I don’t know why I was surprised that my family ruined the moment; it was hardly the first time.

My stomach sank when my mother stepped inside and saw us, followed a moment later by my brother.  Ethan’s gaze swept over the two of us and finally landed on me, harsh, condemning.  Maybe Chris and I hadn’t actually been kissing… but it was pretty clear that what they had walked in on wasn’t innocuous.

I dropped my hand from Chris’s cheek but didn’t let him go entirely, raising my chin and meeting my brother’s glare without shame.  He didn’t expect me to challenge him; his eyes widened a fraction in surprise, then narrowed again.

“What’s this?” my mother asked with an utterly unconvincing sweetness in her voice.  She looked pointedly from me to Chris and back to me again, waiting for an answer.

A flush crept up Chris’s neck.  “I… um.”  He pulled his hand out of mine and pressed his palms against his belly—a gesture meant to reassure himself, I suspected.  “N-nothing happened.”

Ethan made a disgusted noise.  “Sure.”  The single word made Chris shiver, though I wasn’t sure if it was because my brother’s voice or the snowy air blowing in through the open door behind them was colder.  But Ethan had never been one to wrap himself in cold fury; I could see the ice melting, giving way to red-hot anger.  “I can’t fucking believe you,” he snapped.  For a moment I thought the comment was directed at me, but then his gaze shifted over to Chris, pinning him in place.

Chris opened and closed his mouth once, twice, at a loss for words.  “Me?” he said finally, and something in his voice made me turn away from my brother to look at him.  Chris rose slowly to his feet, hands balled into fists at his sides now. 

I stood too, reaching out to lay a supportive hand on one of the omega’s arms; he jerked away without looking at me, focused entirely on my brother.

Ethan’s lip curled even further.  “You heard me.  Pregnancy doesn’t affect your hearing, does it?”

Footsteps sounded behind us.  My father, no doubt drawn to the sound of raised voices echoing down the hallway to his office.  He stopped behind me to observe, but I didn’t dare look at him; Chris’s brief summary of what my father had said to him was enough to make me see red when it came to him.  I couldn’t believe he was trying to throw money at Chris to make him go away.  Well, no—I could believe it, and that was exactly the problem.

“Perhaps we should move elsewhere,” my mother said stiffly.  She may not have been pleased to walk into the house and find me and Chris curled up together in such an intimate moment, but she could still tell that this was a powder keg ready to blow.

“No,” Chris and Ethan both snapped at the same time.  They glared at each other, derision writ clear on my brother’s face.  

“Did you have your father try to buy me off?” Chris demanded.  

My brother hesitated just long enough to render his answer unnecessary.  “Yes,” he said, raising his chin in a silent challenge for Chris to call him on it.

Another day, another time, I would have believed that Chris would walk away… but not now, not when he glared at the father of his child so ferociously, eyes shining with furious tears that Chris blinked away with a scowl.  My heart tore at the expression on his face.  All I wanted was to wrap him in my arms and steal him away to someplace where he didn’t have to deal with any of this, but I knew he wouldn’t let me.

“So, this is what ‘doing the right thing’ looks like, does it?” Chris snapped, voice rising.  “Avoiding me.  Refusing to deal with the fact that we’re having a baby in less than a month.  Sleeping around behind my back and not even having the balls to tell me to my face?  Dragging me here so your parents could treat me like shit and not saying a single fucking word in my defense?”

“It’s not my fault you’re pregnant,” my brother shot back, color rising.

“Bullshit,” I snarled.  This wasn’t my fight, but I refused to stand there and say nothing while my brother—hell, my whole family—acted like Chris was the one to blame for all this.

“Well, you’re probably an expert on that.  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s spread his legs for you already.  He certainly did for me fast enough,” Ethan sneered, glaring fiercely at me; if our parents weren’t there, I had no doubt he would have thrown a punch.

To hell with our parents.  I took a step forward, intending to literally beat my brother to the punch.  He had no right to talk about Chris that way, not after how he’d been treating him.  It wasn’t love making my brother react the way he was, after seeing the way Chris and I looked at each other; his pride had simply been wounded, so he lashed out the only way he knew how.

Chris thrust an arm out to stop me, stepping in front of me.  I would have thought it was so he could defend himself… until I saw his face.  He visibly struggled to hold himself together, wincing almost imperceptibly when one tear slipped down his cheek, then another.  

“This is highly improper,” my mother interjected, though no one was paying attention to her; Chris and my brother glared at each other, I watched Chris, and my father observed everything from behind us in silence, his displeasure palpable without me even having to look at him.

When Chris spoke, there was so much raw hurt in his voice that I felt my own heart squeeze.  “What happened?” he asked, voice incredibly quiet after the way he had been yelling a moment earlier.  He rested his hands on his belly, tears coursing freely down his cheeks.  “When I told you I was pregnant, you were excited. Happy. I stayed with you because you said you wanted kids.  So what happened?”

If I needed any confirmation that my brother didn’t have any feelings for Chris, his next words were it.  “I do want kids,” Ethan snapped, “just not with you.”

Chris recoiled like he’d been hit, face stricken.  He stared at Ethan for just a moment, then turned his head to look at the rest of us.  My mother sniffed and fiddled with her hands, clearly trying to pretend like none of this was happening while simultaneously wishing Chris had never stepped foot into our home in the first place; my father looked as though he’d found something particularly unsavory on the bottom of his boot, only that unsavory thing was a person.  A person whose heart was bigger than the rest of my family put together.  A person who deserved to be loved, not treated like an unwanted burden.

He didn’t look at me.  Maybe he couldn’t.  Maybe he was afraid of what he would see if he did.  Either way, all Chris did was shake his head, make a noise that was part humorless laugh and part sob, and head for the door.

“Chris!  Chris, wait,” I called.  He didn’t listen, vanishing wordlessly into the whirl of snow blowing past the door without looking back.

There was no way I was going to let him leave like that.  I headed after him immediately, determined to see him back inside where it was warm and safe.  If he wanted to leave, we could do that—but Chris had walked out the door in a T-shirt and tennis shoes, straight into a nor’easter doing its best to become a blizzard.  That would have been a bad idea for anyone, but Chris both was pregnant and very unused to actual winter weather.  He was hurt and angry; he wouldn’t be stopping to consider how quickly his body would lose heat, and I had no idea how a pregnancy would affect that.  I forgot everything and everyone else in that moment, fixated only on getting Chris back inside.

My brother stepped into my path three feet from the door.

I glared at him as the air and snow crystals blowing in from outside brushed past us.  “Don’t think I’m done with you,” my brother snarled.

“Move,” I hissed, furious. I could have spent an hour telling my brother exactly what I thought of him, but I didn’t have the time.

“Boys,” my father snapped, the word a clear command to stand down.

We both ignored him.  “You’ve always wanted what’s mine.  You just had to take him too, didn’t you?  Pathetic,” my brother sneered, folding his arms across his chest and planting his feet.

I could have pointed out that it shouldn’t matter if I had feelings for Chris because Ethan had made it more than clear that he didn’t, but I was too angry for that.  Every second Chris was out there was another second he was in danger, and nothing—and no one—was going to stop me from saving him.  “Ethan, if you don’t get the fuck out of my way, I’m going to lay you flat.”  I clenched my fists and shifted my feet slightly, settling into a better stance.  We hadn’t fought in years; older and bigger, Ethan had almost always won.  But that was then; this was now.

Now I wasn’t just fighting for me.  

Now I had someone precious to protect.

“Boys, you will not act like this in front of your father,” my mother cried, voice shrill.  She stared at us with wide eyes, wringing her hands in distress and completely oblivious to the part she had played in all of this.  All her bags of loot from her shopping trip had fallen to the floor at her feet, and a couple of small wrapped presents had tumbled out of the bag.

Looking at those presents out of the corner of my eye, I snorted.  An apt metaphor for our family, wasn’t it?  So concerned with what it looked like from the outside that whatever was inside didn’t matter.  My parents were willing—eager, even—to cast an incredible man aside, just because he didn’t fit what they deemed to be an “acceptable” omega.  Oh, how people would gossip if they found out that Victoria and Preston Denholm’s son was bonded to someone like him.  After all, Chris was only a service industry employee, not the scion of an old money family.  It didn’t matter that he was kind and sweet and funny and patient.  It didn’t matter that he was going to be an amazing father to his daughter.  He wasn’t good enough for my parents, so he wasn’t good enough for my brother.  They didn’t even seem concerned that Chris was out there right now, alone and freezing—though they’d surely care if the headlines splashed across tomorrow’s newspaper were about the omega who they’d casually let die in a snowstorm.

My anger at my family drained away.  They didn’t deserve it; all they deserved was my pity, because they refused to see the incredible gift they’d been given and so carelessly cast aside.

And right now, that gift needed my help.

I took another step toward the door, then stopped.  I’d just been lazing around the house before all this had happened, so I wasn’t wearing shoes or anything thicker than a light sweater.  Though it killed me to take the extra time, I had to go get shoes, a proper coat, and my phone; I wouldn’t be any help to Chris if I went dashing off after him unprepared. 

My brother demanded to know where I was going as I turned and swept past my father; I ignored both Ethan and my father’s commands to stop and obey him as I darted up the stairs toward my room.  It only took a few seconds to shove my feet into a sturdy pair of boots, throw on my jacket, and shove my wallet and phone into my pockets. 

I snatched up my keys at the last second and took off for the garage, hoping to avoid my family.  Need to protect Chris burned through me like a fire; I didn’t want to spend a second longer without him safe and sound in my arms.

My father was no fool; he had already planted himself in front of the door to the garage by the time I got there, arms folded across his chest and gaze stern.  “Where do you think you’re going, son?” he asked, and I wasn’t fooled by how calm his voice sounded.

“I’m going to get Chris,” I said just as calmly, squeezing my keys a little. The slight pain as one of them dug into my palm was a good reminder to stay focused on my goal.

“You will stay,” my father commanded.  “I’ve already sent the maid out to retrieve him; we can’t have him freezing to death, after all.”

I stared at him as though he was a stranger.  How many years had I spent trying to win his approval—hell, trying to win something so small as a smile?  Too many.  He was wrong about this; they all were.

“Her name is Mary—which you’d know if you bothered to talk to her, instead of treating her like a second-class citizen unworthy of your attention.  And I am going.  Chris isn’t a problem you can just pay to go away—he’s a person.  A kind, amazing person.  He deserves better than you. And you know what? So do I.”

My father’s jaw clenched; I’d touched the nerve I’d been going for, all right.  “I forbid it,” he boomed.  

Shaking my head, I brushed past my father.  For so many years, I’d been afraid of hearing those words from him, afraid of seeing this sort of condemnation on his face, afraid of doing anything to engender his disapproval—even if that was all I ever seemed to get.  But now, I realized I didn’t care anymore.  Family was supposed to support you and love you, not… whatever this was.

“You can’t stop me,” I told him over my shoulder, and slammed the garage door behind me.