Page 45 of The Omega's Alpha
“I don’t think you’d ever make him despair.” Despite my smart remark, I folded the shirt neatly and hung it over my arm. “Anything else?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think so. We’re leaving all these blankets and stuff here. I’m claiming this, though.” He reached down behind an upturned bucket and pulled out a bottle. “Tada!”
I had to laugh. “Did you, former Alpha’s Mate, steal a bottle of alcohol from the humans?”
“They gave it to the pack. I just—saved my share for later.” He looked at the label. “Tequila. Wanna get together later and try it out?” He waggled the bottle at me and I laughed again.
“You’re going to be in so much trouble.”
Bax smiled, but what he said was, “I miss him. I want to go home.”
“Then let’s go.”
“Yeah.” But he stood there in the smelly, musty army tent and gazed around him with a worried expression. “I just keep thinking I’m forgetting to do something, or to tell someone something important.”
“We probably are. This wasn’t the most organized of trips.” I walked over and took the bottle from him. “I’ll wrap this up in the shirt to hide it and we’ll stuff it in my snack bag.”
“All right.” He glanced around the tent again and then we started our walk back.
The buses came into sight, and we paused to watch the bustle of movement around them. A dozen pups that were coming back to Mercy Hills with us played in the clearing to one side, kicking a ball around between them. Agatha was in the middle of the scrum, on the surface just like any other pup. Dorian stood to one side, his thumb in his mouth, watching the other pups with an anxious expression on his face. I wasn’t sure which one I was more worried about—the one that was obviously hurt, or the one who didn’t seem to be affected.
“You’re bringing them home with you?” Bax asked softly.
“They don’t have anyone. Parents ran away from home to mate—you know the story. Green Moon didn’t need extra orphans.” I wrapped my arms around my ribs. “I spent a lot of time with them while I was here. It seemed logical.”
“Logic has nothing to do with it, I imagine.” Bax put an arm around me.
“No, you’re right.” I sighed. “I can’t abandon them—wecan’t abandon them. But we haven’t talked to them about it yet, it’s too soon. Maybe by springtime.” By our mating. Quin and I had talked, a lot. About the Green Moon refugees, about us, about our mating, the pups. If the pups settled in, if their family’s families would give them up to us, we wanted to sign their adoption papers at the same time as we signed ours. No questions, no arguments there. Where we didn’t see eye-to-eye was on our own ceremony. “Do you really think it’s necessary to have a big ceremony, with all the Alphas invited?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is that what you’re planning?”
“It’s what Quin’s planning. I’m kind of…uncomfortable with the idea.”
Bax’s jaw worked and he frowned. “I can see where you’re coming from. I think, in your situation, I’d feel the same way. It’s hard, breaking tradition and trying to break a new trail. Exhausting. You can’t just react, because that’s old instinct and going with what you were always taught you were. You have to think about everything, and it gets to be a bit much sometimes.” He glanced across at me. “So I can see why you want to sneak through the underbrush for as long as possible before you break into the open.”
“I’m not a coward.” I wasn’t. But now that the first flush of excitement had receded, I wasn’t living in the moment any more, and the possible outcomes frightened me a little. Not so much for me, but for how hard it would make Quin’s job in the future if we waved our mating in the faces of the other packs.
“I never said you were.” But then he looked at me and I realized that Bax had broken a new trail himself, one that made this mating possible for me.
“You’re a real prick, you know that?”
He smiled and looked back toward the pups. “So Abel tells me sometimes when we’re not in public.” His arm tightened around my shoulders. “You can try to sneak it past them, but how long do you think it will take for the other packs to find out?”
Not long at all. And then my brain put together what Bax was trying to get at. “They’ll think we’re ashamed, that Quin is ashamed of me. It’ll make him weak in front of the other packs.”
Bax nodded. “It’s stupid. We shouldn’t be so tied to the past, but there it is.”
I sighed. “Shit.”
Bax snorted a laugh. “Just sucks to be omega, no matter how you look at it.”
I started to agree, until my gaze fell on Quin and Mac, and Quin looked up at me as he scooped Dorian off the ground. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s a few advantages.” I let go of my grip on my torso and patted his hand. “We better go. Looks like they’re loading the buses.”
We made our way over to the lineup waiting to get into the bus we’d be riding on. Bax said hello to Mac and Quin, then climbed the steps into the bus. I walked up to Quin, patted Dorian and Agatha on the head, then draped my arms around Quin’s neck. “Okay. You want a big, splashy ceremony, you got it. But it’s going to be my big, splashy ceremony, understand? Just don’t complain about the credit card bill when it arrives.” I kissed him, then plucked Dorian out of his arms and left my stunned Alpha almost-mate to follow me onto the bus.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Six hours on the road, and we were home. I was never so glad to see Mercy Hills in my life. We’d driven through, just like we had on the way to Green Moon, with only one stop to let the pups run and give the bathroom at the back of the vehicle a break.
