by J. L. Wilder
“That’s so smart,” she said. “Robbie was so nice to think of it.” And to her surprise and mild embarrassment, tears filled her eyes.
Weston plucked a tissue from the box beside the bed and carefully dabbed her tears away. “It’s all right,” he said quietly.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional.”
“You just gave birth to a litter, Charity. You’re allowed to be.” He grabbed a sports drink from the bedside table and held it up for her to see. “Replenish some electrolytes,” he said. “You’ll feel better when you do.”
Her hands were full, so she allowed Weston to hold the bottle to her lips and tip it slowly back so she could drink. He held a hand beneath her chin to ensure that if any spilled, it wouldn’t fall on the babies in her arms. He’s thought of everything, she marveled. He’s going to take such good care of us. There couldn’t possibly have been a better mate anywhere in the world. She couldn’t have asked for a better father for her children.
He exchanged the babies in her arms for two others and helped them begin to feed. Once they were settled in and sucking away, he took the two who had just eaten and carried them, one by one, across the room.
“Where are they going?” Charity was surprised to find she felt an actual physical ache as distance grew between herself and her babies.
“Just here,” Weston said, smiling back at her. He was settling the babies into one of the four cribs positioned around the room. “They’re ready for a nap.”
“Are they okay?”
“They’re fine. Just full bellies.” He returned to the bed and sat down, careful not to jostle the four babies who were still waiting for their turn to be fed. “Do you think four cribs are enough?”
“Definitely. It’ll be good for them to share. They’ll feel better having their siblings around them,” she said. “I always felt better when we were growing up here knowing that I was sharing a room with all my sisters.”
“I used to like that too,” Weston admitted. “It was only after Hawk took over that I started wanting a space of my own.”
“Do you think they might ever come back?” Charity asked him.
“Who?”
“The rest of the pack. The ones who left.” She looked up at him. “Our missing brothers and sisters. Now that Hawk’s gone, do you think it’s possible they could come back and be happy here?”
“I think they could,” Weston said. She heard caution in his voice. “He’s the reason they left, after all.”
She nodded. “He’s the reason I left, and I consider myself lucky that you all came and found me.”
“But they have no way of knowing he’s gone,” Weston pointed out. “Even if they would be willing to come back and join the pack again, how could they possibly know that it’s safe to do so?”
Charity bit her lip.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Weston said. “I’d love to have them back. I miss them as much as you do. And I want our babies to grow up with all of their aunts and uncles in their lives.”
“Couldn’t you call them?” she asked.
“No. We didn’t get phones until after they left.”
“There’s no way to get in touch, then?”
“I’m afraid not.”
She nodded and exhaled slowly. “We’ll have to go after them, then,” she said.
Weston’s eyes widened. “Go after them? What do you mean?”
“We’ll do what Hawk did,” she said. “We’ll put the word out that we’re looking for them. We won’t put a bounty on their heads, but we won’t need to, because they’re not afraid of us. And we’ll go out looking for them ourselves.”
“Oh no,” Weston shook his head firmly. “Absolutely not, Charity. You’re not going out anywhere. Not until you’ve taken a nice long time to recover from giving birth. And maybe not even then! I don’t want these babies to be without their mother.”
“Oh, relax,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t mean me personally. I thought we could send the boys. Gino and Rick are good trackers, aren’t they? Not as good as you, of course, but we need you here.” She held out one of the babies she’d been feeding. “I think this little girl’s all done.”
Weston accepted the baby and carried her over to one of the empty cribs. “Gino and Rick are good,” he conceded. “But I don’t love the idea of splitting up the pack.”
“The pack’s already split,” Charity pointed out. “We’ve been split for years, ever since we came of age. It was Hawk who drove us all apart, who came between us and ruined the family we used to have. We can’t let him keep driving us apart now that he’s gone. We have a chance to heal those old wounds.”
Weston leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I think you’re getting sentimental because you just gave birth.”
“Maybe I am,” she said. “That doesn’t mean that I’m wrong, though.”
“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t.”
“Will you think about it?”
He sighed. “To be honest with you, Charity, I don’t think I need to think about it. It’s a good idea. You’re right, we should be trying to get our family back. We should be fighting for the unity of the Hell’s Wolves.” He laughed a little. “God knows we could use the extra hands, now that we’ve got all these babies.”
She hardly dared to believe what she was hearing. “Are you saying you’ll do it?” she asked. “You’ll have the pack look for the ones we lost? You’ll put the word out?”
“I’ll do it,” he said. “I only wish I’d thought of it sooner.”
Charity’s heart soared. If this worked, they would have their family back. They would finally be together again, as they’d been before she had left the pack. Hawk’s damage would, at last, be fully healed.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED, Charity slept when she could, although it seemed that she was almost always being jolted awake by the cry of one or more of her children. The time seemed to go by in a blissful fog, and Charity felt—in a surprisingly pleasant, soothing way—as if she were spending most of her time underwater. She was only half awake most of the time, lying propped against pillows as Weston or Lita carried baby after baby from their cribs to her arms, allowing her to feed them before they returned to sleep or to lie on their backs, babbling at the ceiling.
Gino and Rick were quickly dispatched on their mission to find the lost pack members. They called in every evening to report on what they’d seen that day, and although these reports were discouragingly vague, they did become a touchstone for Charity—she could tell what time of day it was each time the phone rang.
She also liked knowing where in the country Gino and Rick were. “We’re in Illinois,” Rick said over the phone one day, and Charity remembered when she and Weston had crossed the Mississippi River on their flight from Hawk. Another time, Gino reported that they were in Colorado Springs, and Charity thought of the beauty of Boulder.
Her body had recovered from childbirth, for the most part—just as she was made to give birth, she had realized, she was designed to bounce back quickly. Three weeks after their birth, Weston managed to get all the babies to sleep at the same time, and Charity seized the opportunity to spend several long, luxurious hours in the bath. When she was done, she wrapped herself in her bathrobe and returned to find her bed stripped and remade with fresh sheets and a piping hot omelet on a tray. Norma.
She smiled and sat down to eat, picking up a book to read while she did so. It felt like forever since she had had even a moment to herself.
As she finished up her meal, Weston came into the room. “Good omelet?”
“Amazing. Be sure to thank Norma for me.”
“I will, but she’s just so happy to do anything she can for you and the babies.” Weston grinned. “Honestly, I think she sees it as you doing her a favor.”
“We don’t deserve her.”
“No, we do not.”
“How are the babies?”
“Awake. Playing with their feet.�
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“I’ve been wondering,” she said. “Do you think one of them is an omega?”
He frowned, sitting down on the foot of the bed. “I would say that’s likely,” he said after an interval. “What makes you wonder that?”
“Well, I wonder everything about them,” she admitted. “I wonder if they’ll be good at sports. I wonder if they’ll be more wolf or more human. I wonder if they’ll get jobs someday, like Robbie. Like I did.”
“Me too,” he said. “I wonder if they’ll be any good on a bike.”
“But I keep coming back to the omega question,” she said.
“Would you prefer that we had one or that we didn’t?” he asked.
“It’s funny,” she said. “If you’d asked me that a year ago, I would have absolutely said that I didn’t want any child of mine to be an omega. I would have said it had caused me a lifetime’s worth of trouble, and that I’d never want my daughter to have to go through that.”
“How do you feel about it now?” he asked.
“Now...it’s almost crazy, but now I feel like it’s the best thing that could possibly happen to a person,” she said. “Provided she has the right mate, of course.” She reached out and took Weston’s hand in hers. “You’ve always taken care of me,” she said. “You’ve always made sure I had what I needed and that I was safe and comfortable. I think being cared for like that is a unique omega experience.”
He nodded. “If we have an omega for a daughter,” he said, “we’ll guard her carefully. We’ll make sure nobody ever treats her badly. And she’ll be lucky because she will have been raised by an omega mother who knows exactly what she needs.”
Charity smiled up at him. “How do you always say exactly the right thing?”
“I get lucky.”
“Do you think we have an alpha?” she said.
“I would say we probably do,” he said. “An omega isn’t vital for the continuation of the pack, so it’s possible we just won’t have one at all, but at some point, one of my children is going to have the alpha gene. I would say it’s probably one of these.”
“There are only three of them,” she marveled. “Three boys in the whole litter. And one of them is already destined to be the new alpha.”
“We’ll have to train him carefully,” Weston said. “We’ll teach him to respect what his pack needs and to guide them firmly without being cruel or aggressive.”
“He’ll have some big shoes to fill,” Charity said with a smile. “I don’t know how he’s ever going to live up to his father. You’re the best alpha I’ve ever known.”
“You give me too much credit,” he protested. “I’m just making this up as I go along.”
“That makes it even more impressive that you’re doing so well,” she told him. “The pack is thriving under you like we never have before. Karl would be impressed.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know so. And he’d love these babies.”
Weston smiled. “I’m sure he would.”
He lay down on the bed beside her and wrapped his arms around her. She curled into his embrace, welcoming his warmth, confident that she would hear her babies cry if they needed her. For now, she would enjoy this moment. It felt like forever since she had relaxed in her mate’s arms, relishing in the closeness of his body and taking comfort from his reassuring strength. She had missed this. She had missed him.
She was drifting, halfway between wakefulness and sleep, when she heard a soft buzzing, followed by the familiar tone of Weston’s voice.
She couldn’t pick out his words, couldn’t understand what he was saying, but his tone was one of surprise. It was enough to pull her up to the higher reaches of her mind, back to a waking state. She opened her eyes and looked up at him.
He hung up the phone, looking shell-shocked.
“Weston?” she said. “What is it? Is everything okay? Who was on the phone?”
He looked down at her. “Everything’s amazing,” he said in wonder. “That was Gino.”
“Gino?” She inhaled sharply. “What did he want?”
“They’re coming home.”
“He and Rick are?”
“No,” Weston said. “All of them. They were all together. They were in Seattle, and they’ve been together all this time.” His face split with a grin. “Our family is coming home.”
He embraced Charity, and she leaned up to catch his lips with hers.
More Books by J.L. Wilder
HELL’S WOLVES MC-THE Omega Games
An omega held against her will.
To protect her, he must win the omega games—or watch her be bred by another.
Wyatt
All my life I’d been a lone wolf.
Drinking, hiding my inner beast.
Then I became second to the Alpha of the Hell’s Wolves MC.
That’s when she came into my life—the omega.
Now my sole purpose is to protect this sexy little wolf.
Even if it violates my alpha’s orders.
Izzy
Those bastards think they can treat me like a breeding bag.
When the wolf moon comes and I’m in heat,
They’ll hold the omega games—with me as the prize.
What they don’t know is I’ll decide who gets my body, and my heart.
For me, there is only one.
And I need him so bad it hurts.
Hell’s Wolves MC-The Omega Purebred
No one ever taught me what to do if I was kidnapped. What did they expect? I am a rare Omega purebred—the last of my line.
Hazel
As an Omega purebred of the wealthiest shifter family on the east coast, I was given three rules:
1. Stay in the house.
2. Always travel in groups.
3. Don’t go out at night.
Well, I didn’t listen to those rules, and now I’m the world’s most wanted omega. I've been kidnapped for breeding. Who can protect me now?
Emmett
I’m president of the Hell’s Wolves MC, the Itinerant Chapter. I travel from place to place doing difficult and dangerous jobs. I have no women and no children, and I like it that way.
I just landed the best paying job of my life, rescue a kidnapped Omega. A lot of what they say about Omegas is myth, but there is one thing about them that is true—they are nearly impossible to resist. And a rare omega purebred is no exception. Good thing I care more about money, than mating with an Omega.
18+ Only. Standalone shifter romance. Full length novel.
Hell’s Bears MC Series
Omega’s Bears
I’m an omega. I’m all alone. And the wolves are coming for me.
All my life, I’ve felt I should be stronger. All my life, I’ve felt I should be powerful. But all my life, I’ve been nothing. The only thing I had was my clan. But the wolves took them from me. Every single one of my family is gone.
The wolves want me for crossbreeding, and I have to run. The only bears who might protect me are dangerous, lawless, and wild. But still I ride on. Straight into the den of the Hell's Bears MC....
The White Omega
I've never left my home. I'm a prisoner in my own pack. All because I'm an omega...
All my life I've been told I need to stay inside, stay protected. As an omega polar bear, i'm an object of lust to shifter men, and the outside world is not safe. When my pack's alpha claims he has imprinted on me, I know it’s a lie. I know the outside world is the only one I can trust.
Even if I get kidnapped, and delivered to the doorstep of the infamous Hell's Bears MC. I am to be their new omega, their breeder. What terrifies me most, is which Hell's Bear will imprint on me, and claim me for life....
The Hidden Omega
There's something wrong with me. Sometimes I'm not even sure I'm human.
I was raised by humans, and all my life I thought I was a monster.
Turns out I'm something more valuable—an omega bear shifter.
Afte
r being kidnapped for a prostitution ring, I'm rescued by the Hell's Bears MC.
There is Clay who imprints on me, Mike who comforts me, and Bruno the alpha.
Sometimes it seems like Bruno wants nothing to do with me...
Do they really want me to be a member of their pack,
or do they just want to use me for breeding?
About The Author
J.L. WILDER LIKES WILD things! Her alpha shifters are gruff and tough, with a pinch of tenderness. Curl up with these bad boy book boyfriends, and they will have you howling at the moon!
When not writing shifter smut, J.L. spends as much time as possible exploring the outdoors. She loves getting into trouble with Ace, her Siberian Husky.
You can grab a free shifter romance and join her email here: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/mvci9dryz6