Page 27 of The Alpha's Pregnant Mate

Much later, after they’d reluctantly dragged themselves out of that post-coital bliss, they dressed and sat on the log again. Laurent was helping her pick the leaves out of her hair while she combed out the tangles, both of them still flushed from their efforts, and there was a deeper, softer quality to the quiet that lay between them. She glanced sideways at him, saw the faint smile playing about his lips, and grinned quietly to herself.

It had been a wild ride, these last few months, but really, the chaos was only just getting started. And as they rose to their feet and set off through the jungle, the early morning air cool against their skin and their fingers entwined, Rhietta couldn’t wait to see just how crazy their life together was going to get.

Chapter 20 - Laurent

“Rhi, we’re going to be late,” Laurent called through the house when his willpower finally gave out. To his credit, he’d been wanting to say it for the last hour, even since he’d realized that the timeline of that afternoon’s celebration and the timeline of Rhietta’s elaborate getting-ready ritual simply did not line up. Given that he could already hear music drifting through their window from the town square, he felt he’d exhibited considerable restraint in waiting until now to point out their tardiness. Rhietta, of course, was utterly unrepentant. She hustled through their living room, half of her hair up and her dress unzipped down the back, holding what appeared to be three completely different shoes in one hand and a comb in the other.

“The guest of honor is never late, Alpha Laurent,” she said primly. “Surely you haven’t forgotten that piece of basic protocol.”

“How could I have?” he said drily. In the last eight months, he felt he’d made considerable strides when it came to adjusting to the chaos in which Rhietta lived her life. He’d honestly been a little spooked by just how easy it had been. A year ago, he could never have imagined that he’d be able to even stand entering a house as messy as this one, let alone live there and love every minute of it. Just one more reason he was so grateful for how much Rhietta had changed him. She always insisted that he hadn’t changed that much, that all her influence had done was free him up a little, but he had his doubts. Looking at her now, her wild hair tumbling down her back, that dress clinging to her stunning curves, he privately felt that a magical transformation seemed a much more realistic explanation.

And it wasn’t like his neat freak tendencies had completely vanished. The nursery, for example, was always arranged with what Rhietta called pathological efficiency. Tease him as she might, though, he’d noticed that she always made an effort to maintain their son’s room to his exacting standards. Parenthood had brought so much additional chaos along with it that Rhietta had quickly seen the wisdom in controlling what they could. Sometimes, the only thing you could count on was knowing which drawer the clean diapers would be in. She’d been right, of course; right about everything, but especially about the point she’d made that night on the cliff’s edge, staring out to sea. Their son’s arrival had been the most terrifying thing that had ever happened to him, but two months in, and he was starting—very slowly—to figure it out.

Half an hour and three outfit changes later, Rhietta was at last close to ready. Laurent helped her zip up the dress she’d chosen, unable to resist letting his hands linger just a little on the swell of her hips until she uttered that low, sexy laugh he adored so much.

“I thought you were worried about being late.”

“We’re the Co-Alphas, aren’t we? Surely we can just change the start time.”

“It’s finally happening,” Rhietta sighed, turning to face him and slipping her arms around his waist. “Alpha Laurent is going mad with power. Reade and Camus will have to stage a coup.”

“Or Silea. She’s been looking for an excuse to overthrow me for years.” He was smiling, but there was more truth in the joke than he was entirely happy with. Since the day he and Rhietta had walked back into the camp and come clean to the pack about the nature of their relationship, the rifts between the divided pack had well and truly begun to heal. But it wasn’t the kind of thing that could happen overnight, and he had a feeling that truly earning the trust of Rhietta’s best friend was still some time away. Whether her protectiveness of Rhietta was more political or personal, Laurent wasn’t sure.

“Oh, she adores you, really, she’s just unbelievably stubborn about feelings.” Rhietta was grinning up at him. “I’m sure that’s hard for you to imagine—”

“Could not possibly relate.”

“If it’s any consolation, she’s too distracted at the moment to be plotting a coup. You owe Seff your life.” Laurent chuckled. Over the last few months, it had become clear even to Laurent that there was considerable tension between his assistant and Rhietta’s closest lieutenant. According to Rhietta, the vibes had been there for much longer than that, and she intuited it, it was most likely true. “Maybe we can do something at the party,” she said, her eyes gleaming thoughtfully. “Get them talking. Lock them in one of the new cottages and ‘accidentally’ lose the key…”

“Let them figure it out, love,” he said gently, drawing her close. She huffed her resentment, but she allowed herself to be held. “Remember how much time I needed?”

His soulmate scoffed against his chest. “If we all ran on your schedule, Alpha Laurent, we’d all die of old age before we found our soulmates.” He couldn’t have argued with that, even if they’d had a moment to spare. “Now, let’s fetch the guest of honor, shall we? He’ll be waking up just about now.”

Rhietta had a supernatural knack for timing her activities precisely around Willas’s nap schedule. Of all the magic of which she seemed capable, this was the thing he found most impressive of all. He simply couldn’t get a handle on it. No matter how many attempts he had made of tracking the baby’s sleeping habits, recording the data in immense detail, poring over the detailed charts and tables he’d made until his eyes were aching and Rhietta was instructing him in her sharpest tones to put the notebooks down and get some rest…none of it held a candle to Rhietta’s ability to simply know when he was awake. Sometimes Laurent would feel her hand on his shoulder in the night, and he’d be out of bed and halfway down the hallway to Willas’s room before the baby’s first cry had even sounded.

Sure enough, when they slipped into the nursery, Willas was midway through a huge yawn as he stirred from his sleep, and his face lit up as his mother scooped him out of the cot. Laurent never got tired of watching them, the two people he loved more than anything in this world. Rhietta leaned in to kiss the baby’s chubby cheek and he giggled, his tiny face bright with a joy that seemed impossible for such a tiny body to contain. Then his gaze tracked across the room to Laurent, and he reached out with both hands, making an urgent, demanding little sound as he did.

“Oh, I see how it is,” Rhietta said, the grin on her face belying her offended tone. “You want Daddy to carry you to the party.”

Laurent had never actually gotten over the absolute terror that shot through him every time he held his son—he’d only gotten better at hiding it. He’d almost passed out the day he’d been born. He could remember it so vividly; Dasha, having finished cleaning the squalling infant she’d just delivered, had simply handed him to Laurent. No warning, no sense of ceremony—just handed him the most precious, the most important, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life. A red-faced Willas had squinted up at him through pale silver eyes, and it had only been the knowledge that falling might have endangered him that had forced Laurent to stay conscious despite his pounding heart and whirling, dizzy, delirious mind. Still, Willas was worth every moment of terror and then some.

“He just likes being tall.” Laurent held him close, smiling as the baby settled in against his shoulder. “Wants to get a good view of the party.”

“First, it’s my fault we’re late, then I’m short. Every day, I am attacked in my own home.”

“It is your fault that we’re late,” Laurent said placidly as he followed her out of Willas’s nursery and towards the front door at last. It was hard to worry about anything when he had his son in his arms. Rhietta flashed him one of her cheekiest grins, and the three of them stepped out into the late afternoon sunlight.

It was a beautiful afternoon. Laurent was glad they’d delayed Willas’s naming day celebration as long as they had. The whole pack had teased them about it, of course, arguing about whether it was Rhietta’s impulsiveness or Laurent’s tendency for overthinking every decision he made that had caused them to take so long to finally decide on a name for their son. But there were benefits, too. If they’d had this welcoming celebration the week after he’d been born, as was more closely in line with tradition, they’d have had to party in a construction site. Pushing the event back meant that they were able to have the party in the settlement’s brand-new town square.

To his surprise, the suggestion to add the square to the plans for the settlement had originally come from Rhietta’s pack—well, wolves who’d been in Rhietta’s pack, during the time they’d been divided. Strange to think how permanent that schism had felt back then; these days, the year their pack had spent apart felt like a tiny blip in their much longer history of unity. At any rate, it seemed that Rhietta’s wolves had been very fond of the town square where they’d first taken shelter after losing their own settlement. The suggestion had been to build a similar shared community space at the center of their new, shared town—a memorial to what had been lost by both halves of the pack in the wildfires, and a promise never to let themselves be divided again.

It was also, he had to admit, a perfect place for a party. A cheer went up when the pack saw them coming, and he couldn’t help but chuckle when he realized that just about everyone had beaten them here. The pack had been hard at work for days to get everything set up for the night’s festivities; he could see Reade and Camus behind the food tables, getting everything arranged, and at the other end of the square he could see a little band tuning up. Seff was among their number, a guitar in his hands, and Laurent wasn’t surprised to see that Silea had positioned herself close enough to observe the proceedings, her eyes lingering on him thoughtfully. He remembered the way he’d looked at Rhietta in those early days, the way he’d worried that someone might see him looking at her and figure out exactly what he was feeling, and he grinned at the realization that he’d been absolutely right.

And then the crowd engulfed them, and with his curious son in his arms, it was all Laurent could do to keep up with the woman at his side. She was in her element, talking and laughing, accepting the well-wishes and congratulations of their pack. Laurent had gotten a lot more comfortable with these kinds of noisy social events, especially since he’d started working on dropping a little of the armor that had kept him so isolated from the wolves around him, but right now he was happy to let Rhietta take the lead. Happy, he thought, feeling the usual strange mixture of joy and fear that realization caused in him. He was happy. He’d never imagined he was capable of being this happy. He’d never imagined he was capable of any of it—of loving a woman like Rhietta, of raising a son, of forming these close bonds with the wolves he led. But Rhietta had showed him he could. After everything they’d been through, she’d never lost faith in her pack, in herself, or in Laurent. She’d given him the strength he needed to be more than he’d ever thought he could be.

And even though he knew it was an impossible task, he was still looking forward to dedicating the rest of his life to making her even happier than she made him.

*****

THE END

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