright orange juice. “Noah, want some juice?” he shouted in the direction of the bedroom.
A few seconds later, the young shifter bounded down the hall and into the kitchen, leaping onto his Pap and wrapping his arms around Abel’s leg. He was almost two and a half now, Quin remembered, and the busiest critter Quin had ever seen—his and Abel’s youngest brother Cas included. “Juice!” Noah said, and grinned up at Abel.
“Juice it is.” Abel smiled down at him and walked over to the cupboard for a plastic tumbler, Noah hanging off his leg and giggling as he was carried along for a ride.
Quin noticed Holland watching the two of them, the fond expression mostly hiding the pain underneath it. He guessed that it was the lack of children, and he wondered what it would take to get Holland to talk about it. Abel and Bax knew what had happened—Holland had come to Mercy Hills before Quin had been made Alpha, so Abel had been the one who had heard his story and accepted him. Quin had never asked.
At first, it had been because he was too much of a mess in those months right after he’d come back from overseas. Then there’d been the political maneuvering with the other packs and his eventual rise to the Alpha’s station. And in the middle of it all, in a rush of need which had terrified him, there’d been that day where he’d casually touched Holland, the day Holland had pointed him in the direction of the on-line therapist, and he’d had to fight down the urge to lay the gorgeous omega down, right there on the kitchen table.
Luckily, he’d come to his senses and bolted before anything had happened; he wasn’t whole enough at the time to handle the consequences. Then later, when he was—less messy, he’d started to wonder if the other shifter’s response had truly only been his heat, or if there’d been something more than biology at work. But Holland had kept himself to himself and seemed wary of the interest of alphas, so Quin had pushed aside his attraction, even during those times he’d thought Holland had noticed him in turn. And he wondered what it was that had dropped Holland here, unmated and uninterested.
There was no mistaking Holland’s interest now. He wandered around the kitchen, but seemed to spend most of his time in some sort of Quin-centered orbit. A couple of times, while setting the kitchen table, he came close enough to brush against Quin’s arm, and his scent rose to Quin’s nostrils like opium.
Bax slipped into the room, using what Quin had dubbed ‘omega stealth mode’ one night about two months after he’d taken over as Alpha and he was still leaning pretty heavily on Abel. He’d made a joke about Abel’s mate’s ability to move about the house without being noticed and how he could have used him in the Marines, until Abel filled him in on why Bax moved like that and it became an awkward subject to joke about. Though Abel had taken to calling it stealth mode shortly afterward, and apparently Quin’s faux-pas was now an in-joke between the mated couple.
Abel held out his arms for Taden and sat at the table next to Quin. Bax raised his eyebrows at Noah, still wrapped around his Pap’s leg, but turned toward the cupboard and the loaf of bread sitting on the cutting board without comment. “I’ll make garlic bread,” he said lightly.
“None for me,” Holland told him. A look passed between the two of them, then Bax smiled and sliced enough off the loaf for everyone except Holland.
Why did Quin suddenly feel like prey?
And why did he like it?
Chapter Ten
My plan was working, as much of a plan as it was. Now that I’d stopped ignoring him with all my might—which, I might add, hadn’t been terribly successful anyway—I found myself constantly aware of him. How he smelled, how he looked, the stretch of cloth across his chest as he moved, teasing me with hints of the muscle beneath. I shivered as my body thrust an image of being pressed between that chest and any relatively solid surface, and I curled my toes painfully to distract myself. I wasn’t going to bite my lip, just in case I did get a chance to test out the romantic waters later.
Except for keeping up with puppy demands, the meal was uneventful. Conversation went in spits and starts, never anything serious or heavy, but small things, such as the letter Bax had gotten from his mother, still writing in longhand on sheets of paper to keep in touch with friends and family moved far away. Her side of the family was the one Bax and I were related on, my mother several years older and gone to the Moonlands just before my first heat came on me. I listened without even a twinge of homesickness as Bax recounted some mischief a few of our more distant cousins had gotten up to, and noticed that Quin listened intently to every word. It didn’t appear to be just politeness—there’s a certain stiffness to a person’s expression when they’re being polite, as if they’re letting the information bounce right off them. Quin looked like he was trying to understand Buffalo Gap, to fit it into what he already knew about it. And us.
Abel wasn’t wrong when he chose his successor. It made me sad that any play I made for him would have to be temporary. The more I watched him, the more I came to respect what he did and what he wanted to do. But I’d enjoy him while I had him—if I managed to get him—and then I’d try to be gracious when I faded into his past.
Quin stretched and looked down at his empty plate. “Thank you, Bax and Holland. It was delicious.”
“Thank Holland, really. It was his work.” Bax flicked a glance at Abel, who grinned wolfishly and reached over to lace his fingers through Bax’s hair.
“I don’t mind your cooking.”
“When I don’t burn it,” Bax said with dry humor.
Quin smiled vaguely, seeming lost in thought, but I used a foot to poke his knee under the table and said, “Earth to Quin, are you in there Quin?”
“Holland!” Bax scolded, but Quin waved him off.
“If we’d criticized our mother’s cooking—” He paused and grinned at Abel, who threw his hands in the air and pretended to be terrified. “Yeah. She didn’t take it well.”
“And then everyone got punished,” Abel added. “Because they had to eat our cooking.”
Bax snorted with laughter. “No wonder he avoids the kitchen.”
“You keep saying you can’t cook,” Abel complained. “I don’t see it. You’re as good as Mom ever was.”
