“This is really good,” I said in between bites.
“It is,” he agreed, cutting into his chicken. He wasn’t eating half as quickly as I was. In fact, he seemed to have something on his mind.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“Oh, yes. Everything’s fine. No reason to worry.” He smiled at me, but I wasn’t convinced.
“Are you really fine with everything that’s going on? I know it’s a lot to take. And we still have so much to talk about.”
“I am. And I know that. But I also know that I love you, and that we’ll make it through whatever life throws our way just as long as we stick together. I know it’s more than just alpha-omega instincts between us.”
I tilted my head. “You know, sometimes I do worry that it’s all hormones.” He smelled so good tonight. Part of me just wanted to rub myself on him.
“Phone sex,” he said, a twinkle in his eyes. “You couldn’t smell me then, could you?”
“No, just the sound of your voice…” And that had been enough. I sighed. He was right; I was in deep.
“It’s okay,” Matt said, stroking my leg with his foot underneath the table in a way that made me hunger for more contact. “I feel the same way about you. And once we’re done with the main course, I have a surprise for you.”
“A surprise?” What could it be? I made myself eat faster, even though I hadn’t thought that was possible.
When I was done, Matt took me to the outdoors area of the restaurant. It had a glass wall as well as ceiling so it wasn’t really outside, but you could see the lights from the harbor in the distance and the night sky above you. One table was set with cake for us—all the others were empty.
“I’ve had them clear out the area,” Matt said.
I didn’t even want to think about what that must have cost. “I thought you wanted everybody to see us.”
“True. But for some moments, privacy is nice. Come, sit.” He pulled out a chair for me and I lowered myself into it.
“This is the surprise?” I asked. “It’s beautiful here.”
He smiled and shook his head. “This isn’t the surprise. This is. Watch.” He pointed up at the sky. I looked. At first, I didn’t see anything, but then, the fireworks started up. My eyes grew wide.
“Did you—”
“Shhh. Just enjoy the moment.”
I did. I enjoyed it immensely. The fireworks lit up the sky in red and yellow and orange sparkles and flowers and even hearts. And I couldn’t help but think of that one time we’d stolen away together during the town’s summer festival, when everyone was watching the fireworks and no one paid us any mind. We’d run to one of his family’s yachts and watched the spectacle from there. I remembered wishing back then that I could just sail away with him.
I’d never have imagined it possible that I’d get my own private fireworks show from him one day.
“Oh, Matt. This is too much.”
“Keep looking up,” he said.
And the moment I looked back to the sky, I saw a question written among the stars. The question.
Will you marry me?
“Oh my God.” My heart stopped still. I looked back at Matt—who’d gone down on one knee beside me, holding a small jewelry box in his hands. “What are you doing?” I asked. I knew of course. I just couldn’t believe it. “Matt—”
He gave me a smile and put a finger on my lips. “I’m doing exactly what I should have been doing years ago. Just listen for a moment, okay?”
I nodded. Too astonished to do anything else.
He took a deep breath, and then he spoke. “I know I’ve already said that I love you, but I feel it can’t be said enough. The years I’ve spent without you have been miserable. I never want to leave you again. I want to raise our children together. I want to wake up next to you every morning. I want you to be mine in every way that you can be mine, and I want to be yours. Elias Stevens, will you do me the honor of marrying me?”
I stared at Matt, heart beating a mile a minute. Did he really just ask me to marry him? In the stars and on his knee? “Of course I’ll marry you!”
He let out a breath. “Oh thank God, I was getting really nervous for a second there.”
I laughed, and then I leaned down and kissed him. He ran his hand into my hair and kissed me back, and I was sure that I was the happiest omega in all of Oceanport.
36
Elias
The next few weeks were the best of my life. Matt was busy with his new job, yes, but he still spent as much time as he could over at my place. He told me this was a) because he wanted Jake to get used to his presence, and b) because he just couldn’t get enough of me. He underlined the last point by kissing me every chance he got. Something else, he said, that people needed to get used to.
I did stop him from undressing me in our living room, though. Way too public as long as I was still living with my brother. But we were already talking about moving to a different place—together. We’d be staying in town, but we wanted a house that was ours. A place we could do whatever we liked… as long as the kids weren’t around, anyway. But we also agreed that we couldn’t start looking at places before we’d talked to Jake about everything.
Which we decided to do about a month after Matt proposed to me. I was almost at the end of my first trimester and we figured it was best to talk to him before he started asking why Daddy was getting so fat.
Together, we fetched him from school one day and took him out to a park where he could run around with Fiona and tire himself out a bit before we had our conversation. That had been Matt’s idea, but it wasn’t a bad one. He really understood energetic little alphas, and I loved seeing the two of them together. Especially when Jake asked Matt to race him and Fiona, and Matt just couldn’t say no.
Both of them returned to me all red in the face after a few minutes. I laughed, and decided my kid had probably run enough.
I handed both of my boys a cookie when they sat on the bench with me while sneaking Fiona a treat. Funny enough, the old dog was the only one not breathing hard. “Good girl,” I said, petting her. Then I turned to Jake, who’d hopped on the bench next to me, letting his feet dangle in the air. “Matt and I need to talk to you about something.”
“Yeah?” He eyed Matt and me suspiciously while nibbling on his cookie. “Am I in trouble?”
I ruffled his hair. “You’re not in trouble.”
“Then what?” Fiona rested her head on Jake’s knees and he put a piece of his cookie in her mouth, even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to do that. But this once, I let it slide.
“You know how Matt and I are a couple?”
He tilted his head, as if wondering why I was asking such a stupid question. “Yeah.”
“Well, we were thinking about making it official.” Matt grabbed my hand as I said this, while Jake continued to look at me curiously.
“But you already told everyone. You even kissed in front of my school.” He made a face. I wasn’t going to apologize, though. As his daddy, embarrassing him every now and then was part of my job.
Matt took over. “What your daddy is trying to say is that we’d like to get married.”
“Oh.” Jake’s eyes widened. “Does that mean you’ll get a huge cake like Tommy’s mom did last year?”
“Yeah,” I said. “There’ll be cake.”
“But will it be huge?”
I glanced at Matt. “I’m sure we can arrange that.”
“Yay! When are you getting married?” Jake asked like he couldn’t wait.
I licked my lips. “We haven’t settled on a date yet, but we thought doing it in the summer might be nice.” On top of giving us a little time because spring had only just started.
“Oh, then there should be ice cream too,” Jake suggested. “Cause it’ll be hot.”
“Like you need it to be hot to want ice cream,” I joked. “We just really wanted to talk to you about this because we’ll also be moving together when we’re marrie
d. All three of us. I want to make sure you’re okay with that.”
“Three?” He looked skeptical. “Does that mean Uncle Griff isn’t coming with us?”
“No.” I put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Uncle Griff needs to live alone for a while. But he’ll come visit. And you can visit him anytime you want. We’re not leaving town.”
“Oh. Okay, then. He should get a piece of the cake, though.”
“He will.”
“Okay.” Jake nodded once, apparently satisfied.
I inhaled. “There is… one more thing.” I looked to Matt, who gave me a reassuring smile.
“There’s more?” Jake asked.
“You’re going to be a big brother,” Matt said, before I could get another word in.
Jake seemed suspicious. “A big brother?”
“Yes, in a few months, you’ll have a baby brother or a baby sister.”
“Tommy got a baby sister.” Jake grimaced. “He says babies are stupid and cry a lot.”
Ugh. Part of me wanted to strangle Tommy for making this hard on me, but Matt took over the conversation before I could get too upset.
“Babies cry because they don’t know better,” he said. “They’re these helpless little things that can’t even talk. They can’t really do much. They can’t run like we just did. They can’t even walk until they’re almost a year old.”
“Do they cry because they’re so bored?” Jake asked.
“No, they cry because they need our help and our protection.”
Finally I could see where Matt was going with this, trying to appeal to Jake’s alpha instincts to get him on board. Pretty clever, actually. I wouldn’t have thought of that, at least not so quickly. It was nice not being alone in figuring this stuff out.
“I can protect them,” Jake said, puffing out his chest and totally taking the bait.
“I know.” Matt nodded. “The baby will be lucky to have a strong big brother like you.”
“I am strong.” Jake beamed and jumped off the bench. “I can lift Fiona!”
I pulled him back by the arm. “But you won’t.” I couldn’t let everything slide. “She’s an old lady and you need to be gentle with her.”
“Okay. But I could!”
“I’m sure you could.” Matt stood up as well. “Race you again? First to the swing set!” And as soon as he’d spoken, he started running.
“Unfair!” Jake yelled, trying to catch up.
I stayed behind laughing, feeling in my bones that everything was going to be just fine somehow. Having another baby wasn’t what I’d planned, and it put a stop to my dreams of returning to college, but I was used to life interfering with my plans. I wasn’t going to feel bitter about it. What was the point?
Over the next few weeks, we tried hard to include Jake in everything that was going on. We took him to see the house we wanted to buy—which was gorgeous, two stories, huge backyard and just outside town. We let him help pick out some toys for the baby—and made sure to buy him one as well. We even took him along to a doctor’s visit so he could see his new sibling on an ultrasound—which he actually found pretty exciting.
The only thing that bothered him was that we didn’t want to find out the gender before birth, but we weren’t going to budge on that. I wanted there to be an element of surprise.
In the first week of May, just around the time I was really starting to show, Matt announced our engagement in the local newspaper. It was a little bit embarrassing when I went grocery shopping that day and every other person stopped to congratulate me. Especially knowing that many of these people had been talking about me behind my back not too long ago. But Matt said I should be proud, and I tried to be, answering everyone with a smile before excusing myself to get on with my day.
I came home a little bit exhausted from my shopping trip, and Griff laughed at me as I huffed, putting the groceries away. “You try being pregnant and running errands!” I told him. “Actually I’m really looking forward to the day it’ll be you in my place.” I tossed him an apple and he caught it.
“Not for a long time!” he said. Then, “Is it really so bad?”
“Not the pregnancy so much.” I wiped some sweat from my forehead. “But it’s like everyone in town suddenly loves me. Super weird.”
“Ah yeah. I saw your thing in the paper. I can’t believe he took out a whole page. Must have cost him a fortune.”
“I guess money doesn’t really matter to you when you have as much as he does.” I lowered myself in a chair and let the rest of the groceries be for a moment.
“And I guess he must really want everyone to know that this baby is going to be legitimate.”
What? I stared at Griff, mouth half-open. Was that really what this was? No, it couldn’t be. Could it? How hadn’t this thought occurred to me before?
Griff rubbed the back of his neck. “Did I say something wrong? I just figured that’s what you guys wanted. I mean, you did get engaged the day after you found out you were pregnant.”
“You know I don’t care about legitimacy!”
He shrugged, the gesture almost apologetic. “I know you don’t.”
I cringed. Because what he was saying made sense, and I didn’t want it to. This baby’s legitimacy status was not why Matt had proposed to me. Was it?
Only one way to find out.
I grabbed my phone.
37
Matthew
Eli sounded upset when I answered the phone. “Is something the matter?” I asked, sitting in my dad’s office. These days I spent so much time with Eli and Jake that I had to pour every other minute I had into work just to stay caught up.
“We need to meet.” There was a certain urgency to Eli’s tone that worried me.
“Did something happen? Is Jake alright?”
“Jake’s fine, just meet me!”
“Okay.” I glanced at the clock that hung on the wall above the door. It was still early evening. “Would you like to go eat something?”
“No, I’m not hungry. Just…Let’s meet by the playground in the park, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, really worried now that Eli didn’t want food. So far, he’d been ravenous for this whole pregnancy.
Leaving the office and the mansion behind, I made my way to the town’s park. The playground was mostly deserted, but Eli was already waiting for me when I got there. And he looked tense. Absolutely beautiful with his belly getting round, but tense.
“Hey,” I said, approaching.
He looked up at the sound of my voice. “Hey. Should we walk a bit? I think I need to walk.”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s.” I took his hand and led him down the path, remembering that night we’d come here to talk. When he’d first told me about Jake all those months ago. Part of me still couldn’t believe how much my life had changed since then.
“I saw the announcement in the paper,” Eli started.
“Yeah? Did you like it?”
“It was… certainly eye-catching. You really wanted everyone to know about us, didn’t you?” He laughed, but it sounded forced.
“Eli? What’s wrong?”
He stopped walking and shook his head. “My brother just said something stupid. Like that you wanted everyone to know how this baby was going to be legitimate. Like that was why you proposed to me.”
“Is that really what you think?” I squeezed his hand. “I love you, Eli. I thought you knew that.”
“I do! But you have to agree the timing was pretty perfect. What with you proposing to me right after you found out about the baby.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath. “I’m not going to deny that hearing about the baby made me want to marry you even more. But it was not the only reason I proposed. I spent a long time living in a loveless marriage. Trust me. I would never voluntarily do that again. The reason I want to marry you is because you make me smile, because when I'm with you I feel like everything fits, like everything is going to be all right and the world is beautiful. B
ecause when I'm not with you I miss you so much it hurts. That is why I want to marry you.” I gazed into Eli's eyes, willing him to believe me. He needed to know that I didn't want to marry him for one single reason but for a million of them.
Eli grabbed both of my hands and returned my gaze. There was such longing in his eyes, but he didn't seem entirely convinced yet. “So what you're saying is that it doesn't matter to you when we get married? If we’re not getting married because of the baby the date should not matter, right?”
I bit my teeth together. He had me there. No, the baby wasn't the only reason I wanted to get married, but it was included in my reasons. Getting married before it was born would just make so many things so much easier. It would bring us a step closer to gaining the acceptance of my family. I knew that didn't matter to Eli, but it still mattered to me. But how could I tell him that now without him taking it the wrong way? I just had to try. “Of course we can get married whenever we want, but the sooner we do it the better. Don't you think so?”
“It really doesn't matter to me if we get married now or in a year. All that matters to me is that we're together.”
“You're right.” I freed one of my hands to run it through his soft hair. “We're always going to be together.” I rested my forehead against his. “But don't you see that marrying sooner rather than later could make some things a bit easier?”
“You really are thinking about the baby's legitimacy, aren't you?” Eli took a step back. “I didn't want to believe that my brother's right, but this actually matters to you.”
“Is that really such a bad thing? I want to show my family that I'm being serious. I want them to accept this baby, and I want them to accept Jake. What's wrong with that?”
Eli shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with that. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.” He sighed. “A DNA test isn’t going to help. A marriage isn’t going to help. Your family loves to look down on people like me, and once you marry me, they’ll look down on you too. That’s all that’s going to happen. I wish it was different, but it isn’t. And it scares me that you still can’t see that. If you want to please your family, you can’t marry me.”
The Omega's Secret Baby (Oceanport Omegas Book 1) Page 18