Page 36 of Mating the Omega
I shook my head.
He pulled his chair next to me and sat down. “You having another mood swing? Plenty of hugs available over here if you need them.”
“I was just thinking about Montana Border.” I wouldn’t call it home. This was home, right here, this little house, with its pack-made furniture and a red-headed alpha male watching me with concern. “It’s okay. I just start thinking about how much better it is here, and I get a little scared.” I summoned up a smile and forced myself to pick up my fork. “I’m better now. All I have to do is look at you and I know it’ll be all right.” And, funnily enough, it did feel that way. My appetite returned, and I dug into my bacon. “This is sooo good.”
Mac kissed me on the ear, and went back to his own breakfast. “You wait until you see your surprise. This is nothing.”
With that to look forward to, I cleaned my plate in record time and had the dishes washed and dried in time for Mac to hand me his. He leaned against the counter, watching me, while he chewed on his last strip of bacon. “We should get a dishwasher.”
I laughed. “You have one.”
He grimaced. “You know I don’t think of you that way.”
I put his plate in the cupboard and gave the counter a final wipe with the dishtowel. “I know. I like looking after you. It’s an omega thing.” I hung the towel up to air dry and turned to find him studying me. “What?”
“You don’t mind being omega?”
Oh, so that was what was going on. “Is this about the waterworks earlier? That’s not how I normally am, though I realize you can’t know that, since I’ve pretty much been pregnant since we met.” He grinned at that thought, obviously remembering exactly how I’d gotten pregnant. I had to admit, I was pretty fond of those memories too. Maybe we could take a pass on the garden today… No. He had a surprise for me. “I like who I am. I just don’t like dealing with the way people think I am. Just like not all alpha are aggressive, selfish assholes.” I popped a kiss onto his lips and flirted at him with my eyelashes and the tiniest of smiles. Not that I was fantastic at it, but practice makes perfect, and I’ll admit I was jealous of the way Bram could flick an eyebrow and have alphas falling all over themselves.
It didn’t work, and I went back to being my boring self with a sigh. “We’d better get going. Who knows what kind of mischief Bram’s getting into. He’s probably lying around on beach chair working on his tan, while half-a-dozen alphas and betas screw up my garden on his behalf.” I started to walk past Mac to get my shoes on, but he caught my arm. My heart gave one hard thump, then remembered that this was Mac, not an alpha from my old pack. I looked up at him in confusion. “What’s up?”
“You don’t see me like that, do you?” He looked truly worried.
“No. You’ve never been like that. Even the night you caught me in the woods, I wasn’t scared. Not more than I usually was.” I stood on tiptoe and kissed him, longer this time. “I love you.” I don’t think I’d said before, which was stupid of me. He deserved to hear it.
“Yeah?” His mouth curled into a smile and he pulled me close, or as close as Little Mac would let him. “You’ve decided I’m worth it?”
“Oh, I knew that from the beginning. I just had stuff of my own to work through.” He hadn’t said it. What did I do? Had I—
He kissed me. “I love you too,” he whispered against my lips when the kiss ended. “Let’s go see your surprise.”
I didn’t care about the surprise anymore, but I wanted him to be happy. “I love surprises. Your surprises, anyway.” Little Mac punched me, and I looked down. “Yes, I know you like them too. That doesn’t mean you have to break anything in there.”
“If he’s that insistent, we’d better go.”
Mac insisted I go everywhere in the truck now, especially if I was going to be working in the garden. I didn’t argue so much—to be honest, I was starting to develop some aches and pains in my back and my hips that made me uncomfortable when I did too much exercise. So I enjoyed my ride over, pestering Mac with guesses about the surprise, and watching his delighted grin get wider and wider as my guesses wandered farther and farther afield.
We pulled up next to the new plot and I was pleased to see the long stretch of dark brown soil, freshly tilled, and the small pile of lettuce stems ready to compost. Bram was about two-thirds of the way down the fourth row, working away with the garden fork, bending occasionally to toss a rock to the side of the patch. I was only a little bit jealous of the sixteen-year-old, with his beautiful auburn hair and the way he was muscled just right. He didn’t have to work at it either. But he was a sweet kid, and his only real bad point was a tendency to flirt with every alpha that walked by. And they loved it, which didn’t help.
Bram waved as we got out and stuck the fork into the soil. “I got it done!” He jogged up to us. “Wow, you can really see the baby now!” I might have been offended by it, if it wasn’t for the hungry look in his eyes as he spoke. Like most omegas, he had a driving need to have children, and it made him overwhelmingly interested in my pregnancy. “Can I touch it?” We’d had some trouble teaching him he couldn’t just grab for my belly—again, as the only omega in the pack for years, he’d been a little spoiled.
I also envied him that experience.
“Sure. He’s a little sleepy right now. We just had breakfast.” I put his hand over the most likely place to feel something and gave Little Mac a small poke. A few seconds later, I felt the weird pressure as he shoved back with a foot or a hand or whatever, right under Bram’s fingers.
“Cool,” he breathed, his eyes alight.
I glanced up at Mac, who watched the two of us with contented possessiveness. And that was the other part of why I let Bram manhandle me as much as I did. Because it made Mac happy to see Bram so excited.
Bram waited intently for another kick, but Little Mac was sleepy and I could see a long list of things that still needed to be done before he got so big I became useless out here. “Let’s go see what you’ve gotten done,” I said, gently removing his hands from my belly. “He might be more awake later, after I’ve done some work.”
“Oh, Mac wants you to see his surprise first,” Bram said blithely. He kept sneaking peeks at my belly and I noticed him surreptitiously rubbing at his own, as if he was wondering what it felt like.Someday.I just hoped he’d be as happy as I was.
“Then let’s go look at it. I want to check the broccoli for worms.” I’d planned it for half of the plot to be stuff that produced all year long, like my tomatoes and my peas, and the other half would be things we could harvest quickly, then compost and put back into the soil again, like the lettuce and broccoli. Later, I’d mix complimentary crops together across the whole thing, but for this year I was taking it easy on myself.
Mac put his arm across my shoulders and led me down toward the other end of the garden. There was something there, that hadn’t been before. It was—
“Oh, you got chairs!” What did I need chairs out in a garden for?
