Chapter Eight
Soleil charged six dollars for a flat white, and was all exposed brick and trailing pothos plants hanging from the ceiling beams. Lysander had ordered two apple turnovers at the counter and carried them back to a table by the window, where Cassian was perched on a stool with his bare feet tucked beneath him.
The turnover lasted four seconds before Cassian made a sound that shouldn’t be coming out of a person’s mouth in a public café at ten in the morning.
It started as a hum, low and private, the kind of noise you might make upon discovering that heated seats existed. Then it escalated. Cassian’s eyes fluttered shut and his tongue swept a long, obscene stripe through the cream that had oozed from the pastry’s seam.
“Mmmmm.” Cassian licked his lips, opened his eyes, and took another bite.
His whole face went slack with rapture, cream smeared across his upper lip and dusted with flakes of golden pastry.
He let out a moan so sincere and so devastatingly pornographic that the alpha at the next table set down his long black and stared.
Lysander’s gaze snapped to the man. He was mid-thirties, wearing a denim shirt, and sporting a wedding ring. His pupils had blown wide and his mouth hung slightly open, watching Cassian tongue cream off his thumb.
Lysander fixed him with a flat, unblinking stare until the man flushed to the roots of his hair, and became extremely interested in his mobile.
Two stools down, a younger alpha in a cap and a black North Face jacket had swivelled his entire body towards Cassian, his smoothie halfway to his mouth, his head tilted at a predatory angle that Lysander recognised because he’d been on the receiving end of it a thousand times.
Lysander locked eyes with him and shook his head once, slowly.
The man dropped his gaze to his laptop and began typing away.
Cassian, oblivious, took another bite and let out a sigh that would have earned him a subscriber milestone on any platform.
It crossed Lysander’s mind to talk to him about it.
This, Cass. This is what an orgasm is. You’re having one right now, in public, over a pastry, and it’s making every alpha in this café lose their minds.
But Cassian was so uncomplicatedly happy that Lysander couldn’t bring himself to ruin his first apple turnover for him.
He held out a napkin instead.
Cassian didn’t even glance at it. He was too busy pressing his tongue into the pastry to chase a stubborn pocket of cream. His tongue action was enough to make the married alpha’s head start turning again. Lysander kicked the leg of the man’s stool without looking at him.
“Here.” Lysander pushed his own turnover across the table. “Have mine.”
Cassian’s eyes went wide. He looked at the second turnover, then back up at Lysander, and his lower lip trembled as his entire world view of Lysander changed with that one offer. “You don’t want yours?”
“Nah. I’m good.”
Cassian pulled the plate towards himself with both hands, cradling it, and Lysander took a sip of his coffee. His mobile buzzed in his pocket. Lysander fished it out, saw the name on the screen, and answered before the second ring.
“Stevie.”
“I cannot fucking wait until this child is out of me.” From their ongoing conversations, Lysander knew that his twin had been uncomfortable for months and had now run out of patience with the miracle of life.
“With my luck, it’ll have a head the size of its alpha father’s, and I’ll be pushing out a bowling ball. ”
Lysander grinned. “Good. Ryland’s a literal genius — we want your little one to take after him when it comes to brains.”
“I’m a solicitor, Lysander.”
“Yeah. You chose to put your brains to evil use.” He leaned back on his stool, watching Cassian methodically dismantle the second turnover. “How are you really feeling, Stevie?”
“Huge. Constantly uncomfortable.” A pause, and when Stephen spoke again his voice had softened. “Yet loving life, Sander. I can’t stop looking at the scan photos and I can’t wait to meet my little boy.”
“Me too, Steve.” Lysander’s chest tightened. “I’ll be there as soon as the little guy makes his grand debut.”
“Will you be bringing your fancy Melbourne alpha with you?”
Across the table, Cassian had somehow managed to get cream on both his cheeks, and was licking the plate with zero self-consciousness while an alpha in a North Face jacket watched, absolutely rapt.
“Stevie…” His throat had gone tight. “I want to. He’s lovely. I know you have no reason to have any faith in my choice of alphas after everything that happened with Dane. But I’ve really lucked out with Hamish, and I want you and Daddy to meet him, so you can see I’ve done well this time.”
The words came out more earnest than he’d intended, raw around the edges. Normally, he would have smoothed it over with a joke, but today he left them bare.
“I’d love it if you did bring him, Sander,” Stephen said. “It’d be amazing to see Ryland interrogating him the way he did Diwa.”
Lysander laughed, and the sound of it made Cassian look up from his plate in curiosity.
Stephen launched into an update about Ryland’s attempts to assemble a cot from IKEA, which had apparently involved three separate YouTube tutorials, a meltdown as his failure triggered an existential crisis over his mental faculties, and the eventual discovery that the instructions were for a different model entirely.
Lysander listened with his chin propped on his hand, offering commentary at appropriate intervals, while Cassian finished the second turnover and began scraping pastry flakes into a pile on the plate with his fingernail.
“Sander, don’t freak out.”
Lysander took in a sharp breath. In his experience, nothing good had ever followed that sentence. It ranked alongside “we need to talk” and “so I’ve had an idea for a subscriber exclusive video” in the pantheon of phrases that preceded disaster.
“Daddy’s been put on bed rest,” Stephen said carefully.
“He’s fine. He’s totally fine. But he had a bit of a funny turn yesterday.
He went out for a walk on his own and passed out on the pavement.
His blood pressure’s been spiking, and Dr Bennett wants him horizontal until they’ve got it under control.
That’s probably not going to happen until he gives birth. ”
“Why didn’t anyone tell me as soon as it happened?” Lysander demanded.
“Because Dad specifically asked us not to. You know what he’s like, Sander.
He didn’t want you worrying from the other side of the world.
” Stephen exhaled. “Diwa’s got a home health nurse coming in round the clock, and he’s working from home now so he’s always there.
It’s being managed. But it’s a geriatric pregnancy, and they’re monitoring him for pre-eclampsia.
Things might get harder before they get easier. ”
Lysander pressed his thumbnail into the rim of the coffee cup hard enough to leave a crescent in the cardboard. Colin Huxley was forty-one years old and hadn’t expected to be pregnant again. The twins had been it, his family complete and that chapter of his life had been closed.
Then Diwa had come along, and now there was a surprise baby on the way right when Colin’s body was already starting to wind down.
The image of his father collapsing on a pavement somewhere in Notting Hill, alone, his mobile out of reach, was almost enough of a trigger for him to go and book a flight right back to England.
“He didn’t want me to tell you,” Stephen said again, quieter this time. “But could you maybe call him more? Just check in. He’s going stir-crazy stuck in bed, and he won’t admit it, but he lights up when you ring. You’ve always been able to make him laugh when the rest of us can’t.”
“I’ll call him tonight,” Lysander said. “And I’ll be back in London before your due date. I’ll stay through till after Dad gives birth. However long it takes for him to get settled.”
“Yeah?” Stephen asked. “That’d be brilliant, Sander. We’d all love that.”
They talked for a few more minutes about nothing in particular, and then Stephen yawned so loudly that Lysander shut the conversation down for his brother’s sake, and they said goodbye.
Lysander set his mobile face-down on the table and stared at the pattern of pastry crumbs Cassian had left on the plate.
“Your face has gone strange,” Cassian observed.
Lysander looked up. Cassian was watching him with his head tilted, those pale eyes tracking across Lysander’s expression.
“My dad’s not well,” Lysander said. He hadn’t planned to say it, but it came out anyway. “He’s pregnant and he’s having a hard time, so they’ve put him on bed rest.”
Cassian’s mouth fell open. “Your father carries?”
“Yeah.” Lysander picked up his mobile and scrolled through his photos, tilting the screen towards Cassian. “He’s a male omega like us. That’s my dad. Colin. And that’s his alpha, Diwa.”
The photo was from Stephen’s birthday last year.
Colin was in a blue jumper, leaning into Diwa’s side in the kitchen of their Notting Hill house, both of them laughing at something off-camera.
Diwa’s arm was around Colin’s shoulders, his hand spread wide against the blue wool.
Colin looked happy, but also tired. The shadows under his eyes were deeper than they should have been, and his smile, though genuine, sat on a face that was thinner than Lysander remembered.
He’d missed that. He’d been ten thousand kilometres away, sending wanking videos to his boyfriend and eating pad kra pao at midnight, so he’d missed that his father was getting thinner even as his belly grew.
“He’s beautiful,” Cassian breathed, leaning in so close that his chin nearly rested on Lysander’s shoulder. “And that’s his alpha? They look like they belong to each other.”
Lysander swiped to the next photo. Stephen and Ryland at a scan appointment, Stephen holding up the ultrasound printout with both hands, his face split into a grin so wide it distorted his features, while Ryland stood behind him with his arms wrapped around Stephen’s bump and his forehead pressed against the side of Stephen’s neck.
“That’s my twin brother,” Lysander said. “Stephen. And his alpha, Ryland. They’re having a boy.”
Cassian made a sound like someone had just told him that the sun rose in the west. He reached out and touched the screen with one fingertip, and his mouth dropped open in awe.
“Your family is blessed and fertile,” Cassian said, clearly awed. He looked up at Lysander with shining eyes. “Two pregnant carriers. Two bonded alphas. You’ve all found your mates.”
Lysander slid his mobile back into his pocket.
“You will too, Cassian,” he said. “Eventually. You’ve just got to develop your arsehole filter first. Learn to tell the difference between an alpha who deserves you and one who doesn’t.
” He took a sip. “And when you find the right one, you’ll see how being with an alpha is supposed to feel. ”
The smile that broke across Cassian’s face was so bright and so sudden that it transformed him entirely.
Cassian leaned forward on his elbows, his chin in his hands.
“Lysander, I’m going to get you a turnover.
As a thank you for teaching me things.” He reached into the pocket of Hamish’s flannel and produced a crumpled twenty-dollar note, holding it up between two fingers like a winning lottery ticket.
“I have money from Hamish. And I know how to order food now.”
Lysander smiled. “Go on, then.”
Cassian slid off his stool and padded towards the counter on his bare feet, clutching the twenty in both hands.
Lysander watched him go, tracking the blond head as it moved through the café, clocking North Face jacket guy whose gaze followed Cassian’s progress across the room, and the barista whose eyes lingered a beat too long.
Cassian reached the counter, pressed both palms flat against it, and announced, “I would like as many turnovers as I can have with this much, please.” He held up the twenty-dollar note.
Lysander kept his eyes on him the whole time.