Page 140 of The Beta's Blind Date

My dad laughs, his head thrown back, finding this situation way too amusing for my liking. But his laugh devolves into a coughing fit, his eyes squeezing shut as he covers his mouth and doubles over in pain, his hands gripping the blanket as he catches his breath.

I drop Taryn’s hand and dart to the side table, pouring him a glass of water from the pitcher there and handing it to him. He sips it, wincing as the water hits his throat, then sets it down, his hands shaking the entire time.

I turn to move back to Taryn, but his hand touching my arm stops me, holding me in place. Our eyes meet, pained blue looking into pained blue, neither of us speaking, both of us hesitant to acknowledge the elephant in the room.

“You didn’t tell me about your mate,” he says, the first one of us to give in.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why?” he asks.

I stare at him, my pulse quickening and my breaths coming faster. All I see is him passed out in various areas of our apartment, him having no memory of being that drunk, him missing out on so many of the events that were important to me as a child.

I shake my head and swallow back my tears and emotion. “When would I have told you?” His jaw ticks and he removes his hand from my arm. “I couldn’t tell you the first night I met her, because I came home to you passed out on the couch. I spent the hours after my date cleaning up your mess and making it seem as though it never happened. And when you came to for a moment, you thought I was still a kid, waking up in the middle of the night to ask you when Mom was coming home from patrol. You didn’t even realize I was no longer eight.”

“Reid—”

“I didn’t tell anyone about Taryn until it was almost too late. Not even Wesley. I’d convinced myself I didn’t want or need a mate, because I grew up seeing what no one else did—I grew up seeing exactly what happens to a wolf when their mate dies and they are left behind. The negative was all I saw because you never shared the positives, never shared with me that having Mom and losing her was better than never having her. Yes, I saw examples of happy, mated pairs with Alpha Harrison and Luna Emily, and Felix and Fiona, but to me it didn’t matter because how could they possibly understand the other side?”

My hands curl into fists at my side, and my body tenses and tightens while I speak, as I fight the urge to pace the side of the bed. I face him head-on, though, the way I should have faced this from the start instead of avoiding and deflecting my entire life.

“You didn’t want a mate?” he asks.

“No, I didn’t want a mate! I was too afraid I’d end up like you!”

He flinches back, blinking at me. “But mates are a gift.”

“I realize that now,” I say, sighing and looking at my girl, at her watery eyes as she watches and feels every emotion racing through me and into her. Her lips form a small smile through the sadness and tears, and I reach for her, taking her under my arm again before turning back to my dad. “Now that I have my mate, I understand it’s not just a bond given to you by Selene. It’s so much more than that. But I didn’t see it that way for most of my life. How could I when the prime example I had was a man who let himself and his life fall apart, who couldn’t pull himself together for his only son?”

Taryn hugs me and I return the squeeze, my eyes clenching against the waves threatening to pull me under and the flood threatening to spill from my eyes. But she pulls away from me too soon, taking her warmth with her as she moves to my dad’s side, perching on the edge of the bed and pulling the ultrasound images from her pocket.

“Reid wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell you,” she says, handing him the pictures.

His red-rimmed eyes scan them, his powerful, muscular body shaking from withheld emotion, or pain, or both, and something in me shifts, softens. The man I strove to be, the man I modeled myself after in my training and the way I present myself as the beta of the pack, is still there on the outside, but he’s never been the same since my mom died, and now he’s losing more.

Taryn is right. I didn’t want to tell him. But he deserves to know. He deserves to have something to live for.

“It’s a girl,” Taryn adds, wiping a tear from under her eye.

He looks at her and then at the images again, and then at me, his brow furrowing. His brain pieces together a timeline, and his face and eyes ask me the question he hesitates to speak out loud.

“I may not be her father, but I’ll always be her dad,” I tell him, but my eyes are on Taryn as she smiles at me, her hand covering our pup in her belly.

The images flutter down into his lap as his hand covers his face, and a choked sob escapes him, his other hand reaching for Taryn’s. Her hand glows gold as she clasps it within hers, and I walk to her side, wrapping my arm around her shoulder and covering their hands with mine. My body tenses and my wolf paces, growling low in my mind as she uses some of her healing power to ease his pain. Both he and I are still hesitant, even though the doctor said it would be fine if she was marked.

Before I know what’s happening, he’s wrapping me in a hug, pulling me onto the bed, and holding me as tight as his pain-wracked body will allow him. His tears soak my T-shirt and his sobs cut through his words, muffled by my shoulder but clear all the same.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, wasn’t the male you needed me to be, all because I was too stubborn and too afraid to ask for help. If I could go back, if I could take all of it back, I would. And I-I am so, so proud of the male you have become, the male you became even with a broken, absent, and neglectful father. I just wish I had witnessed it, that I had been the reason you are who you are, that I could take credit for any of it.” His shoulders heave and he shakes his head, hugging me tighter. “I’m so, so sorry, Buddy.”

Taryn’s hands rub my back, and I realize I’m crying too, my body shaking with my dad’s. All of it comes to a head and bursts through the dam I’ve built over the last eighteen years. His apology, his prognosis, him leaving for who knows how long—it’s all too much for me.

Behind me, I feel Taryn link her hand with my dad’s again, the three of us forming a circle as I curl up on the bed next to him, letting him hold me as I cry, the way I should have and never did eighteen years ago when my mom left us broken and alone.

Chapter 49

REID

“Listen,Buddy,”Dadsaysas he pulls away from me.

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