The Omega's Secret Baby (Oceanport Omegas Book 1)

by Ann-Katrin Byrde

  She grinned. “Caught me. But really,” her voice grew more serious, “you can talk to me if you’re having trouble.”

  “Well, we did get into a bit of a fight. I have to admit that this day didn’t go as I’d planned, but he… He said some pretty harsh things.”

  “Are you sure he meant them? In my experience, parents can get a tad irrational when their babies are involved.”

  “I don’t know. He basically said I was a privileged rich kid who couldn’t understand the real world. Or at least, the world he lives in, whatever that is.” I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “Well, you certainly live in a world different from most people,” Frederica said.

  “You really think so?” Was I so unaware?

  “I’m not saying this to be mean, but life is different for people who have money, people of your standing… That’s just the way it is. And your family has always had some strong ideals that are entirely antiquated, and you were raised with them.” She shot me a sympathetic look, as if to apologize for what she’d said. “If it helps,” she continued, “I’ve always thought you were the best of the bunch. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised to see you back here.”

  “How so?” Why would she be surprised to see me here? I’d always wanted to take over the business and be the head of the family. I thought she knew that. I thought she knew me.

  “You’ve always been a bit of a free spirit. I’ve watched you sneak out of the house as soon as you could. You did what your parents asked of you, but I never got the feeling that you really agreed with all of it. Or any of it. I thought you’d eventually pursue another path in life than the one your parents were laying out for you.”

  “I… never really thought about it that way.” Eli had told me that he wanted Jake to be able to go after whatever he wanted, and I’d kind of just brushed him off. My parents had always assumed they knew what was best for me, and I was starting to act exactly like them.

  “You know… This might be a bit personal, but I kind of always felt that you were trying to please your father too hard. Broke my heart to see you go ignored so many times.”

  I squinted, trying to remember what exactly she was talking about. Sure, there had been times when I was a child when I’d wanted to play with my father, but that was only because I didn’t know better then. Oh God. I rested my head in my hands. Had I really spent my life trying to impress a man who could never give me the time of day?

  “I’m sorry,” Frederica said. “This must be a difficult topic for you, so soon after his death.”

  I took a deep breath. For a moment there, I’d completely forgotten that my father had passed away. Was I now trying to impress a dead man by taking over business? Was that what I was doing with my life?

  No, that wasn’t all I was doing. I had a good job. I liked my job. But Frederica had a point. Even after my failed marriage, it was still difficult for me to envision a life that went off the rails my parents had laid down for me.

  “What did you think I was going to be?” I asked Frederica. “If not head of this business.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever you want to be really. You got a good head on your shoulders, an excellent education and all the money you could ever need.” She smiled and took a sip of her tea. “Really, sometimes, it’s like you don’t even know how lucky you are!”

  I looked up at her. “I guess I really don’t.”

  “You have a really sweet kid with a man you love. Go and make it right.”

  “You know what? I will.” I stood.

  “Hey, I didn’t say you don’t have to finish your tea first! Don’t just leave me here.”

  I stopped. “Oh, I’m sorry, I—”

  She laughed and waved her hand. “Go, go!”

  Seriously, this woman… She did have a point, though. I had to go and see if things between me and Eli could be fixed.

  33

  Elias

  “Can you go to the drugstore for me?” I asked Griff. I couldn’t go myself. The whole town would be talking about my new pregnancy before the day was over. Sending my brother wasn’t much better, but at least a little better.

  “You want me to go buy a pregnancy test for you?” Griff bit his lower lip. He obviously wasn’t in love with this idea.

  “I’ll make it up to you. I just really need to know.” Especially now that I remembered the odd nausea I’d been fighting with last week.

  Oh God, I couldn’t be pregnant again. Not now. Not like this.

  Deep breaths, Eli. Don’t panic just yet. Maybe it’s nothing.

  Yeah, right. Like I was going to be that lucky. I still remembered when I’d first noticed pregnancy symptoms with Jake. I hadn’t wanted it to be true then, either. But that hadn’t changed reality.

  At least this time I wouldn’t have to pee on a stick in a college dorm’s bathroom that smelled faintly of vomit.

  Yeah, this time was going to be much better.

  Oh, who was I kidding?

  “Okay,” Griff said. Maybe he noticed my distress. “I’ll go. But you really owe me for this.”

  “Yeah.” I owed him so much already. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  He gave me a small smile. “Anything else you want from the drugstore while I’m there?”

  “Any chance you can get Valium there?”

  “Probably not. Sorry, man.” He patted me on the back and headed out the door.

  I took another deep breath and started pacing the living room. What was I going to do about my college aspirations if I was pregnant again? No, no, no, I couldn’t think about that now.

  I sank onto the couch.

  Was I really going to have my dreams smashed again by my stupid fertility?

  I couldn’t do this to Griff again, either. My brother really needed to start his own life at some point. Preferably before he was fifty. I totally owed him too much already. He’d been a godsend through all of this, but I couldn’t keep holding him back. The man was still a virgin, for fuck’s sake!

  Okay, Eli, breathe.

  Maybe Matt could help me. That was an option now, right? I mean, sure, I’d gotten mad at him earlier, but he was new to this whole parenting thing. It was unfair of me to expect him to be perfect at it from the get-go. Jake was going to survive his run-in with Matt’s family, and I’d just have to take a firmer stand on the whole matter in the future. For Jake and for this baby. If I was having a baby.

  But if I was having a baby, could I seriously expect a CEO to spend a lot of time with it? No, his family raised their kids by hiring other people to do that for them. It wasn’t generally a bad thing to get a little help, but they were really overdoing it. I was not going to hand over my baby like that.

  If I was having a baby.

  Dear Lord, what was taking Griff so long?

  I got up and started pacing again. By the time my brother came back from the drugstore, I’d almost walked a pattern into the rug, and not a very pretty one.

  “You’re back!” I snatched the paper bag he was holding out of his hand.

  He grabbed it back from me. “That’s my cupcakes!”

  “You went to get cupcakes?” While I’d been sitting here worrying? “Where did you even get those?”

  “I have my sources.” Was he blushing? Where had he been? My brother was becoming a mystery to me, lately. I wasn’t at all surprised that he had someone to go to for sugary snacks—they were his drugs—but someone who made him blush like that?

  Interesting.

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  “No one, okay? Don’t look at me like that.” He pushed a smaller bag at me that I hadn’t seen at first. “Go take your test.”

  “Okay, okay.” If it was important, I’d find out about this guy sooner or later. “Wish me luck.”

  “Are we wishing for baby or no baby?”

  I opened my mouth, the reply I wanted to give on the tip of my tongue, but it wouldn’t come out. “Just wish me good luck,” I said in the end.
>
  He stepped up to me and squeezed my shoulder. “Good luck, bro!”

  I saw him start to dig into his cupcakes as I made my way to the bathroom. God, why hadn’t I checked the date on the condoms? Such a stupid mistake!

  Closing the door to the bathroom behind myself, I got ready to find out whether those condoms had doomed me to another pregnancy. It wasn’t that I never wanted another child, but this so wasn’t the right time. Not while Matt was taking on new responsibilities and I wanted to go back to school. Not while I wasn’t sure if we could even make this relationship work after all. So much had happened between us. So many things left unsaid for too long. Perhaps the worlds we lived in truly were too different.

  But none of that mattered if this test turned out to be positive. Then we’d have to find a way to work alongside each other even if only as co-parents. No matter what I’d said earlier, I was never going to repeat the decision I’d made in the past. Keeping Jake from Matt had been a mistake. I knew that. I was just angry. And scared, in a way, of what was going to happen if that horrible family got their hands on him.

  The thirty seconds I had to wait for the test result were the worst. I was convinced there was some sort of spell on these stupid test sticks that made time slow down while they did their thing.

  And then when the thirty seconds were finally up, I couldn’t make myself look. Like the chicken I was, I took the test stick and took it downstairs without peeking at the result.

  My brother was still in the living room, face full of questions.

  I held the stick out to him. “You tell me. I can’t look.”

  “Okay, let me see.” He took the stick from me.

  I bit my lip and lowered my eyes to the floor. Griff didn’t say anything. Why wasn’t he saying anything? I raised my eyes again and the look on his face spoke volumes.

  Fuck.

  “I’m pregnant, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, man.”

  I took a deep breath. And another one.

  I was having another baby.

  But I couldn’t panic, yet. No, I had to…

  Griff stopped me as I turned to leave the room. “Hey, where are you going?”

  “I have to call Matt.”

  34

  Matthew

  It felt weird to sit at my late father’s desk. It was a huge mahogany thing that seemed entirely too big, even considering the heaps of documents scattered across it. The room still had this faint smell of tobacco that I always associated with my father, even though no one had smoked in here in a while. Briefly, I entertained the thought of fishing a cigar out of the desk’s drawer and lighting up myself, but I’d never smoked, and I wasn’t going to start now. Not even in memory of a dead man.

  No, I was here to get some work done, if only to distract myself from everything else in my life.

  I was looking through some of the papers on the desk when my cell phone rang. Looked like Eli wanted to talk. I found myself hoping that it was to apologize as I answered the call.

  “Hey, it’s me,” Eli said. “I know we were fighting and all, but I’ve got something important to tell you.”

  “Yeah?” I leaned forward, propping my elbows on my father’s large desk. “Did something happen to Jake?”

  “No, Jake’s fine. He’s asleep.” Eli let out a sigh which sounded a little like he was glad children needed to sleep occasionally.

  “If it’s not Jake, what did you want to talk about? Is this about us? Because I’m sorry about—”

  “I’m sorry too,” Eli cut me off. “I shouldn’t have said what I did. I know what I did was wrong.”

  “But were you saying the truth? Is that really why you didn’t tell me? Because you thought I couldn’t handle it? Because you didn’t want me to be your child’s father?”

  Eli didn’t respond immediately, which let me know there was at least some truth to what he’d said, even if he’d said it in anger.

  “Eli? Say something please.”

  After another moment, he did. “It’s more complicated than that,” he said. “I mean, yes, you being this high society alpha and me being… me added to my insecurities, but that wasn’t all of it.” He sounded deflated somehow. “I love you, Matt. I did then and I do now, but there’s just some things…Initially I didn’t tell you because I was young and stupid and I had myself convinced that I would ruin both our lives. And then over time I also convinced myself that Jake and I wouldn’t fit into your world. But that wasn’t because I believed you would be a horrible father or anything. I see now that I only did that to reassure myself that I was doing the right thing, even when I knew I wasn’t. And I’m so sorry. And I don’t know if we can really get past this. I betrayed you.”

  I wasn’t sure where even to start responding to all that. Was this really the kind of conversation we should be having over the phone? “I know you’re sorry,” I said. “And I love you too.” With all my heart. “And I think that we should talk in person.”

  “You’re probably right. It’s not just that, though. There’s something else I need to tell you.”

  “Something else?”

  “Yeah, um… Are you sitting down? You might want to be sitting down for this.”

  “You’re scaring me a little bit,” I tried to joke, even though he was really making me wonder.

  “You remember when we had sex at my place?”

  A grin stole its way onto my face. “How could I forget?”

  “Well, I understand if you’re going to hate me for this, but those condoms we used? Two years past their expiry date.”

  For a second there, my heart stopped beating. If the condoms were old, that meant they might not have worked. And if they didn’t work then… We’d had unprotected sex. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I just took the test a minute ago. I’m pregnant.”

  My mouth went dry. I didn’t know what to say. What to feel. “That’s… Wow. We’re going to have another child?” A myriad of emotions washed over me like a tsunami. Joy and fear and worry and excitement and love and… so many others that I couldn’t even name.

  “Yeah,” Eli said, voice soft. “We’re going to have another child.”

  “Holy shit.”

  I heard the smile in Eli’s voice as he replied. “That sums it up well.”

  I laughed. And then I opened the drawer and lit myself a cigar.

  Holy shit, I couldn’t help but repeat in my head.

  35

  Elias

  Matt and I agreed to meet in person the next day. We got Griff to watch Jake while Matt finally took me to that fancy restaurant he’d been talking about. Even in my best clothes, I felt way under-dressed as the waiter showed us to our table while classical music played in the background. I didn’t have a tailored suit like everyone else here seemed to. Matt looked stunning in his, of course. Not that he didn’t always look stunning. There was a reason I’d been captivated by this alpha from the moment I’d laid eyes on him—and it wasn’t only his smell and the fact that he’d had a puppy in his lap. Looking at him, I could almost forget what had brought us here tonight. Hell, I almost wanted to jump his bones and see if we couldn’t make another baby.

  Better not, though.

  Be cool, Eli, you’re in an upscale restaurant.

  “You look really nice tonight,” I told Matt as I sat at our table.

  “Thanks. So do you.” He gave me a smile as he took the seat opposite me.

  The waiter handed us our menus and left. I couldn’t find any prices listed in mine. “How do you know what anything costs at this place?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “I’ve been wanting to take you out like this forever. I don’t want you to think about money tonight.”

  I looked around the restaurant with all its glitz and glamour. The only way it could have screamed money any louder would have been if the floors and the plates had been made of gold. “Kind of hard not to think about money in a place like thi
s,” I admitted.

  Matt reached out over the table and stroked his thumb over the back of my hand. “I’ll think of ways to distract you, then.” The grin on his face was almost devilish.

  It was so weird to be out with him like this, in public. Weird, but also kind of nice.

  “I don’t want us to hide anymore,” he said, as if he could read my thoughts.

  “No, this is… This is nice. I could just never picture us together in a place like this. I still have to wrap my head around everything that’s happened.”

  “Well, I didn’t expect to be the father of two children so soon.” Matt squeezed my hand.

  “How do you feel about that?” I asked, because I hadn’t gotten too much out of him over the phone.

  “Honestly? I’m kind of looking forward to it.”

  His words made me smile in relief. “Yeah?” At least that was good.

  “Yeah, the pregnancy, getting to meet this little guy or girl, seeing them grow up. All of it.”

  “You’re looking forward to the pregnancy?” I raised an eyebrow at him.

  He grinned again. “Well, if you must know, ever since I found out that you’ve been pregnant with my child and I missed it, I’ve been wondering what a pregnant you looks like.”

  “Fat,” I said, laughing. “Seriously, that’s what you fantasize about?” Well, at least I didn’t have to worry about him leaving me when my body changed.

  “Yes, that’s what I fantasize about,” Matt said with absolutely no shame. “I’m sure you’re going to look amazing.”

  I gave him small smile. “Well, if you think so.” I glanced at the menu. “Is it really okay to order anything?”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  My smile grew. “Good. Because you know I’m eating for two now.” And pregnancy turned me into an absolute glutton. I ordered at least three things off the menu. The gnocchi, some other pasta dish that I couldn’t pronounce and the filet mignon. Matt meanwhile stuck to a simple order of chicken parmigiana and seemed to take great joy in watching me shovel food into my mouth in a manner that did probably not make me look classy enough to be in this place.