Adam honestly hadn’t considered the question until the morning before, when the most senior of the Onalaska Niemi pack’s midwives turned a sharp eye on him during breakfast and said, “And how are you planning to spend the full moon, alpha?”

Adam blinked helplessly at Granny Lee and then at Casey, who was looking equally startled and caught out by the question. The aunties—or rather, four Aunties and Uncle AJ, which turned out to be short for Uncle Auntie Jack due to a decades-ago dispute with a tyrannical previous Granny over whether Jack should be called Uncle or Auntie, softened into a semi-joke by the passage of time—looked variously amused and unconcerned.

“What do you usually do?” Granny Lee persisted.

“Uh... I work, usually,” Adam said.

The thirty-six hours of continuous high-energy wakefulness had been useful in grad school, getting papers written and research done. The primal need to be doing something under the full moon translated well enough, especially with a lifetime of practice at it.

He was seized with the sudden memory of his dad sending him on hunts for specific words through stacks of glossy-paged science journals. He had danced Adam around the room when he found one, burning off extra energy in a burst of raucous yelling and movement, then set him on another hunt. They had played dance music all night—Adam could hardly step foot in a club or a gay bar without being hit in the face with a Madonna or Britney tune that took him right back there.

His gaze skittered to Casey as he returned to himself, the realization returning to him as it had a hundred times in the last few days: He knows.

Not that Casey knew that, or knew much of anything in detail, but it still struck him again and again that he had opened his mouth and said it, and Casey had looked... wounded somehow, but not horrified or disgusted or offended. Not pitying, either, and he hadn’t poked and prodded at Adam’s summary, bare as it was. He hadn’t mentioned it at all in the last three days, in fact.

Adam would have thought he’d imagined even telling Casey, except that the next day they’d visited an omega at home with his new baby. It had turned out that Jamie Jensen had been human until he was bitten in his teens. Casey had shot a glance in Adam’s direction and then took over the questioning, gently probing beyond the survey questions to be sure that Jamie was safe, content, that he’d had help to cope with the changes.

Jamie had alternated between waxing philosophical in a very stoned-undergraduate way about the whole idea of gender and omega-ness and beaming down at his baby until Adam slipped out of the room. He had stood on the porch of Jamie’s cozy little house, on a dirt road lined with similar cozy little houses on both sides, with werewolf children playing in the yards and a few adults keeping a desultory eye out from their front porches or open windows.

He remembered the house where he and his dad had lived, way out apart from the rest of the pack. He remembered his dad yelling at his father: I’m not his mother! I’m not your wife! He remembered curling up on the porch and looking out at the darkness between the trees, wishing there was somewhere to run to, somewhere to escape the tangle of guilt and sadness and fear inside him.

Even he could see that this was... not that, that Jamie Jensen was nothing like his own dad, and that Jamie’s little son would never be alone like Adam had been. Jamie wasn’t alone like Adam’s dad had been. But Adam remembered a cluster of houses like this on the Hathaway pack lands. After his dad was gone, he’d fostered in homes like this for a few years, and eventually his father had moved into one and he and Adam had... cohabitated there, for the last couple years Adam was in high school.

Before he could dwell any further on those memories, Casey stepped out onto the porch, holding a manila envelope and a sealed sample tube. There was a wry smile on his face, but even then, he didn’t say anything except to ask who they were set to visit next.

All of which had kept Adam thoroughly distracted from the fact that tonight was the full moon and he had no idea at all what he was going to do with himself through the hours of the night. That threw his mind to the last few nights—the Niemis’ Midwives’ House was full up, but there was a guest house just across the way, and he and Casey had both been given rooms there.

Casey had taken the farthest room from Adam’s and had neither invited Adam to visit nor come near Adam’s room. They had, however, so happened to meet in the bathroom and share the shower three times in two days. The bathroom was set up so that an entire werewolf family could use it at once; there was plenty of room to maneuver under the water.

Adam had also overheard, from his solitary bed at the other end of the house, how Casey attempted to help himself to sleep at night. He had stared at the ceiling and not jerked off each time, out of some obscure sense that what happened in Casey’s room was off limits, even though in his own room he had an equal right to privacy. If Casey wanted Adam to join him in using an orgasm as a sleep aid, he would have asked, so Adam didn’t.

Whatever suppressants Casey was planning to use to prevent a heat, they didn’t seem to be much use against the effects of the waxing moon. Tonight... if Casey wasn’t going to be secluded in a heat-house, Adam should probably shut himself in the car with his laptop, or take a long drive, maybe. And never mind that there would be no escape, in the car that smelled like Casey, felt like a place where Casey lived, with Casey’s lightweight jacket and Casey’s candy wrappers and Casey’s endless succession of guest-gifts piling up in the back seat.

“I guess it depends on what Casey’s doing tonight,” Adam said, after a pause that was a few seconds too long and still not long enough for him to hear what he was about to say until the words came out of his mouth.

Casey flushed a bright, startling pink. The rest of the midwives at the table laughed loud and long.

Adam ducked his head, feeling his own face go hot as well, but when he peeked up at Casey, he was looking back, still pink but not angry. A little embarrassed, but not ashamed, and not walking away. Not saying no, or even I don’t like you.

And, well. No matter how you sliced it, Adam had told the truth. It was up to Casey what he did tonight.

There was the day to get through, first. Casey went off to make himself useful, helping the midwives check on pack members with near-term pregnancies who might be pulled into labor by the full moon tonight.

Adam entertained a brief fantasy that Casey would be needed tonight, too busy doing his job to give Adam a thought. Adam knew that was only slightly more likely than being drafted to assist himself, but it was a nice thought. A good thought, a safe one—one that didn’t leave Adam feeling half-sick with guilt like the rest of his thoughts did.

Somehow he didn’t find himself thinking like that when Casey was actually around. All his best intentions and a lifetime of determined carefulness all went up in smoke around Casey.

Still, Adam had a rare day away from Casey at his disposal and he needed to make use of it. The tug of the moon had him feeling sharp and focused, and Adam settled down in the guest house with his laptop, ready to see what preliminary conclusions he could arrive at from the first batches of data. He’d seen a few emails come in with the first DNA analyses, so he would have something to work with on that side, and he could start coding the survey responses from the Olmsted County packs, now that they’d left them all behind, without trampling all over the subjects’ anonymity.

But when Adam looked more closely at the DNA analysis emails he’d gotten, he realized one of them wasn’t what he’d been expecting. It was the DNA analysis from the unidentified bodies buried in a secluded clearing on the Niemi pack’s land.

The results had been CC’d to Nat and Callie Niemi, and there was a brief message directed to Adam from Alpha Niemi in the thread: I would appreciate your interpretation of these results.

Adam looked around the empty common room of the guest house. No one was presently housed there other than him and Casey. The Midwives’ House was nearly empty, only one omega inside, asleep after working the night shift. Farther than that there was the din of the pack; homes for individuals and families started just down the road from the Midwives’ House, and there were workshops and the pack’s daycare/primary school among the houses.

Still, he found he could pick out Casey’s heartbeat among all the others, and knew that he was cheerfully occupied. He was in the company of two others—and one more heartbeat, tiny and muffled and fast.

Adam became abruptly aware of eavesdropping and jerked his attention back to his own immediate surroundings. He was alone. Casey was a mile or so away. No one was going to interrupt.

Adam clicked on the attached files, opening up the data and the raw output of the initial match-testing.

The omega and three children—three children in the forest, he thought, remembering Casey’s voice telling him the werewolf fairy tale, but of course in fact there had been four children, and only one had escaped alive—matched virtually exactly on mitochondrial DNA, which passed unchanged from the parent who supplied the egg cell to their offspring. The four were likewise near-perfect matches on Lycan DNA, the DNA string found in the Lycan bodies of each cell, which governed werewolf characteristics and the ability to shift.

The man who had been guessed to be the children’s father matched a little over 50 percent with all three of the children—and also matched nearly 20 percent with the adult omega. Their mitochondrial DNA didn’t match—so they weren’t related in the maternal line—but their Lycan DNA showed considerable similarity.

This similarity suggested that their Lycan DNA ultimately traced back to the same source—perhaps the founding member of their pack. The overlap in their chromosomal DNA suggested a cousin relationship of some kind.

Adam pulled up the other samples for comparison, to confirm the growing suspicion, and found what he had expected. The other unidentified werewolves were not closely related to each other, but their Lycan DNA showed various degrees of relatedness—they were all from packs that had intermarried, or had been bitten by werewolves from those packs. But all of them were far more similar to each other than any of them were to the parents and children.

It was what Alpha Niemi had predicted: Casey came from a pack that was sharply disconnected from the other packs in the area. Isolated, and showing the signs of a lack of genetic diversity, cousins marrying cousins in one generation after another for lack of options.

A pack that kept itself so strictly apart wouldn’t have heard that the Niemis were trying to identify a lost child—they likely wouldn’t have been searching for any of those who left. They would turn inward, shunning any who dared to leave as they shunned everyone else outside the pack.

Adam shook his head, pushing away thoughts of parents on the run with four children, captured by hunters just short of what might have been genuine safety and freedom. He was extrapolating far beyond what the data could actually support. He didn’t have any idea what had really happened to Casey’s family; they might have been the last surviving remnant of an isolated pack. There might have been no one left to search for Casey. They might have immigrated to the United States from somewhere far off. The genetics couldn’t tell him any of that.

He opened a reply email and composed a careful summary of what the results meant. He edited again and again to remove any hint of speculation as to how these genetic relationships might occur. The Niemis were perfectly capable of inventing that on their own. That wasn’t what they needed from Adam.

We also, of course, have no demonstrated connection between Casey and the family of five. Casey has declined to give a DNA sample for the study, and even if he did, it would be unethical to use a sample given for that purpose to trace a genealogical connection he has no interest in exploring.

Adam considered deleting those lines—the Niemis knew more than he did about how they had concluded that Casey was a member of the little family, and they were surely perfectly aware that Casey had his own choices to make regarding this information.

On the other hand, Adam had been told to watch out for some unnamed something. And Casey...

It might be nothing, but Casey had an odd moment when we stopped for a few hours in Dover. He seemed lost in thought, or memory, for a moment, not responding to me calling his name until I actually touched him. He brushed it off, saying that he thought he’d smelled something and giving no further explanation, although he seemed shaken by it. A little later, when I asked him what it was that he had thought he smelled, he seemed to have almost completely forgotten that it happened, and didn’t answer my question at all.

Adam definitely was not going to attempt to reason from that data point, but people who knew Casey better—and knew more than Adam did about what Adam was supposed to be guarding against—might be able to draw conclusions. He hit send before he could second-guess himself, or attempt to close with any polite verbiage.

They were into November now; the sun set early, and the full moon would be a long one. At mid-afternoon Adam took stock of the supplies available in the guest house kitchen and assembled a light dinner while planning a hearty moonset breakfast. However Casey spent the full moon night, he wasn’t likely to think of food until morning, and by then he would be ravenous. With a fully-equipped and generously-supplied kitchen, it was no harder to make food for two than for one.

Adam had a bean soup bubbling on the stove by the time he looked up to see Casey standing in the doorway looking bewildered. Adam scowled, braced to snarl at whatever mockery Casey served up at the idea of an alpha who could manage basic domestic tasks.

Casey snorted and walked into the kitchen and right up to him, and then Adam could smell him above the scent of cooking food. He was running hot, musky and ripe, his heart beating fast. His pupils were pools of black and for once Adam suspected that wolfsbane wasn’t entirely, or even primarily, to blame.

“Are you,” Adam said, and had to swallow and gather his thoughts before he tried, “I thought you—you said. Suppressants.”

“It’s not like flipping a switch,” Casey said, his voice a little sharp, but there was a smile in his eyes. It wasn’t exactly a friendly expression. Possibly predatory. “I’ve been putting away a lot of wolfsbane, the last couple of weeks. Had to calculate a dose that wouldn’t turn toxic on top of that but would tamp things down. Feels like it’s not going to be a real heat, but it’s not going to be far off, either.”

Adam stood very still. “That sounds like the sort of thing that... could potentially be miscalculated.”

Casey grinned, showing his teeth. “How do you feel about living dangerously?”

Adam took a sharp step back. “Not at all interested, when the consequences aren’t going to fall mainly on me.”

Casey’s grin faltered into confusion, and then he rolled his eyes, throwing up his hands for good measure. “Adam. I’m a midwife. I am not going to get pregnant by mistake.”

Adam had felt that questioning omegas about their contraceptive methods and family planning choices was best left to a later stage of the study, when more trust had been established, so he had no idea how Casey would guard against it. On the other hand, Casey was a midwife, and his body was his business; if he was confident, there was no reason Adam should presume to know better than he did.

He wanted to argue that a pregnancy wasn’t the only possible consequence of spending a heat together, but he knew even less about the nebulous process of bonding than he did about omegas’ contraceptive practices. Anything he said about Casey possibly getting overly attached to him would only be met with another eyeroll and Casey’s insistence that he didn’t like Adam anyway. There was no need to say something he already knew was going to sound stupid and draw more mockery.

He didn’t actually want to fight. Not about this. Not now.

“All right,” Adam said, which seemed to throw Casey a little. He must have been expecting another argument. Adam made his voice deliberately mild as he gestured to the stove and added, “Then how I feel about living dangerously is that we probably shouldn’t do it on an empty stomach.”

They ate without speaking, only stealing glances at each other that might have been called shy if they hadn’t been them. Adam suspected they both knew that talking was hazardous and to be avoided as much as possible.

Casey sat for a while, fidgeting and frowning and poking at the last of his bowl of soup as the sun sank lower. Adam tried not to monitor the shifting of his scent as it grew sharper and hotter with the approach of the moon. He struggled to keep himself still and his breathing and heartbeat slow and steady. He doubted he was succeeding to any great extent, but he knew he at least ought to try.

Eventually Casey got up, put his bowl and spoon in the sink, and walked out. He was out of sight when he stopped and said sharply, “That was good. Thanks.”

Adam nodded, not daring to even look up from his bowl, and after a few seconds Casey moved on. Adam heard the shower turn on and turned his attention to preparing for the night ahead, if only to distract himself. He tidied up the dishes and leftovers and went to the room where he’d been staying, wondering where exactly this was going to happen.

They would be here another two or three days at least, sleeping in this same guest house while they finished their survey work. Whatever happened tonight, no matter how they cleaned tomorrow, the traces of it would linger. Casey surely wouldn’t want to sleep in the middle of that, but Adam didn’t know that he could himself, either.

Adam went up to the second floor to look for other options, and spotted a trap door in the hallway ceiling. It wasn’t hidden, and looked like it saw fairly regular use. When he pulled, an angled ladder, nearly a staircase, folded smoothly down.

He climbed up into an open attic room, the walls sloping together like a tent overhead. The room was lit by the last of the sun through a west-facing window at one end. The east-facing window at the opposite end showed a deep blue darkening sky.

There was a wide bed under each window, not made up but with linens neatly folded on top of the pillows. A chest at the foot of each bed doubtless held blankets. Adam was debating whether to make up one of the beds, and which one, when he heard a soft sound on the ladder and turned to watch Casey emerge into the attic.

Casey was naked, his hair still damp, though not wet enough to restrain the curls, and the scent of him was pure and hot and filled the air. It was like watching the moon rise; Adam’s mind was wiped clean of words, plans, of any coherent thought at all.

Still he managed to hold back. He stood absolutely frozen, panting, already almost painfully hard, his whole body heating in response to the omega—to Casey, naked, grinning toothily at him, hungry and eager. Adam closed his eyes, his hands closing into fists as the knowledge that went deeper than words—don’t hurt don’t take don’t demand don’t you dare—held him against every howling instinct.

A cloud of intense scent enveloped him half a second before Casey’s lips pressed to the base of his throat. Casey’s hands were at the bottom of his shirt, pushing it up unhesitatingly to press against the bare skin beneath. All Adam could smell was omega and wet and want and—

Not afraid.

Adam’s hands were on Casey then, grabbing his ass and hauling him up against Adam’s body. He caught Casey’s mouth in a rough, hungry kiss, and Casey’s arms were around his neck, Casey’s legs wrapped around his hips, as Casey met the kiss with equal need.

Adam was aware that he was still dressed mostly because his cock ached where his pants held it down, and his skin itched to be touching Casey instead of dead cloth. It was a problem, but he couldn’t think further than that, couldn’t think of anything except keeping Casey held tight against him and pushing his tongue into the heat of Casey’s mouth.

Eventually they did have to breathe, and Casey looked around wildly. Adam moved toward the nearer bed, under the window that already showed the night sky. There were too many trees to see a proper horizon, but the moonlight would filter through as soon as there was any.

Casey wriggled free of him, and Adam held on harder for a second and then let go all at once; Casey stumbled as he hit the ground and shot a glare at Adam before he flung open the chest at the foot of the bed. Strapped to the underside of the lid was a folded piece of heavy, plain cloth, vaguely stained but obviously clean.

“Cover the mattress,” Casey said, tugging it free and throwing it at the bed.

Adam dumped the folded linens on the floor and shook out what was undeniably a tarp over the bed. That was going to be either embarrassing or impressively thoughtful later, but all Adam could think of was to make a place where he could have Casey. When the mattress was covered, Casey threw an armful of blankets over the tarp, soft much-washed things that looked as heavily used as the tarp itself.

Casey threw himself down on top of them, and Adam gave the bedding no more thought, lunging to cover that slim body with his own. Casey pushed back and Adam froze, only to realize that Casey’s objection was to his clothes, not Adam himself. Adam helped with clumsy, frantic hands—fabric tore—and then he was gloriously naked, skin to skin with every inch of Casey, kissing him and pressing him down into the mattress as Casey growled and writhed under him.

Casey was biting at his lips, grabbing at his ass, his legs spread wide, his dick pressing up against Adam’s and his slick filling the whole room with the smell of sex. Adam knew that there was something beyond this, something better, but he couldn’t think to want anything more. He had Casey under him in a soft bed, snarling and welcoming at the same time, and Adam’s cock was rubbing in the hot space between their bodies, and the moon—

Adam lifted his head to see the first of the full moon’s silver light spilling into the sky, its grip on his mind and body turning to something fiery. He felt Casey’s whole body flush hotter under his, and Casey let out a furious whine and clawed at his back, curling under him.

“Come on,” Casey gasped. “What are you fucking waiting for, you’ve gotta know how this fucking—”

Adam caught Casey’s wrists and pressed them to the bed with one hand. Casey fell silent, his lips still parted, his eyes dark pools with the slightest rim of blue like a fingernail moon in a starless sky.

“Like this?” Adam asked, the words coming out low and harsh.

Casey nodded and licked his lips.

Adam reached down with his free hand and pressed two fingers into Casey. His cock surged at the feel of him, wet and open and ready.

“Say—” please. He choked that word back. “Tell me—” But even through the haze he knew he didn’t dare demand that Casey say any of the things he wanted to hear.

“Fuck me,” Casey said, filling in the gap on his own. “Adam, fuck me, knot me, I want you to, come fucking on.”

Adam covered Casey’s mouth in another rough kiss, his head swimming and cock throbbing at the thought of knotting.

He’d never done it. He’d never knotted anything but his own hand, and now—now he would. With Casey, because Casey wanted him to.

Adam pushed up on his knees enough to have some maneuvering room, keeping his mouth more or less in contact with Casey’s as he lined them up. Casey obviously knew exactly how to do this, swinging one leg up over Adam’s hips to get the angle. Everything was hot and slippery and Adam was so hard even the touch of his own hand was an agonizing pleasure; he had a second of genuine terror that he was going to come all over Casey without actually getting inside him, and then everything slid into place.

Half his cock was inside before he thought to stop, raising his head to see Casey’s reaction, but Casey looked blissful and wriggled under him, inviting more. Adam closed his eyes, letting his forehead fall against Casey’s, and thrust into the tight channel.

Casey gasped against his lips as Adam’s full length pushed into him, but his body didn’t tense, and there was no hint of pain or unhappiness in his scent. Adam was glad, dimly, because it would have hurt to stop, to draw back now that they were joined—except as soon as he thought that the urge to move took over, and he was pulling back so he could thrust in again, driving down into Casey over and over while Casey clung to him.

Neither of them made a sound beyond rough breathing and the wet friction of their bodies meeting, their hearts pounding in a rhythm so perfectly matched that it seemed to be a single beat. Hot pleasure and fierce satisfaction rushed through Adam’s blood, and he was faintly aware of wanting the moment to last just before it began to change.

He didn’t recognize the feeling at first; he thought he was close to coming and looked down to gauge how close Casey was, but the tingling heat at the base of his cock didn’t rush up into more. Adam’s rhythm stuttered, and Casey’s rim felt tighter around his cock on the next stroke, and then Casey’s eyes flashed wide open.

For a second Adam remembered the first day they’d met. Casey’s eyes seemed almost as unseeing now as then, but Casey’s face was full of ecstasy, not fear, and Adam was already thrusting in again, feeling Casey tighter still around him.

Around his knot as it swelled.

Adam groaned, and it felt like the sound came all the way from his tightening balls.

Casey curled up to catch his mouth in another kiss, his arms around Adam’s neck again. Adam curled both of his arms around Casey, holding and bracing him as Adam thrust into him again and again, slower now. Each thrust was a new feeling, a new effort, as the shape of him changed with every beat of his heart. Casey gasped and moaned, Adam growled, and he felt as if they had never understood each other better, never communicated more clearly than the grunts and breaths passing between their mouths.

Adam jerked his hips back and met resistance, his cock catching inside, and Casey made a new sound, almost keening. Adam kissed it away and moved one hand down between them, rocking his hips in small moves as he found Casey’s dick and curled his hand around it. It was wet already with sweat and pre-come, and sounded as filthy in his grip as his cock did where it was clutched in Casey’s hole.

It was only the space of a couple of breaths before Casey gasped out something that might have been Adam’s name and his entire body rippled as he came, his dick jerking in Adam’s hand and his ass tightening impossibly around Adam’s knot. The rhythmic clutch of it sent a sensation beyond pleasure shooting up Adam’s spine, and he could hardly breathe as he started to come. The impossible peak stretched and lingered, his cock jerking where it was locked inside Casey’s body.

When his vision came into focus, he found that he was looking down at Casey’s face, sweaty and flushed and wide-eyed. The expression on his face was neither wild nor blissful now. He looked... surprised.

Adam narrowed his eyes, struggling to focus on sight and speech at the same time, and said, “You’ve never done this before either.”

Casey’s expression—which had been a little blissful, though Adam didn’t notice until it was gone—hardened instantly to a scowl. “You’re not that fucking special, it’s not like alphas even have a monopoly on knots.”

Adam couldn’t help rocking his hips at that, his cock still pulsing slowly, just to make Casey’s eyes go unfocused for a second. “Just a little fucking special?”

Casey rolled his eyes. “I’ve been knotted before.”

“Uh-huh,” Adam said, because knots were, to no one’s surprise, an extremely thoroughly studied phenomenon—practically the first thing alpha male werewolves had done with open access to modern science was measure their dicks with it—and they did occur in betas and even omegas. They tended to be considerably smaller, though.

Adam should have let it go, should have shut up and accepted it, but the wild urge to make Casey admit something had him opening his mouth again. “Are you trying to tell me it’s not different with an alpha? I’ve fucked people before, and it’s not the same. We’re only fucking at all because it’s different with an alpha.”

Casey closed his eyes this time, and Adam couldn’t read his expression at all when he looked up again and said, “Well, maybe this time it’ll cure me.”

“We can only hope,” Adam agreed, but it didn’t sound as sharp as it should. Casey sounded a little soft-edged himself; maybe they could keep a truce going at least until they were able to physically separate.

Casey squirmed under him, letting out an irritated noise, and Adam said, “Move?”

Casey nodded, and they fumbled through flipping over while tied together by their most sensitive body parts, until Casey was sitting astride Adam’s hips. He gave a wicked look then, his eyes shadowed in the silver light by the fall of his hair, and started rocking on Adam’s cock. Adam could barely breathe for the shocking pleasure of it, almost too much already, and he reached for Casey’s cock, still hard, and dragged his fingertips up it, then back down, teasing and making Casey writhe that much more.

That only lasted a few breaths before Casey’s hand closed over his, tightening Adam’s grip to something purposeful. After a few short strokes, Casey was coming again, spilling over both their hands, tightening on Adam’s knot. Adam arched up under him, feeling his cock give a last few jerks and finally subside.

They were still tied together until the knot went down, and now that the first rush of need was satisfied, they were both more clearheaded. Casey looked around the room while Adam gazed up at him, limned in moonlight. He hoped there was some shadow to guard his own expression.

“You were here all day,” Casey said. “You didn’t think about a heat bed until I was already in the shower?”

Adam pinched the bridge of his nose with a damp hand that smelled overwhelmingly of sex, his and Casey’s scents mingled. It did nothing to quell the irritation, or the horrible fondness that came with it. “I had some other work to do. Also, you’re the one who was sure you weren’t going into heat.”

“I didn’t,” Casey said, and then his voice dropped lower, sultry, as though some seduction was still necessary when Casey was sitting on Adam’s knot. “Believe me, you’d know.”

Adam looked through his fingers at Casey, who dropped the smirk and went back to frowning down at the bedding. “I’m not doing the laundry after just because I’m the omega.”

“I will do the laundry,” Adam said, both to stop the argument and because he’d seen the large washer and dryer in the Midwives’ House just across the yard and knew it wouldn’t be especially onerous.

Casey frowned at him. “You don’t have to—”

“Okay, shut up,” Adam said, pushing up to sit and catching Casey in a kiss. Casey bit his lip but pulled him closer at the same time, so Adam figured it was better than arguing any other way. They had a long night ahead of them; there was no point in letting things get nasty right out of the gate.