Page 228 of Captive Omega

“Are they happy tears?” Garrison asks softly.

I nod.

He opens his arms wide and closes his eyes. “Then I promise I won’t look.”

I walk into his chest, bury my face in his shirt, and proceed to soak the front of it as he wraps his arms around me and strokes his hand down my hair. Blaine and Vaughn wrap themselves around me in another Lucas Security huddle. Except this one isn’t about keeping me safe. This makes me feel loved. I must be the luckiest girl in the world.

“Are you okay?” Blaine asks, several minutes later, when I peel my damp face from Garrison’s wet shirt.

He looks concerned. So does Vaughn, who hands me a thick wad of tissues he must have emptied out of a box.

“I’m okay. Just… thanks. You didn’t have to do this, but thanks.”

“Resa?” Garrison pulls my attention from my gigantic pile of tissues, thumbing a tear away before I can wipe my face.

“Yeah?”

“You never have to worry about hiding your tears from us. Happy tears are fine. But sad tears…” He gives me a long look. “Can I ask you to promise something for me?”

It’s a measure of how much I trust and love him that I’m ready to agree before he tells me what it is. Because I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that whatever it is won’t be something that hurts me.

“What do you want me to promise?” I ask.

“If the thing making you cry is something bad, promise you’ll let one or all of us fix it.”

“And if you can’t fix the thing that made me cry?”

“We built the crib with the instructions that made no sense. After that motherfu…” Vaughn’s voice trails off when Garrison lifts his brow. “Anyway. We will fix it.”

“Can I see the book you kept hiding in your newspaper now?” I ask Garrison.

He blows out a resigned sigh as he presses it into my arms. “Here. That morning when you said you were thinking about porn, that was when you found it, wasn’t it?”

“Nope.” I take the book from him and sit cross-legged on the floor, setting my pile of tissues aside, so I can see what else they tabbed as important need to know information. “It was before then.”

“So you weren’t really thinking about porn?” Vaughn flops to the ground beside me.

“Nope,” I say. Blaine drops down beside me, and Garrison stretches his long legs in front of him as he sits with his back to the window. “Why didn’t you just tell me about the book?”

“Sadie said it was better to let you decide when you wanted to talk about the baby,” Garrison explains. “She guessed early on that you were still in flight or fight mode. None of us wanted to do or say anything that would make you run.”

“She also said not to overwhelm you with stuff.” Vaughn eyes the boxes of flatpack furniture with the intensity of a person psyching themselves up to scale a mountain.

“I can help,” I offer. “I used to help my dad, and I always liked it.”

Vaughn stares at me like I’m a stranger. “You like it?”

“Anyway, we figured this is stuff you and the baby need,” Blaine says. “And we’d be failing you if we didn’t give those things to you.”

I look at him, but I’m not really seeing him.

I’m back to that night where I hobbled upstairs, terrified I’d tip backward down them and everyone would see just how weak I was. It feels like a million years ago, and now I’m here, still in the same house, with the same men.

A gentle nudge on my right side startles me.

Blaine peers down at me through his black-rimmed glasses. “You okay?”

I nod. “I’m okay.”

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