Page 7 of His Prodigal Alpha

I didn’t even get his number so I could check in on him after I’d calmed down.

If I ever saw him again, I would apologize for that. He’d deserved better treatment. Hell, even now, months after our encounter, I couldn’t shake him from my thoughts, and that had never happened with any of my previous hook-ups before. Sure, some of the focus could be attributed to the fact that it had literally changed my life —and body— but it was more than that. I couldn’t quite explain it, but there had been a spark between us. A connection. I’d been drawn to him, determined to make him mine, if only for twenty minutes.

Courtesy of the knotting thing, it had been longer than that.

Not wanting to linger too much on those thoughts, I tuned back into the conversation across the bar. The room had become more crowded, and a band was setting up on the littlestage at the back of the room. I doubted that I’d be able to listen in for much longer, even with my recently advanced hearing.

“…still think it’s all a tall tale,” Beau’s companion sounded like he was trying his best to talk him down from his escalating hopes.

“It’s not!” Beau thumped the table between them with his fist, causing the glasses accumulated on its surface to clatter against each other. “Bessie told Mindy she even saw the alpha and his mate. She said the mate, the omega, wassuperpre—”

I winced as the drummer chose that moment to give an impromptu solo fill, his sticks hitting every drum on his kit with rapid double strokes, creating a loud but pleasant cascading effect from one end of the kit to the other. When the guitarist also started riffing, ostensibly double checking the tuning of his bright red strat, I gave up on being able to eavesdrop any longer.

Draining my glass, I set it on the worn timber tabletop in front of me and then eased out of my seat, sliding my leather jacket back on over my shoulders. I’d come to a split-second decision: I was going to head to Iowa and see if there really were other men like me. If nothing else, they might have the answers I had spent so long trying to avoid.

Chapter Three - Damon

“So,” Ollie sauntered in through Eric’s front door and sat on the edge of the reception desk, swinging his long legs childishly, “this alpha of yours…”

I sighed. The pack had been kind enough to take me in, allowing me to stay in one of Ollie and Beck’s guest rooms while Eric organized a studio apartment in town to be, in his words, ‘spruced up’ for me. I’d only just moved into the cozy space the night before. I would have happily slept in a barn if need be, but nobody in the pack would allow it. Instead, I’d been offered a roof over my head and a part-time job in Eric and Brandt’s doctor’s clinic.

I had been surprised to learn that the big, buff omegas in question were dragon shifters, and even more surprised still to learn that they were brothers. Eric appeared to be the younger of the pair, with golden blonde curls and a heart shaped face, where Brandt was all long, dark hair and even darker eyes.They had another brother, Sage, who also looked completely different to the two of them, with red hair and bright blue eyes, freckles, and a jovial disposition.

From what I had gathered over the week or so I’d been living in Shifters Sanctuary, Eric owned the majority of the properties in the little township, having purchased them over the course of a number of decades. He had all but gifted a large farmstead to Ollie and Beck when they had moved here, and they seemed happy enough for him to live and work out of the small grounds-keeper’s cottage on the same property. The living room in the cottage had become a makeshift reception room, and the two smallest bedrooms were converted into consulting rooms for Eric and Brandt. Because all the clientele were shifters, Eric had had soundproofing installed in all the rooms to preserve doctor-patient confidentiality.

With Ollie turning up to discuss ‘that alpha of mine’, I was glad that the soundproofing worked both ways.

“He’s notmine,” I argued, even though I knew the remonstration would fall on deaf ears. Ollie, I had discovered, was an eternal romantic. He had this idea in his head that what he and Beck had experienced was some sort of ‘fated mates’ deal and that the same thing had happened for me and Rex.

Only my surprise alpha hadn’t bonded with me when he’d knotted me in that gross bathroom stall. He hadn’t sealed our souls together with a mating bite like the legends —and Ollie— spoke about. He’d put a baby in me and fled. If that was fate’s idea of an ideal mate for me…well, I supposed I should be glad the asshole hadn’t bitten me, shouldn’t I?

That was unfair. Rex wasn’t an asshole. He had been nothing but sweet to me, and even though he had obviously been surprised by the changes to his body, I had never felt as though he was going to flip out on me. Additionally, it was as much my responsibility as his to think about protection, and neitherone of us had. No, I hadn’t realized that he was an alpha —not when he had scented human— but it was still best practice to be safe, even if shifters were immune to most human STIs. Even after he had knotted me and filled me up at my begging, he had no reason to suspect the rules had changed. I should have thought about it at the time, but I had also been blindsided by the fact that my sexy human cowboy was an alpha.

So, no, he wasn’t an asshole.

Fate could still suck my dick, though.

Imagine dangling an alpha in front of me and then whisking him away again, only for me to discover the consequences months later, and with no way to contact the alpha in question! Didn’t I deserve the happiness that Ollie and Beck had? Didn’t my cub deserve its alpha father? Where was fate in all of this mess, hmm?

“Even so,” Ollie waved off my protest, “was he, oh, I don’t know…about yay high,” he gestured about a foot taller than himself, which was a mild exaggeration, “broad shouldered, sandy colored hair and a hot AF beard, with a thick, sexy Texan accent? Real fondness for cowboy attire?”

Midway through the cutesy way he was describing the alpha who had left me in the ladies’ room of a roadside bar, I stiffened. “He’shere?”

Ollie nodded, a Cheshire Cat smirk spreading across his face. “Turned up on Main Street asking questions about Beck. Jazz called because he scented like alpha and puma. Beck told her to bring him up to the house.” I watched as Ollie smiled absently and rubbed at his chest, a far-off look in his eyes before he gave himself a shake and cocked his head at me. “Wanna come see him?”

I gaped at Ollie as if he had lost his damn mind and gesturedto the very obvious baby bump I was sporting. “Because I should just waddle on up there and be like ‘surprise!’?” I completed my sarcastic line with a timeless display of jazz hands.

Honestly, what were the chances Rex had come looking for Beck’s pack right then, when I had only arrived a week earlier?

Fate was determined to fuck with me, I just knew it.

Ollie seemed to be thinking similar thoughts, but with a much more positive bend to them. “Yes! I mean, if this doesn’t prove that you’re fated, I don’t know what does.”

“Or,” I grizzled and pushed aside a notepad containing messages for Eric to follow up on so I could drum my fingers on the desk’s timber surface, “he heard there was someone else like him in the world and came looking for answers the same way I did.”

“But within a week of each other?” Ollie’s green eyes gleamed and he clasped his hands in front of his chest. “It’s a Christmas miracle!”

I groaned. I’d been doing my best to ignore the rampant holiday cheer my host was attempting to ram down my throat. The guy was obsessed with the festive season. He had turned the entire town into what basically amounted to Santa’s village without the height-challenged minions. Eric had thankfully drawn the line at having his living room bedecked in too much tinsel, though he had found one of those damnable ‘Elf On The Shelf’ things hiding in his consulting room’s storage cupboards. The toy was now shoved inside my desk drawer, not that Ollie would know about it.

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