Chapter Fifteen
Nolan
“What are you doing?” I looked up from my tablet where I was tracking the progress of stock I’d recently bought a big block of. “Do you need help?”
“Me? No. Why do you ask?” Casey inquired, looking puzzled.
“Because your arms are filled with cushions and blankets and dish towels?”
“I like the cotton,” he said, heading for the stairs. “I think the sitting room area will be best.”
“For what?” I asked, still half caught up in the stock’s puzzling decline for the day.
“My nest.” He climbed up toward the loft. “And we don’t have nearly enough bolsters in this house. Why don’t we have more bolsters?”
“Bolsters?” That caught my attention. I was pretty sure we didn’t have any bolsters, whatever they were. Taking a second, I looked them up and learned we actually did, but I’d never called them that. I just thought of them as decorative pillows or backrests, depending on the style. Comforters, pillows, cotton towels…
And my mate was carrying high and firm, which seemed normal to me but had him kind of confused. I set my tablet down and followed him up the stairs. He was trying to drag the love seat away from the wall, and I jumped in to help. “Don’t hurt yourself. Not when you have a willing servant here. Isn’t that why you have an alpha to start with?”
He glanced up at me, his eyes glazed over with a singleness of purpose I hadn’t seen since he was in heat. But this wasn’t about sex. He wasn’t laying down all those things so we could make passionate love on them. He wasn’t dragging the furniture out of our upstairs sitting area to make an open space for kinky sex.
No. He was clearing a space for his nest. The one whose purpose didn’t seem to be sinking in for him. Could it be he didn’t know how this connected to what he carried? I hadn’t expected this to happen, since he carried wolf and dog genes, but those babies also had mine and somehow, they’d figured out how to make the kind of pre-birth experience they needed. Baby dragons. They had to be, although I wouldn’t say so unless my mate asked. I hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed not to be giving birth to wolf cubs or beagle puppies. But I really hoped he wouldn’t freak out at the idea of having to lay eggs.
Over the next few hours, I took up my job as finder of all soft materials in the house. This nest even had some clothing in it, soft sweaters from our put-away winter garments. My mate created his nest like he knew what it meant.
I was going to have to tell him. So, when he stopped, face glowing with perspiration, I took his hand and led him down the stairs.
“No,” he protested, trying to pull away. “I need to finish. Need to get it all done.”
“Come and sit down and we’ll talk.” He couldn’t be prepared for everything about to happen, although the midwife had been very helpful, and I wanted my mate to be sure to know I was here for him, no matter what happened.
“I still can’t get over the fact that I am carrying eggs. How is it even possible?”
“Do you want to go visit the midwife and ask more questions?”
“No. I don’t think so.” He sat on the sofa, and I joined him. “I just want you to know that whatever happens, I’m here to help you. I’ll help you build your nest, sit with the eggs in your nest, bring you anything you need. My job is to make yours easier.”
“It won’t be that hard, will it…at least once I get the eggs laid. I’m a little more than nervous about that.”
“I think more than hard, it will be absorbing. Like, you need to go on paternity leave from work soon, since the midwife says you’re close to laying.”
“I think I can work on my laptop while watching the eggs,” he said. “I mean, it’s not like after they hatch when I’ll have babies to feed and bathe and change diapers for. Then I for sure won’t have time to work.”
“I only know what I’ve heard from other dragons, but they say that the omega dads are very focused on those eggs. Now, you’re not a dragon, and maybe that will be different, but at least give your employer a heads-up that you may have do duck out early.”
“They are humans there, most of them. And all the big shots. I don’t think I can tell them that I’m going to lay eggs.”
“Try pregnancy complications.”
“Oh, that’s good. They really are, aren’t they?”
I went to the kitchen and brought him back some orange juice before continuing our conversation. The kind that was fortified with calcium. “All babies are complicated, aren’t they?”
We sat quietly together while he sipped his juice before I went to get my tablet and returned. “Want to see a secret site?”
His eyes sparkled. “Of course. Is it naughty?”
I chuckled. “It’s nests. A web page only for dragons where some of the omegas have put up their nests to show off. Dragons do love to show off.”
“If I had wings, I’d sure show off.”
“And if I was the cutest beagle ever, I’d do the same, but do you want to see the nests or not?”
“More than taking my next breath.”
I had thought it might make him feel calmer about building his nest, but instead, it became Pinterest for expectant egg layers. For the next several hours, Casey studied each nest and the notes made by the alpha and omega parents as well as comments by other dragons. We were almost extinct, but it seemed everyone who was alive was having hatchlings, and many were excited to show off their over-the-top nests to anyone willing to look. I nodded off sitting next to him, waking several times when he gasped or shouted at something he saw.
Finally, he shook my shoulder and woke me all the way. “Alpha, we have to go shopping.”
“Why? Are you hungry?”
“No, but I’ve redesigned my whole nest, and I need a lot more…”
“Bolsters?”
“Everything.”
That little town didn’t have all those things, of course, so we had to do an overnight to the city where we could visit big-box stores and other types of places that carried all the things on the new and improved nesting plan list.
I shouldn’t have shown him that site, but he was having such a wonderful time, I didn’t have the heart to complain. And when it was finally finished, we did a photo shoot and uploaded it to the web page. I thought ours, done in amethyst to match my wings and gold because it was magnificent, was the nicest one of all.