Chapter 19 #2
This is more than I’ve ever been able to tell him, but I know Lucas is trustworthy.
“I hear you like fire,” he smirks. “Let’s try to get this little girl to finish her bottle before she falls asleep.”
Glancing down, I smile. “Too late,” I say.
She’s completely passed out again. Oh well.
“Then, she’ll finish later,” he says, putting the bottle on the nightstand. “As you said, we don’t wake sleeping babies.”
“Nope,” I grin. This feels so easy with him.
“Does the person running this auction have any kind of protection?” Lucas asks. “She must if no one has shut her down, right?”
“Rock Dresmond and his pack was her protector, but someone killed them. Ophelia no longer has anyone to keep her safe, since they were her rabid dogs,” I explain.
“She used to give women and men to the pack while she was entertaining Rock to keep them busy. The screams were so loud, I could hear them no matter where I was.”
Shuddering, I force myself to take a breath.
“Ophelia has no issues throwing people in front of her to protect herself, and I doubt that she’s made it known that she’s without a benefactor,” I say. “Ignorance is her bliss. It disgusts me the way she farms out omegas when she is one. She has her own little pharmacy of horrors.”
“She’s experimenting on her omegas?” Lucas asks, his brows knitting together.
“Oh yeah,” I say with a nod. “From pills to make men hard and feral, to injections for heats that also cause memory loss. It’s why it feels as if I blinked and years went by. There are bits and pieces, but it’s hard to pull it all together. My dreams are the closest I get, but they’re warped.”
“It’s very dangerous to experiment without safety protocols,” Lucas snarls angrily.
It used to feel as if they were mad at me when any of them were angry. After weeks together, I’m able to see that they aren’t. The heat of burned scents still isn’t appealing, but it does help to know that they’re upset with a situation and not me.
“No. I don’t know if there’s any lasting effect to anything Ophelia and her handlers have done to me,” I sigh, my fingers playing with Leila’s soft hair.
This is a much nicer grounding technique than my usual methods.
“Darlin’,” Lucas groans. “Now I want to have tests run to see. Not because you’re some type of experiment, but I’m worried now.”
“I’m not used to that yet.”
“Used to what?” he asks, twisting onto his side so he can gaze at me.
“Used to someone worrying about me. I don’t typically talk about myself at all if I’m being honest,” I shrug. “I do the job I’m hired to do and then go back to whatever place I’m using until I have to go to the next. Everything is transitional and transactional.”
“I bet that’s another reason you wanted a place of your own,” he surmises. At my widened eyes, he smiles. “Am I right?”
“I hadn’t really thought about that before, but you are. There’s not much that I need to do here since the landlord takes such great care of this house. I changed out some of his locks, though. They weren’t very sturdy,” I confess.
“You may want to check the trees around the area,” he says. “I think you may have picked up a stalker.”
“I should have hit Grant harder,” I complain as Lucas’ eyes sparkle with mischief.
“He’s going to kill me for telling his secrets,” Lucas says. “Ugh, or worse. He may make me spar with him.”
“You complain an awful lot for an alpha with such a gorgeous body,” I say.
“You like what you see?” he asks, taking my hand to run it down his hard muscles. He never put his sweatshirt back on, and I’m going to enjoy the view.
“You know I do,” I rasp. “It’s why I kept you naked so often at the warehouse.”
“I fucking knew it,” he says, grinning. “So, can I schedule an appointment with a doctor please?”
“I don’t like doctors,” I say, my nose wrinkling. My other hand curves over Leila’s back, ensuring that she’s not going to slide down my chest.
“Did you think you were going by yourself?” he asks. “Oh, darlin’. You’re going to have to beat your pack off with a fucking stick. They’ll all want to hold your hand or a baby.”
“Why do I keep forgetting about that?”
“Eh, it’s probably our fault,” he says, suspiciously serious. “We clearly haven’t shown you how much we love you. I’ll try harder since I’m a competitive fucker.”
My shoulders shake as I silently laugh, not wanting to scare the baby again.
“I honestly don’t know what to do with you all,” I say, my voice cracking.
I heard him, I did. My heart is doing this flip flopping thing it does when it’s too full. It’s all on the tip of my tongue, I want to say something back, but Lucas kisses my lips gently.
“If I ever suggest something that may be even slightly difficult for you, I want to be there to support you,” he says.
“I need you to hear me, because you’re not going to be a mother to this baby alone.
Just like I’m going to be here for whatever you need to do to heal and rebuild your life.
You’ve done so much while you’ve been alone.
You simply don’t have to do it by yourself anymore, okay? ”
“Okay,” I gasp, feeling as if the air is too thin. It’s not panic, I’m simply overwhelmed by emotions. There are bubbles of butterflies that are threatening to take over.
I feel giddy, excited, and completely lost all at the same time. How did they become so important to me so quickly?
“Now, let’s try this again. Can I make you an appointment with a doctor? The doctors here talk too much. I don’t have to worry about that as much with the contractors I hire because they get non disclosure agreements in all their contracts,” he rambles.
Is he nervous?
“Yes, please. What doctor are you going with if they all gossip?” I ask.
“One who I may be able to get to do a house call,” he says. “I’ve been working through it while we’ve been talking, and I think that would be the best way to do this. Leila shouldn’t be exposed to germs from a waiting room either.”
“Is that why you were rambling just now?” I ask, unable to not tease him.
“You noticed that?” he asks, color flooding his face.
“Oh yeah. I did.”
“Ugh. I try not to do that, but it happens when I’m working through different options,” he sighs. “I was also thinking about how overwhelming it would be to have four alphas crowded into a small office. It would be too much. The doctor might shit himself.”
“We can’t have that,” I sputter, trying not to move as I laugh.
“It would be terrible,” he agrees, kissing me again. His body is warm against me and I find myself melting into his embrace as he slides his arms around the baby and I.
“What else is going on in your very busy mind?”
“It’s because I slept,” he says, his hair falling over his forehead as he smiles at me. There are a lot of different ways that Lucas presents himself to the world, but this is mine.
The goofy, nerdy, highly addictive Lucas really does it for me. Some people might say that it’s too soon for me to be this head over heels over Lucas, but I’ve seen him in some very vulnerable situations. He never cracked or attempted to use his alpha bark.
I think he used his imprisonment as a form of vacation, which may make him as insane as I am.
“Does that mean you rebooted yourself?” I ask. I drop my head back on the pillows, realizing that the bubbles I feel are both love and happiness.
Woah.
“It seems so,” he says, picking up his phone to text someone. “I’m asking Oliver to start the paperwork for our pack and Leila to submit to the HPO. I am also asking him to get some paperwork started for her. I need to ask a question though.”
Lucas is in the groove. The one where he’s split between doing several things as he gets shit done.
“Are you going to look at me when you ask?”
“Yes,” he grunts, dropping his phone to give me his full attention. “There are two ways we could go about making Leila part of this family.”
I’ve been with her for about three days since the fire, bonding and figuring out what she likes and dislikes. In my head, she’s mine. It still boggles my mind that my alphas are so willing to walk with me on this path.
“Hit me with it,” I whisper, tears threatening. I feel as if I’m on a rollercoaster that I can’t get off. I’m not even sure I want to.
I’ve shut everything down for so long outside of pain to be able to control and feel something that now it’s as if I’m trying to drink from a firehose.
It’s messy and hurts a bit.
“We could submit completion of adoption papers, or we could forge Leila’s birth certificate so that you’re her mother and we’re her fathers.”
“That’s a lot of names,” I gasp, tears slipping free.
“Lots of love for a special girl,” he says easily.
“It doesn’t matter to me that you didn’t give birth to her, but you did save her.
We can tell her about what happened when she’s older if you want.
I’m not saying that we lie, just that we extend the truth.
Who the fuck knows who this birth mother is. Blood doesn’t make a parent.”
“No it doesn’t,” I admit, knowing how detached mine was. “It’s only been three days and I can’t imagine giving her up. I don’t even mind the sleepless nights or how many times she poops a day.”
“I bet they’re stinky,” he chuckles.
“I had to give her a bath with Oli,” I remember. “He was absolutely devastated by how messy she got.”
“Oh no,” he says, not looking at all sorry.
“She hated getting her butt washed in the shower,” I say. “You would have thought she was being tortured by how dramatic she was acting. Alesso even came in ready to hit someone because he thought someone was hurting her.”
“Well, life won’t be boring,” he says. “I’m going to call Oliver to deliver the news. Since we’re breaking so many laws, it’s probably best that there not be a text trail.”
“Definitely.”
I’m beginning to feel drowsy again as he requests a video call from Oliver, my eyes threatening to close. There’s something about being warm and cozy under blankets that does this to me.