Chapter 24 Ben #2
“I don’t,” I said, and then blushed when I immediately yawned widely. Everyone chuckled.
“Ben’s expecting,” Angus said proudly.
Gail smiled. She looked to be around Laura’s age, her ebony skin creased at the corners of her eyes and laugh lines beginning to develop around her mouth.
She wore her dark-brown hair in elaborate braids wrapped around her head, and a pair of colorful beaded earrings hung from her ears.
Over a white t-shirt, she wore a pair of bright cotton overalls the same color of orangey-red as her lipstick and the Crocs on her feet.
She regarded us with frank brown eyes from behind turquoise glasses with square frames.
“And he’s your mate?” she asked.
“Mate and husband, and so is Colt.” Angus gestured to Colt as he stood up from where he’d been sitting on the couch.
“Oh, my. A polyamorous mating. How interesting.”
“You sound like Laura,” Colt said, smiling. “So, you’ll probably be interested to know Angus and I are both alphas.”
“I thought so! That’s very unusual,” Gail said. “I’m in the process of getting my doctorate, and my dissertation is on biological character classification. I would be grateful if I could interview you three sometime in the next couple of months.”
“I suppose we could do that,” Angus said, after looking at me and Colt to make sure it was okay with us.
It had been so exciting to meet the omegas, but once inside Colt’s car, I gave in to sleep before we could even get home. I woke up when Colt picked me up out of the back seat and started carrying me to the house.
“I can walk,” I said, surprised at how out-of-it I sounded.
“I like to carry you,” Colt replied.
Next thing I knew, I was on our soft be,d and my alphas were stripping off my clothes and tucking me in.
“Come to bed with me,” I murmured.
“We will directly,” Angus said
I sighed. “What does that even mean?”
The last thing I heard before I drifted off was Angus chuckling softly.
***
David and I wanted to spend time with the omegas. Not just wanted, we needed to spend time with them. We couldn’t explain it; we just had to be with them. Both of us felt out of sorts when we left them the day before, and the feeling continued into the next morning.
“It’s an omega bonding thing, I think,” Laura said when Angus called and told her about it.
He had her on speaker phone while he was driving the all-terrain vehicle around the ranch with me in the passenger seat.
When he stopped at the hog pen, I hopped out to pour slop into their trough and stood a moment watching them nudge at each other to get their faces in the mess.
“How long will it last?” Angus asked as I climbed back into the ATV and he continued on our route.
“I feel confident that once they’ve gotten to know one another well, it will settle,” she said.
We passed David talking to the hens as he cleaned their coop and drove on to the cow enclosure. Again, I got out and jogged to the gate to open it and let them into fresh pasture, patting a few of them as they passed me. When I got back to the vehicle, Angus had hung up with Laura.
“Are you mad that I want to spend time with the omegas?” I asked him when we were underway again.
“Of course not,” Angus scoffed. “It’s more that I’m afraid you’ll get anxious without me or Colt with you.”
“Maybe I won’t this time. David got over it for the most part.”
“You know as well as I do it’s because you’re pregnant and newly mated, so you won’t be getting over it anytime soon.”
“I think I can do it,” I said stubbornly. I was desperate to go see them, although I didn’t know why. I felt sure that if I became riddled with anxiety, the others could take my mind off it. “Anyway, Laura is there.”
“What’s she got to do with anything? She’s not your alpha,” Angus grumbled.
“Are you jealous of her, too?” I teased. “I meant she could drive me back here if I need to come home.” Leaning toward him, I puckered my lips.
Angus looked at me. “What?”
“I want a kiss.” I made exaggerated smooching noises.
Sighing, Angus stopped the ATV and kissed me. The soft warmth of his mouth on mine felt so nice, I couldn’t pull away for a long time. When I finally did, Angus looked at me with a sly smile.
“Keep this up, and I’ll take you behind the barn and have you over a hay bale.”
That got me uncomfortably wet, and when Angus scented my tang, he took another kiss, biting my bottom lip before pulling away.
“Fine. You and David go see your omega friends, but if it’s too much, call me to pick you up. I won’t say I told you so.”
Grinning, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket.
“Who’re you calling?” Angus asked.
“I’m texting Trey to get Bertram to take him over there. He wants to meet the omegas, too.”
An hour and a half later, David and I were helping our new friends finish their chores. Trey arrived, and Bertram took the baby inside to visit with Nova. Ollie was asleep in the house in the new nursery.
Elliott came running from the house after delivering the eggs from the coop to the kitchen, and Ren and Riku took their full baskets of freshly picked vegetables to the back porch.
Then Keane spread out a blanket on the grass, and we all sat down.
It was weird; they were strangers, yet I felt like I’d known these guys my whole life.
I was a little restless without Angus or Colt nearby but being in a group of individuals just like myself was so unusual, I didn’t dwell on it.
Even in the omega halfway house I stayed at after leaving Gleesa’s, there had been only three other omegas there.
They were all several years younger than I was, and although I felt sort of a brotherly affection for them, it was not like I felt with this group.
Knowing that their families had been killed by the kidnappers, David and I had agreed to skirt any topics that might take them there.
“Are omegas really that rare?” I asked after our idle chatter ended.
Keane shrugged. “No way. That would mean the information we’ve been fed is the truth, and it isn’t.”
“What do you mean?” Trey asked around a piece of hay in his mouth. He looked so much like a born-and-bred farm boy, I couldn’t help but smile.
Zeke said, “The government lies. Surely you know that. They’re all a bunch of betas out for themselves.”
“What about the alphas?” David asked. “Our president is an alpha. Trey’s dad’s a senator and an alpha.”
“The alphas don’t have a clue,” Zeke said.
Trey, David, and I exchanged glances. We’d heard Jackson’s parents say as much, and Laura, but hearing it from other omegas was different somehow.
“Do all of you believe that?” David asked, looking at each omega in the group. They all nodded.
“Tell us everything you know,” Trey surprised me by saying. He was usually pretty quiet when we talked about this stuff—at least, he had been ever since that night we told him about the SOS and asked about his father. Had he been mulling it over in his mind?
Keane considered. “How do we know you aren’t a spy?”
“A spy?” Trey reared back. “What are you talking about?”
“Your dad’s a senator.”
“He’s an alpha,” David said. “You just said it’s the betas who are doing this and that the alphas are clueless.”
“He’s got a mother, doesn’t he? A beta,” Solomon said. It was an obvious assumption.
“Crap, you guys are suspicious,” I said.
“You would be, too, if you’d been through what we have,” Keane shot back, staring me down.
“Sorry. We know a little about what happened to you. Not much.”
“What do you know?” Solomon asked, his dark eyes curious. Or were they suspicious?
“Just that you were all kidnapped from different areas of the URA, and that the Society for Omega Safety saved you from the five betas who did it,” Trey said quietly.
“How did they do that, anyway?” David asked. “To me, the SOS seems like this unimaginable entity.”
“They have this bad-ass special operations group,” Riku spoke up.
David, Trey, and I exchanged confused looks. “What?” I asked. “Really?”
“Really.” Riku nodded his head. “I’m going to join one day.”
Ren elbowed him in the side. “You can’t do that. You’re an omega.”
“So? That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Sure. I can just imagine you all dressed in black, weapons strapped to your body, jumping out of a helicopter with a bunch of other ops guys. Then an alpha appears, and you go into heat. While the others are beating up the bad guys, you’re trying to fuck them.”
When the rest of the group burst out laughing—I mean, it was a funny thing to picture—Riku jumped to his feet, furious.
“I will do it. Just wait!” He stomped off.
Elliott started to get up to go after him, but Ren stopped him.
“Let him blow off steam. He’s been at his boiling point for days.”
“What’s he been upset about?” David asked.
Ren shrugged. “Who knows? My brother’s dramatic as hell.” But I noticed him cast a glance where Riku continued to walk away from us.
Settling down again, Elliott looked at his lap. In the sun, the blond in his hair stood out in gold strands among the darker undergrowth.
“It was that team that got us out of there,” Solomon said.
“They got a tip on where we could be, and the next thing we knew, pandemonium. One minute we were talking quietly in the room they kept us in, and the next minute, shouting, sounds of things breaking, and a weird smell in the air. We all woke up in the hospital. Well, all but one.” His gaze went to the top of Elliott’s bowed head.
“They saved Elliott a few days later,” Keane told us. “He—”
Camp put his hand on Keane’s arm, stopping him. “Then we were all together again,” he told us. “And we’ve been together ever since. Brothers.”
“That’s the way we are,” I said. “Brothers. Jackson, too. Hopefully, you’ll get to meet him soon. He lives in Hudson City, in the Catskill Region.”
“What’s your story?” Keane asked.
I told them about how Jackson, David, and I met and how we got with our mates.