Page 47 of Lone Wolf
And now we were having a housewarming party, which was absolutely required, according to Oscar. Damian had shot him a suspicious look but hadn’t said anything, which had left me wondering if this was an elaborate prank of Oscar’s. But since Damian hadn’t argued about it, and he’d lived in as a human for much longer than I had, I’d gone ahead with plans for an afternoon barbecue with people from Damian’s work and some of the neighbors we’d met over the past month.
The doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” Damian said, kissing me on the way by.
“Damn,” I muttered and slammed the dishwasher shut. I was pretty sure I had everything I needed out already, anyway, but I’d wanted it empty so we could just put dirty things straight into it.
“Just us,” Oscar called from the front door.
Damian strolled back into the kitchen, a cloth shopping bag swinging heavily from his fingers. “He brought the girlfriend of the week,” he whispered to me as he set it on the counter. Then, louder, “How much do I owe you?”
“My gift,” Oscar drawled, his arm draped over the shoulder of a tall blond woman in a sundress and sandals. Her jewelry was expensive-looking, so maybe he was hunting in more exclusive territory this time. “This is Sandra. She’s an actuary.”
I stared at him blankly.
“I deal with risk management for insurance companies,” she put in smoothly. “Lots of paper shuffling. You have a lovely house. It’s very comfortable.”
“Thank you,” I said with real gratitude. I thought it was comfortable and Damian could be comfortable on a bed of nails, so he was no help. It was nice to have someone who didn’t know me say that I’d managed to pull it off. “Would you like a drink? We have wine or beer, or there’s tea and coffee up here.” I opened a cupboard to show her all the nifty little pods I’d bought.
Her eyebrows went up as she surveyed the boxes piled neatly on the shelf. Okay, I’d maybe gone a little overboard. Damian had given me this machine that made one mug of tea or coffee at a time and I’d been so excited by it that I’d ended up filling the cupboard from bottom to top.
Being a good mate, or at least a wise one, Damian hadn’t said a word.
Noises trickled out of the baby monitor on the kitchen counter. Damian nodded toward the bedrooms. “Do you want to go get him? Oscar and I are going to put the steaks on.”
“Get Sandra something to drink too, would you?” I stole a quick kiss and patted Sandra’s arm. “Damian will look after you. I need to get the baby up before he gets mad.”
In the end, I had gone with a traditional omega-style name for him, but it suited him. Asher meant happy, and he was the happiest little boy I’d ever met. “Hey, look who’s awake,” I cooed at him as I got him out of his crib. “Oh, and look who peed all the way through his diaper. Again.” He was a firehose, our son. But an adorable one. “Let’s get you cleaned up and we’ll go meet everyone, okay?”
By the time I’d washed him, put a new diaper on him and put him in his party outfit—a dinosaur sleeper in bright green, with little fake claws on the feet—most everyone else had arrived. Damian had left Oscar in charge of the barbecue while he showed people around the house and I had to hunt to find him in the crowd so he could show off the baby too.
More neighbors dropped in over the course of the afternoon and even one or two of Damian’s coworkers, though I still found it hard to forgive them for what they’d put him through that night in the desert. I knew they’d thought it was necessary, that they’d just been following orders, but well—I might piss on Oscar now if he was on fire, but none of the rest of them had earned that kind of clemency from me.
Near the end, after we’d all eaten and drunk our fill and I was sitting in the back yard with the baby asleep on my shoulder, Sandra came to take the seat beside me.
“He’s out like a light,” she said, nodding at Asher.
“We’re not usually this social,” I told her. “I think all the people wore him out.”
She nodded and sipped at her wine. “Damian says you’re going to stay home with the baby for a while?”
I nodded. “He makes enough money, and I like the idea that when he comes home, he doesn’t need to worry about anything around here, because I’ll have the time to get it done. And with him traveling so much, work might be hard to schedule.”
She gazed across the yard to where the alphas—sorry, the men—were playing some crazy no rules game with a football and what looked to me the determination to kill each other. “You should consider going back to school at some point though. Damian says you have a lot of math and economics in your background?”
“Just high school.” Right now, I thought I could stay home with the pups forever, but I knew that I might change my mind in the future. Or that things might happen that would force my hand. “I’m not really ready to settle into anything yet. Except him.” I rubbed Asher’s back and listened to him breathe.
“Well, when you start thinking about it, you might want to consider risk management.” She got to her feet and played briefly with Asher’s fingers. “The Agency can always use more people like us. It pays well, and it’s a nice, safe, secure office job. Very useful when you have a pup to think about.” Then she drifted away, leaving me open-mouthed and frozen in place.
Was I being recruited? I caught Oscar’s eye and he winked knowingly at me.You prick.
But then I saw Damian tackle him, hard, and I could relax. I wasn’t alone here, I had someone I could depend on to keep me safe.
But who would keep him safe?
Asher yawned against my shoulder and started to wake up, so I filed Sandra’s words away to think about later. And to talk with my mate about, so we could decide together what this meant, and what we wanted to do about it.
Because we were shifters and mates, and that meant that we were in this together, in a way that humans could never understand. Our own little pack of three.
After everyone had left, I sat Damian down and told him what Sandra had said. I wanted to know what he thought our risks were.
