Page 26 of His Prodigal Alpha

Three months didn’t feel that long. How was I supposed to brace myself for fatherhood in such a short amount of time? God, I’d only just told Damon that I wanted to date him, to see if we could work towards being a family, but now I was feeling the urge to run again. To flee and not look back, just like I did the night I met him. The night we conceived our son.

No.

No, I was not going to be a coward. Not again.

While I hadn’t planned on seeing Damon again, I’d gone crawling back to him the second I’d gotten a chance. Instinct had told me to, just like instinct was telling me to grow up and accept the changes coming my way.

“Come on,” Beck led me to where his truck was parked behind mine on the street, “let’s head back up to the house and we can talk, alpha to alpha.”

* * *

Sitting at Beck’s dining table with a plate full of homemade spaghetti and meatballs and a tall glass of ice-cold beer, I felt strangely at home. I hadn’t felt that way since my teens; before I’d come out to my adoptive parents. And, even back then, I’d never felt as though I fit in properly. But in Shifters Sanctuary, at Beckett Smith’s dining table, I honestly felt like I belonged.

He’d just begun regaling me with his thoughts on discovering he wasn’t human when Ollie entered the room, dropping into his fiancé’s lap. Beck rubbed Ollie’s back and nuzzled his face intothe crook of his neck, over Ollie’s mating mark.

Quickly avoiding being caught watching, I looked back at my half-eaten dinner and twirled my fork in my pasta, watching red flecks of sauce spin off the strands of tasty goodness.

“Kids asleep?” Beck asked, and Ollie hummed in answer.

“Yeah. Duke fought me on it, but he eventually went down.”

“You should get some sleep,” Beck murmured, his voice filled with a mixture of emotions that made my chest ache. “I’ll take the first wake-up call.”

I cast them a sideways glance, feeling like an intruder on their intimate moment.

“Don’t be too late coming to bed,” Ollie instructed. “You know I sleep better when you’re with me.”

I was going to get cavities from all the sweetness.

Beck chuckled softly. “I won’t, baby. I promise.”

I looked back down at my plate as they kissed chastely, vaguely registering Ollie sliding back off Beck’s lap. Ollie ignored me as he left the room, and Beck sighed.

“He’ll come around,” he told me, even though I hadn’t said anything. “He’s just protective of Damon. They’re close in age, and he feels like he could have been in Damon’s situation, you know?”

I winced. “It’s not like I knew I could knock him up.” Swallowing roughly, I gave up the pretense of continuing with my meal. What little I had eaten was sitting heavily in my gut. “Sure, I should have used a condom anyway, but—”

“I get it. The whole mating heat and rut thing is no joke,” Beck grinned wryly. “Your instincts take over and, hey presto, instant family.”

“But you stuck around with Ollie. I ran the second my knot went away.”

“True,” Beck shrugged and sat back in his seat, fiddling with the edge of the cork coaster that sat beneath his empty glass. “I was scared out of my mind, though,” he confessed. “I do wonder if we hadn’t accidentally bonded, whether I might have made a different choice.”

Considering how deeply in love he and Ollie seemed to be, that admission surprised me. “Really?”

He nodded. “I thought about running and not looking back. But I could feel his emotions. His proximity through the bond. That’s what stopped me. I was freaking the ever-loving-fuck out, but I didn’t know how to sever the bond —or if we even could— and I didn’t know what would happen, or if it would hurt either of us if I ran away.”

It might have made me a really shitty person, but I felt better hearing that. It made my own decision to turn tail feel less cowardly.

“How does that bond stuff work, anyhow? Doesn’t it get tiring or confusing feeling two lots of thoughts or emotions or whatever?”

Beck nodded and swirled his glass, watching the dregs of foamy amber spinning around. “It took a lot of getting used to. After I got used to shifting, I found it easier to manipulate the sharing of the emotional and physical sensations. We, uh,” his cheeks turned pink, “we’ve had some fun with that, too.”

It took me a couple of seconds to cotton on before my jaw dropped. “Hold up. You use it for sex?”

“Sometimes.” Beck cleared his throat. “There have to be some benefits, too, right? But that all came over time. It…it’s kind of like the bond is sentient, I guess? It evolved with our relationship. Now, it feels as natural to me as shifting. Like an invisible limb or something.”

“And shifting feels natural to you?” I struggled to wrap my head around the concept. “Even though you’ve only known you were a shifter for…what? Just over a year?”

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