Page 47 of Bonding the Band

“Are you fucking serious?”

Arlo stuck his head out of the window of the absolutely massive double-decker RV. “Of course I’m serious. We need it.”

“We already have a bus,” Beckett said with a sigh.

“Meadow deserves a proper nest on the road. You know we couldn’t get all of the scents out of the bedroom.”

“Let me in.” I kicked the door, and Arlo hit a button that had it whooshing open. The inside was immaculate, with a full kitchen and living space and bunks twice the size we were used to. I sprinted up the stairs and found a bed big enough for all five of us to sleep comfortably.

Arlo appeared behind me. “Check out what I had them add.” He pushed a button on the wall, and the middle portion whirred, a machine pulling the sheets forward in that section.

“What’s it for?”

“So Meadow doesn’t get stuck when she’s super full of baby. There’s a remote too. There’s a slide-y underlayer that’s alsowaterproof. All she has to do is get in the middle, and it’ll pull her to the end so she can stand up. ”

“Shit.” I laughed. “That’s fucking brilliant.”

Arlo grinned. “I know.”

“How did you even find this on such short notice?”

“The snowbirds made it easy. All those old people coming down south to spend winters where it’s warm meant there was a lot to choose from. The winch works for them, too, so it was perfect and in stock.”

“I love it. I bet Meadow is going to need a lot of nesting stuff to fill in the space. We should message Hen and get him to have her put in an order we can pick up tomorrow.”

“Not to be a downer,” said Beckett, “but how are we going to hide all of this from Gary?”

Arlo squinted. “Okay, brain wave. I drove this thing here, so I could drive it to Seattle. We could have our regular driver take our old bus to Minneapolis. Gary doesn’t need to know we’re not on it.”

“Counterpoint,” I said, “it’s, like, an all-day drive from Seattle to Minneapolis. You can’t drive that entire route.”

Beckett nodded. “It’s eighteen hours from here to Minneapolis. The drivers are going to have to trade off. We can’t take them with us.”

“Okay,” said Arlo. “Double counterpoint, there’s a lot of highway between us and our destinations. I can do all the city stuff, you guys can trade off driving on the interstates, and just pull over before you get to anything complicated.”

I raised one eyebrow at him. “You want us to drive this gigantic fucking death machine with our pregnant omega on board?”

“Let me reach out to some of our Seattle contacts,” said Beckett. “They probably have someone who can help us.”

Arlo pouted. “It’s not scary driving in basically a straight line. If it comes down to it, I will sit on a lap and be a copilot. Come on, if people so old they shouldn’t be on the road anymore can learn to drive these things, so can you guys. It’s not like they have a training course for RVs.”

“I’m pretty sure they do,” replied Beckett. “Just not that we can take advantage of in time.”

I sighed. Usually on these long trips, I would take a couple of edibles and chill as long as I could. If I was going to have to drive, I couldn’t do that. Though, now that I thought about it, I should probably spend a little extra time totally sober in case Meadow needed me. Not that I expected her to, with Hendrix being her bond mate, Arlo already having shared her bed, and Beckett being the most practical of us. I was probably the last of the four of us she would turn to for anything, but I wanted to be ready in case she did.

Even being hypothetically needed had my dormant alpha instincts waking up. A mate and baby. In a few short months, life was going to look very different. While I anticipated it being agooddifferent, we wouldn’t know for sure until it happened.

“I will give you one hour of test drive,” I told Arlo. “If I don’t feel confident in my abilities at that point, I’m going to side with Beckett on hiring someone. We’ll have to keep moving the entire time if we’re going to make it to Minneapolis early enough before the show that Gary won’t tan all of our hides.”

Arlo grinned at me. “I am an excellent teacher. Go grab what you need from the old bus, and let’s get on the road.”

We all scrambled to collect our essentials, and then Arlo was navigating us out of Salt Lake City and onto the interstate. He wasn’t a bad driver, by any means, but it was still nerve-racking as hell to be sitting up front, watching him drive this behemoth. After about an hour, he pulled over and we traded spots.

“You’ve totally got this. It’s just like the moving truck after you got your license.”

Oh god. “I backed into a sign with that.”

“No signs to back into here. It’s basically a straight line down I-84 for hours. I’ll be right here.”

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