Chapter Twenty-Three
Nixon
Did I? Fuck no. It was the last thing I wanted to do—to confess to them that I had been breaking their trust. They were going to see it as me putting our sweet baby in danger when it was the opposite. I was protecting them, making the world a safe place to live in.
Except I wasn’t making them safer—I was going in circles, achieving little to no success, and inadvertently pushing my alphas away.
“Not really.” I sighed, leaving the toasted bagel be as I walked to the chair. I could feel their eyes glued to me, and the tension intensified with each step. “You’re going to be mad.” Of course, they were. I would be, too. Shit, I was mad at me.
“And you think keeping us in the dark avoids that end?” Titus grabbed his bag off the counter. I knew what was next and preemptively pushed up my sleeve.
My stupid blood pressure had been inching up, and he had feared I was at risk for preeclampsia. Every time I looked the slightest bit agitated, he seemed to like to whip it out. On numerous occasions, I suggested he whip something else out. I had a feeling this was not an occasion where he’d find the humor.
“I’m fine.” I didn’t know why I bothered. I never convinced him to not test it.
As the cuff wrapped around my forearm, I watched Randy’s face intently.
He’d been the one to question me about the ticket. Ugh, why did I leave it where they could find it?
Mates
Damn bear was right. Because they were my mates and hiding anything from them was wrong.
I sat silently as Titus did his thing, knowing that when I spoke while he took it, my numbers went up—just a tiny bit, but at any increase, his brow wrinkled with worry, and I very much did not need that, not when I was the cause of all of his worries. My arm squeezed tightly—more tightly than normal, and I knew it was bad.
“Do I even want to know?” I asked as he opened the pressure relief thingy and the last of the air wooshed out.
“How about we take a little trip to Distance?” he said calmly. Far too calmly.
“Titus,” Randy all but growled.
“It’s just a little higher than I’d like, and with him being pregnant, I prefer a healer to my kind of medicine.”
I could taste the lie.
“How high?” It had to be really insanely high for him to want to skip straight to the healer.
He looked at Randy, not me. Fuck.
“I have been investigating why I was sold and my family was killed. I got a lead from my old neighbor, Mrs. Juniper, about Professor Anvil and was seeing what else I could find out. I thought if I could put this all to bed, I could make it safe to have this baby.” I just spat it all out even as the growls in both their chests grew. Not that I could expect them to be anything but pissed. I needed them to understand. “I never let myself be in harm’s way. I just did research.”
Their growls grew.
“I love you,” I added on for good measure. It was true. I loved both of them and our baby more than I knew it was possible to love anyone.
Randy walked over, scooped me out of the chair, and carried me into the bedroom—and not at all in a sexy way. He laid me on the bed and stalked to the dresser as Titus entered and tossed a pair of pajamas he snagged from the drawer to me.
“Titus, call Samson and ask him to come here. Double whatever compensation he asks for. I need our omega here and safe.”
It was as if I wasn’t even in the freaking room. I silently changed as they went back and forth trying to decide what to do with me, not once asking my opinion.
“Alphas?” And, yeah, I called them alpha. hoping it would increase my odds of them answering me.
“I will call. You keep him calm.”
Again, as if I weren’t in the room, and it didn’t even feel as if they were angry—no this was 100 percent worried if I was to guess, and somehow that was a bazillion times worse.
Randy came over, wrapping his arms around me in a tender hug, completely unfitting the mood and tension in the room, before helping me undress. “Please, mate. Please promise me you will not put yourself in harm’s way again. The thought of something happening to you is unbearable, and now, with your condition, it is especially important.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
And that was when my ears picked up Titus’s conversation. “One ninety over 108.” And then none of his words made sense. I knew very little about blood pressure and safe numbers, but when mine got to 130 over 85, Titus began to worry, and these numbers far surpassed those.
Next thing I knew, he was sitting on the edge of the bed, his little cuff in hand. “Samson is coming. He is hoping it is situational.” Titus yanked his shirt over his head, dropping the cuff thingy on the bed. “Randy.” He spoke as a command, and while I had no idea what his unspoken commandment was, Randy began to remove his shirt, signaling to me that he had heard it.
“So, he thinks it will go away when the baby is born?” I clarified before counting the weeks left—too many, given the numbers I’d just heard.
“No, he proposes that your keeping things from us and putting yourself in harm’s way is causing it to spike higher than your body naturally would. He suggests we lay with you, skin to skin, and discuss things rationally.” At that, Randy removed his jeans, and Titus began to remove the clothing Randy had so tenderly placed on me, and within a minute, the three of us were in bed together.
“I won’t do it anymore.” And I meant it. The burden that fell off me as I told them was a clear indication that hiding it from them was the worst thing I could’ve done for not only me and the baby, but for them. “We need to do something, though.”
I snuggled into Titus, Randy doing the same to me until I was ensconced between them.
“We do. I have a friend, a lawyer—and he has some connections, shall we say. I will call him tomorrow.” Randy used his this is the end of the conversation tone I’d grown to know well, which was fine by me.
We lay like that in silence, until my stomach decided it had other ideas and gurgled ever so unsexily.
“Bagel?” Randy asked as he started to rise.
“Please.”
He sat up, wrapping me with the covers as he did.
“Wait, maybe make that three?”
His laughter belted out of him as he walked out of the room, and Titus reached for his damn cuff.
“We already know it sucks monkey balls.” I sighed.
“The only balls you are to be sucking belong to your two mates—bear mates at that.”
“It was a figure of speech. I don’t even know monkey shifters.”
He settled the cuff on my arm and shook his head when I went to sit up. He filled it with air, and it hurt less than earlier and stayed filled longer. I crossed my fingers that was a good sign.
“Omega ours, when did you start looking into things? Did it maybe coincide with when your blood pressure started going up?”
“Huh. I think it did. So, this was all my fault?” I officially was the worst papa ever, causing my child harm when I was trying to protect him. “So, the baby?” I dared not ask the question on my heart, scared of the answer.
“Your blood pressure is 120 over 75. Not magnificent, but well within the normal range. See what you had been doing by hiding and playing James Bond on us?”
“Bagels are almost toasted,” Randy called from the kitchen. “Cream cheese?”
“Yes please,” I hollered back and turned to Titus. “No more of that. I need this babe safe. How much harm have I caused him?” I finally spoke the words.
“None, all is well. Well enough I can call off Samson unless you want his reassurance.”
I nodded.
“Then he shall be here to tell you the same and possibly to limit your daily bagel intake to less than a dozen,” I teased.
“I have had only five today.”
“Plus three.”
“Which makes four a piece. I’m golden.” I leaned over and kissed him on the cheek as my bagels arrived, feeling so much lighter than I had only a few hours earlier. I needed to learn to trust my gut instinct to trust my mates. They deserved that from me. They deserved everything.