Page 49 of The Omega's Secret Baby
I hadn’t managed to make my marriage work, and the only child I had was my illegitimate son no one even knew about yet. I wasn’t planning to keep Jake a secret forever, but I knew my mother wasn’t going to be jumping for joy when she heard of her newest grandchild. I’d wanted to come clean about all of this in the next couple of days. Now I wasn’t so sure whether that was a good idea, considering the state my mother was in.
Was my sister right and I was just being selfish by wanting things that had never been in the cards for me?
I didn’t know anymore. Maybe yes. Maybe not. It was so difficult to think clearly. I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling another migraine building in the front of my head.
I inhaled, exhaled, and wondered why the world couldn’t go back to being as simple as it had been when I was a teen. I’d known my place in life then—even if I hadn’t always loved it.
And then I’d met Eli. He’d made my life more complicated. But it wasn’t fair to say that without mentioning that he’d also made it a lot brighter. He’d made me dream in color where I’d only seen black and white before. But still, everything he’d made me want was just that.Dreams.
And yet, I would have given a lot to go back to that time. To dreaming.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was calling Eli.
He answered almost immediately, had probably been waiting for my call. “Hey, you. Is everything alright?”
No, no, it wasn’t, but hearing the soft cadence of his voice let me breathe a little easier. “He’s… passed,” I made myself say.
Eli was quiet for a moment, taking this in. “I’m sorry,” he said then, and I knew that he meant it, even though he hadn’t known my father. Eli was like that, feeling other people’s pain like his own. “Is there anything I can do?”
Was there? There was only one thing I could think of, and as soon as I’d thought it, the words had already left my mouth. “Could you stay the night with me? At the cabin, like we used to?” Didn’t even have to be the whole night.
Eli hesitated. Of course he did. He had a child to look after and a job to return to in the morning. This was an unreasonable request. “Matt… You know I’d love to, but… No, you know what? We’ll do that. I’m going to get Griff to watch Jake. He won’t mind. Not in this case, I’m sure.”
“Really? That would mean a lot to me.”
“Hey, I’m here for you, okay? I just need a little time to get things in order here. Say we’ll meet up at the cabin in two hours?”
“Thank you, Eli.”
He hung up after telling me not to worry about it. I put the phone back in my pocket, feeling a little bit lighter than I had before. Maybe it was only for a little while, but I couldn’t wait to escape from here and lose myself in the omega I loved more than anything in the world.
21
Matthew
Eli arrivedat the cabin a little later than me, but I didn’t mind, grateful that he’d come at all as I listened to the crunch of his shoes over the fallen snow outside. We were lucky the roads had been cleared.
I opened the door to let Eli inside and he brushed some snow out of his hair as he entered. “Oh good, you got a fire going,” he said.
I tried to smile at him, but it was hard to get my mouth to move in that position, as if something was weighing down the corners of my lips. “I want you to be comfortable.”
“Yeah?” He closed the door behind him and took off his boots. “I thought I was here to makeyoucomfortable.” That said, he took me by the arm and made me sit on the couch with him, as if he was the alpha and I the omega. That wasn’t typical behavior for him, but I didn’t mind, because Ineededsomeone else to be in charge for just a moment, and somehow, he seemed to sense that. Eli was amazing like that. He’d always had a feel for just the right words to say, just the right things to do to make me feel at ease. I didn’t know if that was an omega thing or an Eli thing. I suspected the latter, though, even if Eli himself would have insisted on it being the former. He gave himself too little credit.
“Thank you for being here with me,” I said.
“You don’t have to thank me,” he responded, draping an arm around my shoulders and kissing the side of my face. “We need to support each other if we’re going to be a couple. And if we’re going to be raising Jake together.”
Jake. Ugh. I groaned. We were going to tell him about me today, and I’d forgotten all about those plans.
“It’s okay,” Eli said, as if he could tell what was going through my mind. “We’ll talk to him some other time. It’s not your fault your father died today.”
I took a deep breath, because those words were still difficult to hear. As if the fact that my father had passed away became a little more true every time someone talked about it. “I know it’s not my fault, but I feel like… it shouldn’t bother me so much. And that thought alone is horrible, but we really weren’t that close. It’s like…” I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to find the words to describe what was going on inside of me. “It’s like I’m mourning what I didn’t have, a relationship thatcould have been, but that wasn’t. If that makes any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense.” Eli ran his fingers through my hair in a soothing way. I still had a headache, but his touch was doing wonders for that, the way it always did. “You’re regretting that you didn’t share a closer bond with your father. There’s nothing weird about that.”
“Maybe. Yeah.” I sighed. “He told me that alphas couldn’t raise kids, you know? That we don’t have the right instincts, and that’s why we need women. Or omegas, I guess.” I rested my head in my hands.
Eli stroked the hair in the nape of my neck in a way that made me shiver, even now. “You’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ve seen the way you are with Jake. You love that kid, and why wouldn’t you? He’s the best.”
