Page 38 of Legally Mated
“Yeah, it’s hard to let them out of your sight, isn’t it? Just want to wrap them up in cotton and keep them home, safe.” He glanced down at the baby, but for some reason, Laine didn’t think it was the baby he was talkingabout.
“It is,” Laine said finally, and pried his finger out of the baby’s mouth. “I’ll see youtonightthen.”
Holland nodded and looked back towardthebed.
On his way out of the room, Laine stopped by the nurse’s desk. “If his condition changes, I’d like to be called please.” He scribbled his cell phone number on the back of one of his business cards and handed it over, watching sharply as she realized just who and whathewas.
“Of course,” she said, and glanced up at him with an expression mixed between fear andresignation.
“Thank you,” he said, all friendly, with a wide grin like the baring of teeth,andleft.
Chapter30
Iwokeup gently the next time, my eyes drifting open like I’d just had a nap in the sun on a warm spring afternoon. The air smelled mostly of disinfectant, but the scent of two shifters wove through the assorted human smells. Above me, sunlight from the window on the other side of the curtain streaked the ceiling. I turned my head hoping for Laine, but he was gone. Instead, I found Holland, head bent over the baby busily nursing at hisbreast.
“Hi,” I croaked. It might have been a dry throat, but some of it for sure was uncertainty over how Holland would react to his prediction of disastercomingtrue.
He surprised me. As soon as he heard my voice, he looked up and smiled and while I wouldn’t have said it was with unadulterated approval, I didn’t seem to be in any immediatetrouble.
Holland shifted his weight and settled the baby with unconscious ease. “How are you feeling? Your morphine pump thing is just by your right hand if youwantit.”
“Thanks.” I felt around in the sheets until my fingers brushed against the cold plastic. “Found it.” I didn’t need it, though. Things ached, but I could stand it. And I wanted to know what had happened and what the pack would have to sayaboutit.
“I have something for you,” Holland said, bending carefully to rummage in his bag. He sat up, balancing the baby against his chest with the other hand, and held out a book with an old cloth cover. “You might as well start learning about your heritage,” he said, just as I realized what thebookwas.
He knew. The doctors had told him, or someone had seen something. I didn’t think Laine knew—surely he would have said something? But my eyes met Holland’s and then I held out my hand to take the book. “Thank you.” I looked down at it—there was no title on the cover and when I opened it, it was full of closely spaced handwriting in the old pack language. “I can’treadit.”
“Shit.” Pink rose in Holland’s cheeks and he bent to his bag again. “I gave you the wrong one.” He pulled another cloth bound book, this one just as battered, but obviously newer. “I told that idiot Bram it was a bad idea to translate them into identical journals. I knew I’d do something dumb ifwedid.”
I traded him back the old journal and accepted the new one. “You’renotmad?”
“That you hid it?” He grimaced and shook his head. “Maybe a little at first, but no. I know why, or can at least make an educated guess. And before you ask, Quin doesn’t know yet—I’m still trying to figure out how to break it to him without triggering the kind of protectionism I think would make you really unhappy, on top of the interference with your work.” Holland sat back and cuddled the baby. “I feel a little hurt that you didn’t trust us enough to tell us, and I know that’s not logicaleither.”
“I’m sorry. I should have told you, or Quin, when things started changing so much for the omegas at MercyHills.”
“After a lifetime of hiding it? That would have given me conniptions.” Holland reached down between himself and the baby and, with a soft popping noise, lifted him away from his chest and laid him over his shoulder. I caught a glimpse of reddened, swollen nipple and a trickle of milk still leaking from it, and had to suppress a shudder.Not for me. Never for me.I’d never wanted pups of my own, and once I was old enough to understand the implications of that fucking line on my belly, I knew that I would never have a mate, because I saw how the male omegas were treated right from a baby, and it horrified me. My parents had been right tohideit.
He caught me watching and raised his eyebrows. I shook my head. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. That’s a part of your heritage too, if youwantit.”
I shook my head again. “Not on your life.” I didn’t think his eyebrows could go higher, but they did. “I don’t want pups,” I explained. “Ilikebeing a lawyer,notbeing tied down, havingotherthings to do than clean up after someone else.” The old fear boiled up and the words shot out of my in a panic. “I don’t want to be an omega. I want to be me, Garrick the gammalawyer.”
He nodded and continued patting the baby’s back until he burped. “Read the book. Then read some of the others. Don’t make a decision on it yet, until you see what we once were.” Deftly, he laid the baby along his arm again, pointed in the opposite direction, and set him to nursing on the other side. “This,” he said suddenly, with a wave of his hand that seemed to take in the baby and everything that went before and after one, “I think this is a very small part of our purpose. I’ve only glanced through most of the books so I can’t do more than guess at the shape of an omega’s life before the enclosure, but it was bigger than what we have become.” He nodded to the book in my hand. “That one, in particular, is a good place to start.” He smiled suddenly, wistful. “My ancestor, and Bax’s. And maybe Jason’s too, or some sort of cousin. We’re still looking. But he was…an amazing man, from what I cangather.”
“I see,” I told him, though I really didn’t. And then the curtain rattled back and about a half-dozen humans in scrubs and white coats stood in the opening, and my opportunity to question Holland further had to be put on hold in favor of my owninterrogation.
Chapter31
Holland gaveme my phone before he left so I could catch up on messages. Not that I’d have many, but there would be a few and Quin might want to talk to me. He warned me that the police would want to hear my version of the story, and to call him if they came beforecurfew.
He also told me that Laine would be back to see me again this evening, which made my heart do strange things and gave me something to lookforwardto.
After he left, in the gap of time between his leaving and Bram’s promised arrival, I took the opportunity to nap. It was a strange sleep, and I wondered if the morphine had something to do with that. I dreamed of Laine shot, but I didn’t feel any fear or sorrow at it, and then the dream moved on to the next day and there was a wolf with me. Laine, somehow, in this form, and in my dream, I knew that he could be human again too, but for whatever reason, he refused to change back from the wolf shape. It frustrated me, though not badly in that weird way that dreams had, and then I wandered off into a courtroom where I found myself arguing that the word flavor was spelled withaV.
Sometime after that I woke up and side-eyed the morphine pump, wondering if I could do without it for awhile.
The doctors came around again, read my charts, and showed me off to the medical students or interns or whatever they were like I was a zoo exhibit, then moved on to do the exact same thing to the person in the next bed, so my initial irritation turned to embarrassment. I was just a case to them, and then the funny side of it hit me, but laughing hurt, so I had to make do with a smile and a deepbreath.
