15. Hudson
Hudson
Mary looked beautiful as she stood on the front steps of Maeve’s home.
Lincoln got out of the car and opened the rear door for her.
“Very gentlemanly,” she said.
I came around the car. “Good afternoon, Mary.”
“Afternoon,” she said.
Lincoln looked past her toward the open front door.
Maeve arrived with Mac pressed against her leg and Mila on her hip. Then Gregor stood behind her. He didn’t say anything, and it was quite unnerving.
Lincoln leaned closer to me. “That’s Gregor?”
“I believe so.”
“Mary was right. Ominous.”
Mary bit her lip to contain a smile. “I did warn you.”
Maeve came down one step. “You’ll bring her back?”
“No, we’re going to kidnap her and leave her on an island,” I said.
“Has it got sand? Can I come?” Mac asked.
Maeve smoothed his hair down. “He’s being facetious.”
“Is that good or bad?” Mac asked.
Mary laughed. “We’re going to see the baby.”
“At an island?” Mac replied.
Mary thought for a moment. I was sure she wanted to say something funny back to Mac but decided on honesty. “At a clinic. It’s where we’ll see it for the first time.”
Mac sat down on the step with a disheartened thud. “No sand.”
“Sorry, not today.”
“After you’ve got the pictures of the babies.”
Mary’s face changed. The word babies still startled her, and the way her hand pressed more firmly over her stomach before she relaxed it.
“One baby,” she said gently.
Mac frowned. “Two.”
Mary stared at him as Maeve kissed the top of his head. “He’s normally right about weird things.”
“You should discourage your children from prophecy,” Mary said.
“I like his weird thoughts,” I said.
“You know he’s only three years old. He is not Nostradamus.” Mary’s gaze flicked back to me, and for one brief moment we shared the smile.
“Let’s go and meet our children,” Lincoln added as he opened the car door.
“Don’t!” Mary said but laughed as she got into the car. Lincoln sat beside her.
I drove through the gates and onto the Surrey road. The estate disappeared behind us, tucked away beneath trees and security and the life Maeve had built with her pack.
Mary sat with her hands folded over her bag, with no phone and no sharp comment ready. Just quiet.
Lincoln glanced at her. “Sick?”
“Not yet. Just petrified.”
“I’m sure your nephew does not have any superpowers.”
She looked at him, and the smallest smile tugged at her mouth. “It would be my luck that I am having twins.”
I watched them in the mirror and kept my hands steady on the wheel.
For ten minutes, the car held the soft sounds of the road. Tires over wet asphalt. The turn signal clicking at a roundabout. Lincoln opened a bottle of water and offered it without comment.
Mary took it. It was stupid, really, but the quiet sight of her accepting care without making a battle of it first was a step in the right direction.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
Mary’s eyes found mine in the mirror.
I kept my gaze on the road. “About Damien.”
Mary’s fingers tightened around the bottle. “Is he all right?”
The question was immediate and kind. That was Mary when she forgot to protect herself. She was still hurt and still angry, but still checked whether the person who’d wounded her was okay.
“He’s not hurt,” I said.
“Then?”
“You should know the full truth before the scan.”
Lincoln shifted beside her. He knew what I was about to say. We’d discussed it that morning in my kitchen, over coffee neither of us drank.
I’d agreed.
Then we’d both stood there for far too long, silent and thinking of a boy at three years old with sandy hair, a too-large backpack, and jam on his sleeve.
“Damien isn’t our biological son,” I said.
Mary’s fingers stopped moving on the bottle.
“What?”
“He’s our stepson.”
Lincoln’s hand rested on his knee, palm open. He didn’t reach for her. He gave her the room to hear it.
“But he calls you Dad.”
“Yes.”
“Both of you?”
“Yes,” Lincoln said.
Mary looked between us. “I don’t understand.”
“His mother came to London when Damien was three,” I said. “She had left Damien’s biological father in Boston. We were younger, ambitious, and unsettled in the way alphas can be when they are too young to know better.”
Mary listened without interrupting, which was new. It wasn’t because she was incapable of listening. Silence usually made her feel cornered, but today she let the story come.
“Were you scent-matched?” she asked.
“No.”
“But you were together?”
“For a long time.”
“And the two of you?”
“Pack,” I said. “Not lovers. We never have been.”
Lincoln huffed. “Brothers, near enough. I’d take a bullet for the man, share an omega, but not share a bathroom with him.”
“Okay.”
Lincoln looked out the window. “I’ll be honest with you. We liked her. We liked her enough to move to Boston when she got homesick.”
“She needed us,” I said. “And we needed an omega to settle us, or we thought we did. Damien was the bonus.”
Mary’s face softened. “You loved him.”
“Yes.”
“From the beginning?”
Lincoln breathed out a laugh, rough at the edges. “He had marmalade on his face and told Hudson his shoes were ugly.”
I glanced at him. “They were very ugly. It was the fashion back then.”
Mary’s mouth lifted.
Lincoln’s eyes stayed on the window, but his scent warmed with memory. “He fell asleep on me the first night she brought him over. Climbed up like he’d decided I was furniture and went out cold.”
“You didn’t move for two hours,” I said.
“He was asleep.”
“Your leg went numb.”
“He was asleep.”
Mary’s smile became real. It was small, but real. And I nearly missed the turn.
“She never wanted more children,” I said.
Her smile faded gently, not disappearing all at once. “Damien’s mother?”
“Yes. She was clear about that. We accepted it.”
“And what happened?” she asked as I indicated to turn into a street.
“Damien visited his biological father in Boston. He was older by then, curious, angry in ways he didn’t know how to name. His father asked him to apply for college there. Damien did.”
Mary looked down at the bottle. “And his mother?”
“She sent us a note letting us know she needed to be with her alpha.”
Lincoln’s teeth ground together.
“A note?” Mary asked softly.
“She said she wanted to try again with him being Damien’s father,” I said.
The car felt very quiet around us. Mary’s gaze moved to Lincoln who didn’t look at her, but his hand had curled around his own knee.
“I’m sorry,” she said, with no joke tucked behind it and no performance. Just Mary, seeing the bruise and stroking over it carefully.
I pulled into a turnout before I decided to do it.
Gravel crunched under the tires. The car stopped beneath a row of bare trees, rainwater clinging to the branches like glass.
Mary looked at me. “What are you doing?”
I unfastened my seat belt and turned in the driver’s seat. “Looking at you properly.”
Her breath caught and beside her, Lincoln had gone completely quiet. I reached back, slowly enough that she could move away. “May I?”
Mary looked at my hand, then at my face.
She nodded.
“Words,” Lincoln murmured.
She swallowed. “Yes.”
I touched her chin with two fingers and turned her gently toward me.
Her skin was cool from the car, softer than I remembered and exactly as dangerous. Her blue eyes moved over my face, first to my eyes, then to my mouth, then back again as if she hadn’t meant to be caught looking.
I caught her anyway.
“You don’t need to apologize for someone else’s wound,” I said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Not really,” she whispered.
My thumb brushed the side of her jaw. Her scent opened, violet and blackberry warming beneath the rain thread that tied all three of us together.
“Mary.”
“If you’re about to tell me I can’t replace Damien’s mum, don’t because that’ll make me cry.”
Lincoln made a quiet sound that might have been a laugh if he hadn’t been holding his breath.
“I don’t want you to cry,” I said. “I want to kiss you.”
“Oh!” Her gaze dropped to my mouth again and the air inside the car changed.
This wasn’t heat, or pain, or biology dragging her through a door she couldn’t close. This was Mary, fully herself, frightened and wanting and present.
“Can I?” I leaned in slowly.
“Yes.” She met me halfway.
The kiss was soft for one heartbeat.
Then she made a sound, small and startled, and her hand came up to my wrist as if she needed to hold herself steady.
I kept my fingers gentle on her jaw. No claiming, no taking more than she wanted to give.
Only the press of her mouth, the tremble of her breath, and the sweet shock of her choosing me without the heat getting in the way.
Lincoln’s scent deepened beside her.
I broke the kiss before I jumped over the seat and kissed her until she couldn’t breathe.
Mary’s eyes opened slowly. She looked dazed. Then she blinked. “Well that was nice.”
Lincoln smiled. “That’s your assessment?” he asked.
Mary touched her mouth with her fingertips. “I’m compiling further notes. I’ll present you with my thesis later.”
“Thorough of you,” I said.
“I’m a business student.”
“Of course.” I turned and started the car again.
Mary didn’t move away from Lincoln this time. Not much. Her shoulder brushed his sleeve as we pulled back onto the road. He didn’t make a sound, which was heroic, under the circumstances.
The Surrey Omega Health Clinic sat behind a private medical center with too much glass and a parking lot full of expensive vehicles. Mary grew quieter as we walked inside.
The waiting room smelled of disinfectant, and the faint sweetness of omega-safe calming diffusers. Pale wood chairs lined the walls. A woman with a sleeping baby sat near the window. And a beta nurse moved behind reception, speaking softly into a headset.
Mary stopped just inside the doorway. Lincoln moved beside her, not touching, but close.
“Too much?” he asked.
“No.”
“Mary.”
She looked at the floor. “A bit.”
“We can wait outside,” I said.
“No.” Her hand went to her stomach. This time she left it there. “No, I want to do this.”
I checked us in while Lincoln sat with her. When I returned, she had taken the chair in the corner, and Lincoln had placed himself between her and the room. She noticed and didn’t object.
Progress came in strange shapes.
“Mary McCarthy?” The nurse called fifteen minutes later.
Mary stood, but her face had gone pale again.
I stepped closer. “We want to come in but we can stay here if you prefer.”
She looked at Lincoln. He rose, slower than I knew he wanted to. “Your choice, love.”
Mary nodded, once, then walked toward the door. At the threshold, she stopped and glanced back.
“I really didn’t think you would stay if I asked you to,” she said.
Lincoln’s smile softened. “Thank fuck for that.”
The scan room was dim and warm, with a bed, a monitor angled away, and a sonographer who introduced herself as Jessica and didn’t so much as blink at the sight of two alphas hovering around one young omega.
Mary lay back on the bed and lifted her sweater.
Her stomach was still mostly flat, soft in the way she had insulted herself in the car a few days earlier. I remembered her saying there was only fat to touch and felt the old anger stir again, not at her but at everyone who had taught her to speak about herself like that.
Jessica warmed the gel. “This may feel a little cold.”
Mary looked at me. “Medicine lies constantly.”
“It does,” I said.
Jessica laughed and placed the probe against Mary’s stomach. Mary sucked in a breath.
Lincoln moved first, then stopped. “Hand?”
Mary reached for him. He took her hand like it was an oath.
The monitor flickered.
Gray and black shapes swam on the screen. Static. Shadows. The strange private weather of a body making life. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. But I knew it mattered more than anything I’d ever looked at.
Jessica adjusted the probe, then a fast little sound filled the room, making Mary’s eyes widen.
“Is that...” she whispered.
“Heartbeat,” Jessica said.
Lincoln’s breath left him. Mine didn’t. I forgot how to breathe.
The sound was rapid, impossible, tiny and enormous at once.
Mary stared at the screen, all the color gone from her face except the blue of her eyes and the pink where she’d bitten her lip. “That’s real,” she whispered.
“It’s real.” Jessica moved the probe again, then paused. Not long, but long enough.
Mary’s head turned. “Is everything okay?”
Jessica smiled. “I just need a clearer angle.”
Lincoln’s hand tightened around Mary’s, and I stepped closer to the bed.
The probe shifted, and another shape appeared on the monitor. Another flicker… Another heartbeat.
Jessica’s smile widened. “Well, congratulations. There are two.”
Mary blinked. “Two what?”
Lincoln made a strangled sound.
Jessica’s smile softened. “Two babies.”
Mary looked at me, then Lincoln, then the screen. “Oh my God.” Her voice was faint.
“Twins,” Jessica said.
“I’m having two babies. My nephew was right.” Mary’s eyes filled with panic so quickly I felt it like a hand around my throat.
“It’ll be fine,” I whispered. Inside I was doing cartwheels, outside I was trying my damndest to remain calm.
“That’s...” She swallowed. “That’s frightening.”
Jessica, busied herself with measurements.
Lincoln pushed Mary’s hair back from her face. “We’ll look after you.”
Mary’s eyes moved to him, then to me.
“You can’t just say things like that.”
“I just did,” Lincoln said.
“It makes me want to believe you.”
“Believe it.”
I looked at Lincoln, and he looked back. There was no hesitation in him or in me.
I turned to Mary. “Move in with us.”
Her mouth parted.
Jessica became intensely interested in the machine controls..
“Try it,” I said.
“I’ve a room at Maeve’s.”
“Keep it.”
“I’ve online classes.”
“We’ll make space for you to study.”
“I’ve nausea and that really isn’t pretty.”
Lincoln’s mouth curved. “We’ve noticed.”
“I’ve feelings too.”
“Unfortunately, so do we,” I said.
That made her laugh once, but the fear didn’t leave. “I’m not too young for you?”
The question came quietly, with no armor and no theatrical flourish. Just the fear.
I moved closer and rested my hand on the edge of the bed, not touching her until she shifted her fingers toward mine. Then I took them. “I told you, Mary,” I said. “You’re perfect no matter your age.”
Her eyes shone. Lincoln leaned over and kissed her knuckles.
On the monitor, two heartbeats flickered in grainy light. Mary looked at them, then at us, and for the first time since she’d come back into our lives, she didn’t look as if she was trying to leave before anyone asked her to stay.
“Just to try,” she whispered.
“Just to try,” I said.
Lincoln’s thumb moved over her hand. “I can bring you cake every day,” he added.
Mary laughed properly then, wet and startled and real and it was the most beautiful sound in the room.