His Pretend Omega: M/M Non-Shifter Alpha/Omega MPREG (Cafe Om Book 2)

by Harper B. Cole

  But Chris stepped up and answered again before I had a chance, taking my dad's nosiness with an ease I hadn't expected with his nervousness on the way in. "No, really, the majority of us are just normal people, working normal jobs. But I think it's really admirable that Café Om goes out of their way to provide jobs with protection to vulnerable omegas who need some help transitioning back into daily life outside of a safe house."

  He had everyone at the table who could hear him nodding in agreement and I relaxed. He shouldn’t have felt nervous at all. He had this crowd, no problem. He both fit in and stood out, in the best kind of way. After the main part of dinner adjourned, we retired to the ballroom and my dads led off the first dance, my dad's smile excited, my father's indulgent. My father didn't care for dancing on its own merit, but my dad couldn't get enough of it, which meant my father enjoyed participating because it made my dad happy. I couldn't help but feel a bit wistful. I wanted what they had.

  And I knew they thought I could find it the way they had, through an arranged mating, but I wasn't willing to take that chance. I knew that the chances for a successful marriage were just as likely whether a mating was arranged or not, but I just wasn't willing to chance it and derail my attention from my business at such a critical point in its launch. Nor could I imagine laying my eternal happiness at someone else's feet, even my dads’. Other couples drifted after my dads' lead, and I held my hand out to Chris in invitation.

  "What?" Chris looked at me incredulously. "You want me? To dance?"

  "That does seem to be the thing to do at the moment."

  Chris rolled his eyes at my sarcasm. "I honestly haven't danced since sixth grade," he admitted. "And that was line dancing. I don't suppose there will be line dancing at some point tonight? I'm pretty sure I can still break out a decent electric slide."

  He made me laugh. A real laugh, not the polite amusement I was used to rationing out at these kind of events. "Just follow me," I told him. "The night isn't complete without at least one dance."

  He took my hand. "If your feet are bruised tomorrow, let's just say I'm warning you now."

  "If it's that bad, I'll make sure to wear my steel enforced boots next time." And I did want there to be a next time. I had been crushing on Chris for months, yes, but crushing on an ideal is never the same as learning the reality of a person. And I was learning that Chris was so much more than I had imagined, and my ideal certainly hadn't been disappointed. He was nervous in the face of the unknown, but it didn't stop him from facing it. I spun him around the room, relishing the chance to hold his body close. Maybe I could convince him to go on a real date with me. One where the expectations of my dads wasn't a concern, wasn't even a thought. He’d mentioned he was seeing someone, but…maybe it wasn’t that serious. I wouldn't ask him tonight. We still had a long drive back tomorrow morning, and I didn't want to make it awkward if he didn't feel the same. But in a couple days, perhaps. When he was at work. If I didn't lose my nerve.

  4

  Chris

  My pretend date with Aiden only highlighted how not alright my relationship, if you could call it that, with Will was. He had already planned to come over with a pizza for the night so we could “watch” the game, which really meant getting off, eating pizza and going to our separate bedrooms, his thankfully in another part of town.

  Why I had allowed this to become my norm, I had no idea, but I was putting an end to it. Even if my “date” with Aiden hadn’t been so much better than anything I’d ever experienced with Will, it should’ve been clear as day when Will had been completely fine with me going without asking any questions. I didn’t even tell him the pretend part, just that I was going with a friend.

  As the knock on the door to my crappy apartment echoed, I took a deep breath, prepared to do this.

  “Hi,” I greeted as I opened the door. Just as I predicted, he had the convenience store crappy five-dollar pizza special in his hand along with a six pack of beers. The beers were for him only, which he made sure of by bringing the brand he knew would never cross my lips.

  He wasn’t actually a bad guy. He just was a weak alpha and that tended to hurt all parts of his life. Society had expectations for alphas, just as they did for omegas. Alphas were supposed to be strong, have leadership skills, and be able to take charge. Will was none of those things.

  He was a good enough looking man. Many might even consider him quite handsome. No one, however, would look at him and think of him as an alpha. He once confided in me that he grew up knowing he was a beta and hadn’t bothered to get tested. Then when his first knot popped, he freaked out and went to the doctor only to find out that not only his but his entire family’s assumption he was a beta was flat out wrong. His life would’ve been better had he been a beta. Instead, he had to live up to unrealistic expectations and in reaction to that, he became kind of a putz.

  “Hi. I brought pizza.” He held it out to me as he made his way in and the smell made my stomach churn. How long had the pizza been sitting out, waiting for some poor soul with more hunger than money to buy it? Grease congealed on top of the cheese, and I wondered if it had gone rancid. Will plopped down on my crappy couch and opening his beer and grabbed the remote.

  “TV’s broken.” I controlled my gag reflex and placed the box on the plastic side table and grabbed a paper plate for Will. I would probably just put together a salad with whatever I had in the fridge.

  When we had started to see each other, I thought Will was ashamed of me and that was why we were always at my place. Pretty quickly, I realized he was ashamed of his place and I had nothing to do with it. He was just that insecure.

  “Sucks. Good game on tonight, too.” He took a swig of his gross excuse of a beer.

  “I heard.” From him.

  “How about we eat and…” He tilted his head in the direction of my bed as he raised his eyebrows during his pause. Yeah, that was not going to become a thing. “And then I can be back home in time for the game.”

  No time like the present. “I was actually thinking we shouldn’t see each other anymore.” I sat on the edge of the small chair across the room. It wasn’t far away but gave me a feeling of being not too close in case he got mad. I doubted he would, but an omega can never be too safe.

  “And why is that? We have fun.” He took another swig of his beer before picking up a piece of pizza as if I had just told him it was going to rain and not that we were breaking up. Not that he was my boyfriend, but the end result was the same. He wasn’t getting laid.

  “And we’re going nowhere. We both know this.”

  “Wait, is this your omega instincts telling you that you need to mate and you’re trying to ultimatum me into it? I don’t do ultimatums.” Leave it to him to think this was me wanting more. It was all I could do not to roll my eyes.

  “Neither do I, so no, this is no ultimatum.”

  He put down his pizza and looked at me for the first time since the conversation actually began. Maybe it was finally starting to sink in.

  “Fuck.” He leaned back and let out an exasperated sigh. “This is about the guy you went to the party with isn’t it?”

  “No.” I shook my head trying to figure out where his train of thought was taking him. He wasn’t acting jealous, so that wasn’t it. “It’s been building for a long time.”

  “You know he won’t want someone like you.”

  “Like me?” What the heck? Jerk.

  “Someone who lives in a rat-infested crap hole and slings coffee for a living.” He spoke as if I were a small child. “You don’t even come from a good family and you’re getting too old to be mate material.” Because anything over twenty-five was ancient? I was so making the right decision, booting Will.

  “First of all, Aiden and I are never going to be a thing, that’s true. But not because of any of those things.” That was the sad reality of the entire thing. The one I wanted would never be mine. “I feel bad for you thinking that material possessions, job status, and who your pa
rents are is more important than who you are as a person.”

  “It sucks, but you know they matter. Otherwise why would you settle for an alpha like me?” My anger started to fade. His stupid comments weren’t about me. They were about him. He believed all the alpha omega crap he’d been fed all his life. My heart broke for him. Not enough to take it back, but enough to want to make things better for him.

  “It isn’t what kind of an alpha you are or are not that matters to me, and you know it. We never clicked anywhere other than the bedroom.” And by “clicked,” I mean we got off. Which had been good enough at the time.

  “Yet you kept me out during your heats.”

  “Because we both knew being mated was not in our future and heat meant a higher chance of babies.”

  “Whoa, who said I wanted babies with you?”

  “Do you listen at all? You don’t want babies with me and I don’t with you. That is why no heats.” I stood and made my way to the door in a not so subtle hint it was time for him to leave.

  “Fuck, you are such a tease, letting me come over.”

  “Will, you invited yourself. It isn’t like you want me in particular. You have more than one omega you visit from time to time.” He gave a slight nod and shrug. It had never been a secret and was probably why I kept him around. No fear of him getting too attached.

  “So I’m not getting laid?” Because that was what mattered.

  “Yeah, that was pretty much the point of this conversation.”

  “I’m taking the pizza.” He grabbed the box as he rose, the beers in his other hand. If that made him feel like he was winning, good on him.

  I held my breath as a whiff of his disgusting beer wafted toward me. I wouldn’t miss that smell at all. “Fair enough. Have a good life, Will.” I meant it, too, it just needed to not be connected to mine anymore.

  He replied by slamming the door, proving once again that I made the correct decision.

  5

  Aiden

  I was in the lab adjusting the current recipe. After dropping Chris off that morning, I'd spent the morning researching from home and then come in to put my thoughts into practice. The taste of the vanilla was too chalky, according to the market research. The strawberry and chocolate were fine, but I needed to change the flavor profile of the vanilla without changing the recipe too much. Or in a way I could adjust the strawberry and chocolate to keep the dietary values the same across all three flavors, but without mucking up the tastes of the ones that were working. I lived for this part of the project. The challenge. The details. I'd put together seven tests already today and was working on the eighth before I realized Ethan was yelling my name.

  I pulled down my goggles and turned to him in confusion. "What's wrong?"

  Ethan looked skyward and muttered something I couldn't hear. "You need to be more aware of your surroundings, dude. What if there was a fire?"

  I gave him an annoyed look. "Was there a fire?"

  "No, but you'd be shit out of luck if there was and I didn't come looking for your ass."

  I waved away his concerns. "I'm fairly certain I'd notice the fire alarm."

  "And I'm fairly concerned you wouldn't." It was an old argument, and one that wasn't going away anytime soon.

  "Did you need something?" I asked.

  "Your dads," Ethan said.

  "My dads need something? Did they call."

  "No, you—" Ethan cut himself off and I could imagine the litany of names running through his brain. He'd called me them all before. He was trying to train himself to not berate me in public, though, now that we were business partners. An attempt I took pleasure in challenging at every turn. "Your dads are here."

  "Here?" I repeated dumbly. "But I was just at their place last night."

  "No, Aiden," Ethan said with a sigh of exasperation. "You were at their place the night before last. You worked all through the night again."

  I blinked at him in consternation. But, it had only been... I looked around for my phone, but I must have left it upstairs in my office. And the lab had no windows to the outside. And, come to think of it, it did take quite a while to put even a single test recipe together, and I was on number eight.

  "What time is it?"

  "It's eleven AM Saturday. Your dads called me because they couldn't get a hold of you and I had to drag my ass down here to let them in."

  "They're here here?"

  Ethan threw his hands up. "I'm done. Go take care of your dads and then go get some sleep. And some food. Preferably food and then sleep."

  "I'll grab a shake out of my fridge," I promised, putting my workspace in order. If my dads were here, they'd probably want to go to lunch. I wouldn't eat, and they would fuss, but I'd already had that big dinner at their house this week. Focusing on eating only for pleasure was just so much more satisfying to me when it was an occasional thing. I enjoyed food more now than when I ate three meals a day. Or two, if Ethan wasn't around to harass me into being healthy.

  "Fine," Ethan said. "They're waiting for you there anyway."

  "You know I'd be lost without you," I yelled after Ethan and he flipped me the bird without turning around. He knew I was right. Hell, I'd written it into the company paperwork when I gave him a huge chunk of the company.

  As I suspected, my dads wanted to go out for lunch. And as expected, we argued a bit over whether I would eat or not, so I ordered a small fruit bowl to mollify them and my dad made my father back down. I picked around the other fruit and ate the pineapples and strawberries. I had no desire to eat the melon and grapes just because they were in the bowl. One of the huge benefits to streamlining my diet with the shakes was that I never needed to force myself to eat something just for nutritional value.

  "So, Aiden," my father started. "It's been six months since you finished school."

  I didn't like how this was starting. And the way my father said school, as if I’d been playing around. I’d just finished my second Masters program. "That long already?" I feigned surprise, as if I didn't feel the passage of time breathing down my neck, reminding me I still didn't have a product I was willing to go public with yet.

  My dads shared a look. Yeah, I really wasn't going to like what they said next.

  "Now, Ethan," my dad said. "I know you've been against the idea, but we believe it's time for you to settle down and start a family."

  I set my fork down. This wasn't a new conversation, but they'd never approached it so directly before. "And you already know what I'm going to say. Do you have anything new to contribute to the discussion? Because my views haven't changed."

  My father set his fork down as well. "You have three months to choose a mate, or let us choose one for you, or we're cutting off our financial support."

  My chest clenched like a vise had a hold on me. "Excuse me?"

  "You didn't mishear me." My father sat back, waiting for my inevitable response. He and I were like two stallions in a field. Generally, it was just a better idea to separate us. The last time we had butted heads, I'd rejected their choice of a private university, the private apartment they wanted to provide me, the timeline they had planned, and ended up at a state university in regular housing, completely funded by scholarships. Now, my father wasn't as overbearing as I'm afraid I sometimes make him sound. We just both have extremely strong opinions about how to provide the best life for me, and once I'm able to convince him, he comes around, but it's not easy. I wasn't sure how I was going to get around this one, though, before the deadline. Without that money, LifeFuel was dead in the water.

  "And I'm sure you have the perfect candidate already picked out?" Even I winced at the acid in my tone, but my father didn't flinch.

  My dad, however, patted my arm reassuringly. "Of course not, Aiden. Though if you want us to provide you with a list of candidates, we would be more than happy to do so."

  It was easy to stay angry at my father, but not my dad. They both simply wanted the best for me. My dad was just so much softer about approac
hing it.

  "You know that just won't work for me."

  "You mean you just won't consider it," my father responded.

  Before I could get my hackles up, my dad jumped in, "And we respect that. I know I've already said it a million times, but I'd never even heard of your father until a month before our mating, and he's the best thing that's ever happened to me."

  My father softened slightly and leaned forward to peck my dad's lips. Disgustingly romantic, these two. I wished I had their confidence that I would find a mate as well matched as they were through an arrangement.

  "But," my dad said, turning to me, "we both feel that you need to make mating a higher priority. This startup thing is wonderful, and you have an amazing vision for it, but what is it really worth if you don't have someone to share the burdens and frustrations? And don't say Ethan. That's not the kind of relationship I'm talking about. But that Chris fellow seemed nice. I could order a background check on him if you'd like."

  I had been going to say Ethan. And if Ethan were an omega, I knew my dads would be jumping all over him as a possible mate. But there was absolutely no way Ethan and I would ever consider each other that way, no matter what our designations had ended up being. We were excellent roommates, friends and business partners, but that was where it stopped. And ordering a background check on Chris? I couldn't even begin to fathom invading his privacy like that.

  "That's it, then. No rebuttals?" I looked at my father as I spoke. I could see the wall of stubbornness that I wasn't going to be able to surpass. I knew it well enough in myself. And it didn't help that I could see their side of the story, I was still angry. I hadn't taken a single penny of support from them all throughout college. I'd picked up tutoring as a side job starting my freshman year and covered college completely with scholarships. Yes, they had bought me a car when I graduated, but I hadn't asked for it. I had asked them to support me as I got the startup going, but now they were using the one thing I had asked for, the one and only material thing I needed from them for the past four and a half years, and they were using it to force me to bend to their path for my life.