Damian pulled into the driveway in front of an older ranch-style house with a For Sale sign in front of it. “What do you think?”

I peered out the passenger window at the other houses in the neighborhood. “So far so good. Did you notice there’s only neighbors on one side?”

He nodded. “I’ll ask about the empty property on the other side. It might be worth buying just to keep the space. We could put trees on it.”

I nodded and looked down at my notes on the place, comparing them to what I was seeing. “It looks better in person.” The pictures hadn’t done the brick front any favors in the real estate listing. “I like the little spot they have out front for sitting.”

“Lots of trees,” Damian said with satisfaction and I hid a grin. He was obsessed with trees. Okay, I was a little obsessed with them too. After Nevada Ashes, all this green was a wonder and a miracle to me. Ten years in his tiny apartment made the space around this house a treasure to Damian.

I thought we’d found our home. “Let’s go in. If the inside is as nice as the outside, this could be it.”

“I’ll get the baby.” He leaned over and kissed me, just a quick brush of lips over mine, before he jumped out of the car and opened the back door. “There’s my boy,” he crooned.

“Don’t you wake him up,” I warned him as I climbed out on my side and opened the other rear door to get the baby bag out.

“He’s not going to wake up anytime soon,” Damian assured me. “He’s just like his Da, sleeps whenever he can.” He grinned, proud of his joke against me.

I laughed and shook my head. “Come on, we’re keeping the real estate agent waiting.”

The realtor met us at the front door. “Come in, you’re right on time,” and immediately started the tour.

“It’s bigger inside than it looks,” Damian whispered in my ear while the realtor droned on, and I nodded. All basically one room, with what looked like a hallway leading down to bedrooms—I liked it. The pup could play in the living room while I worked around the house—Damian assured me he made enough money that I could stay home with him for the first little while. As long as we kept our house budget reasonable. And this house was well within our budget. I’d made darn sure of that—there was nothing like being tied down with a baby nursing every two hours to give you time to research.

“This is cute,” I said, running my hands over one wall in the kitchen that had been turned into a chalkboard.

“A honey-do board,” the realtor said with a professional smile. “It’s a great place to leave notes about chores or to keep track of groceries that need to be bought.”

“I could fill that up easy,” Damian pronounced and I elbowed him, but carefully so we didn’t wake the baby.

We passed on from the kitchen, peeked into the bedrooms—pretty standard, as far as I could tell, then went down to the finished basement and out the French doors to the back yard.

I could tell as soon as we got outside that Damian was happy with it. The yard stretched away from us, ending in a row of mature trees. A fence ran down one side, separating us from the single neighbor this place had.

“What’s the story on that piece of land over there?” Damian asked, pointing at the empty lot beside us.

“Are you interested?”

Damian nodded. “Depending on the price.”

“Let me see what I can find out about it.” The glee in the realtor’s voice was impossible to miss, but I guessed if you lived off selling things, someone handing you a sale with very little work would make you excited. I knew that I’d gotten excited at easy dates when I’d been working.

“If you could,” Damian said with a nod. He put a hand around my waist and leaned in close. “What do you think?”

“I like it. I think it’s a good place to raise pups, but let’s see if we can get that land too,” I whispered back.

“You want to talk to him,” he asked, jerking his head toward the realtor, “Or me?”

“I’ll do it. Give me the baby. You go imagine all your new trees,” I told him, not bothering to hide my amusement, and sent him on his way.

“He’s going to have a look around the outside of the house,” I said, strolling over to stand beside the realtor. “Why don’t we talk a little more about the neighborhood?”

I pulled out the top rack of our dishwasher and started lining up wine glasses and beer glasses on the countertop above it. Behind me, Damian was filling large bowls with potato chips and pretzels and taking plastic wrap off smaller bowls filled with things to dip the snacks in.

We had a house, we had a mortgage, and I had a credit card that had seen some heavy use in the weeks since we’d moved into our new den, as I’d furnished it and started filling the spaces that Damian’s bachelor’s furniture hadn’t covered.

And now we were having a housewarming party, which was absolutely required, according to Oscar. Damian had shot him a suspicious look but hadn’t said anything, which had left me wondering if this was an elaborate prank of Oscar’s. But since Damian hadn’t argued about it, and he’d lived in as a human for much longer than I had, I’d gone ahead with plans for an afternoon barbecue with people from Damian’s work and some of the neighbors we’d met over the past month.

The doorbell rang. “I’ll get it,” Damian said, kissing me on the way by.

“Damn,” I muttered and slammed the dishwasher shut. I was pretty sure I had everything I needed out already, anyway, but I’d wanted it empty so we could just put dirty things straight into it.

“Just us,” Oscar called from the front door.

Damian strolled back into the kitchen, a cloth shopping bag swinging heavily from his fingers. “He brought the girlfriend of the week,” he whispered to me as he set it on the counter. Then, louder, “How much do I owe you?”

“My gift,” Oscar drawled, his arm draped over the shoulder of a tall blond woman in a sundress and sandals. Her jewelry was expensive-looking, so maybe he was hunting in more exclusive territory this time. “This is Sandra. She’s an actuary.”

I stared at him blankly.

“I deal with risk management for insurance companies,” she put in smoothly. “Lots of paper shuffling. You have a lovely house. It’s very comfortable.”

“Thank you,” I said with real gratitude. I thought it was comfortable and Damian could be comfortable on a bed of nails, so he was no help. It was nice to have someone who didn’t know me say that I’d managed to pull it off. “Would you like a drink? We have wine or beer, or there’s tea and coffee up here.” I opened a cupboard to show her all the nifty little pods I’d bought.

Her eyebrows went up as she surveyed the boxes piled neatly on the shelf. Okay, I’d maybe gone a little overboard. Damian had given me this machine that made one mug of tea or coffee at a time and I’d been so excited by it that I’d ended up filling the cupboard from bottom to top.

Being a good mate, or at least a wise one, Damian hadn’t said a word.

Noises trickled out of the baby monitor on the kitchen counter. Damian nodded toward the bedrooms. “Do you want to go get him? Oscar and I are going to put the steaks on.”

“Get Sandra something to drink too, would you?” I stole a quick kiss and patted Sandra’s arm. “Damian will look after you. I need to get the baby up before he gets mad.”

In the end, I had gone with a traditional omega-style name for him, but it suited him. Asher meant happy, and he was the happiest little boy I’d ever met. “Hey, look who’s awake,” I cooed at him as I got him out of his crib. “Oh, and look who peed all the way through his diaper. Again.” He was a firehose, our son. But an adorable one. “Let’s get you cleaned up and we’ll go meet everyone, okay?”

By the time I’d washed him, put a new diaper on him and put him in his party outfit—a dinosaur sleeper in bright green, with little fake claws on the feet—most everyone else had arrived. Damian had left Oscar in charge of the barbecue while he showed people around the house and I had to hunt to find him in the crowd so he could show off the baby too.

More neighbors dropped in over the course of the afternoon and even one or two of Damian’s coworkers, though I still found it hard to forgive them for what they’d put him through that night in the desert. I knew they’d thought it was necessary, that they’d just been following orders, but well—I might piss on Oscar now if he was on fire, but none of the rest of them had earned that kind of clemency from me.

Near the end, after we’d all eaten and drunk our fill and I was sitting in the back yard with the baby asleep on my shoulder, Sandra came to take the seat beside me.

“He’s out like a light,” she said, nodding at Asher.

“We’re not usually this social,” I told her. “I think all the people wore him out.”

She nodded and sipped at her wine. “Damian says you’re going to stay home with the baby for a while?”

I nodded. “He makes enough money, and I like the idea that when he comes home, he doesn’t need to worry about anything around here, because I’ll have the time to get it done. And with him traveling so much, work might be hard to schedule.”

She gazed across the yard to where the alphas—sorry, the men—were playing some crazy no rules game with a football and what looked to me the determination to kill each other. “You should consider going back to school at some point though. Damian says you have a lot of math and economics in your background?”

“Just high school.” Right now, I thought I could stay home with the pups forever, but I knew that I might change my mind in the future. Or that things might happen that would force my hand. “I’m not really ready to settle into anything yet. Except him.” I rubbed Asher’s back and listened to him breathe.

“Well, when you start thinking about it, you might want to consider risk management.” She got to her feet and played briefly with Asher’s fingers. “The Agency can always use more people like us. It pays well, and it’s a nice, safe, secure office job. Very useful when you have a pup to think about.” Then she drifted away, leaving me open-mouthed and frozen in place.

Was I being recruited? I caught Oscar’s eye and he winked knowingly at me. You prick.

But then I saw Damian tackle him, hard, and I could relax. I wasn’t alone here, I had someone I could depend on to keep me safe.

But who would keep him safe?

Asher yawned against my shoulder and started to wake up, so I filed Sandra’s words away to think about later. And to talk with my mate about, so we could decide together what this meant, and what we wanted to do about it.

Because we were shifters and mates, and that meant that we were in this together, in a way that humans could never understand. Our own little pack of three.

After everyone had left, I sat Damian down and told him what Sandra had said. I wanted to know what he thought our risks were.

He slouched on the couch for a moment, his hands limp in his lap, then shook his head and met my eyes. “I’m not surprised they want you under their eye, and this would be an easy way to do it. It’s up to you how you want to handle it. They pay well—we could put money away against Asher’s future. Send some back to your parents. But you have to be happy doing it.”

“How long do you think I have before they force the choice on me?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think they’d force it on you. But you understand, it’s very hard to have a life like we’re trying to build here while I’m working my job. And if you want another pup, we’re going to have to move and hide for six months. We could be transferred anywhere in the country at any time depending on the needs of the job. It’s not particularly stable.”

He didn’t mention that something could happen to him, though the specter of it floated between us. I banished that fear firmly from my mind. “So we go forward as planned then,” I told him. “I’d like another pup. Would you?”

“I’ll have as many as you’ll let me have.” He grinned and reached out to tickle Asher’s foot, then sobered. “Are you regretting your choice?”

I snorted. “Let me get him to sleep tonight and I’ll show you how much I’m regretting this.” I moved over to lean against him and planted a kiss on the underside of his jaw. “No, I regret nothing, except that I didn’t grab you and keep you that first night. But for two shifters in the most back-assward mating I’ve ever seen, I think we came out pretty well.”

“Yeah,” he said, more contentment in his voice than I’d ever heard. “I think you’re right.”

I leaned my head on his shoulder for a moment, then sat up with a sigh. “Can you take him? I’m going to start cleaning up the kitchen.” I didn’t wait for him to say yes, just handed off the baby and made my escape to the kitchen.

Behind me, I heard Damian say, “Who’s Daddy’s little boy… Hey!” He followed me out to the kitchen, a suspicious frown on his face. “He needs to be changed,” he informed me.

“Does he?” I asked innocently and began rinsing things to put them in the dishwasher.

Damian watched me for a second, then laughed. “Devious omega. I’ll remember this.” He hefted Asher on his shoulder and I heard him say as he walked down the hallway, “You get this from your Da, don’t you? Smelly pup.”

I smiled and went back to loading the dishwasher.

We were going to be just fine.