Page 62 of Broken Bonds

“Can I get some help? It’s quite a few boxes and some of them are heavy as hell,” he says, pointing behind him with his thumb before shoving his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his feet.

I grunt, throwing the rag I was using to wipe the counters down across the bar top.

“Yeah, just give me a few and I’ll be out there.”

Jillian comes to stand in front of me on the opposite side of the bar when he heads back outside. I lean my hip against the bar on my side, crossing my arms as I stare at the double doors. She does the same, a sigh escaping her.

“Why would he have something shipped here instead of home?” she mutters under her breath.

I shrug, the same question echoing in my mind, but also knowing it’s not my place to question anything to do with Ramsey’s alphas. Maybe it’s a gift for Ramsey that they wanted to surprise her with.

“She was starting to get a little better,” Jillian whispers, chewing on the side of her thumb.

I reach over and lightly smack her hand away from her mouth, which makes her huff and roll her eyes. She stops chewing on her thumb like she’s going to gnaw straight through the bone, though.

“And she’ll keep getting better. Look, there’s probably always going to be something that’s a bit of a trigger for her. Hell, Link is the biggest trigger possible, and if she can sit through dinner with him and not go completely off the deep end, then there’s hope for her yet. Come on. Let’s go see what’s out there,” I tell her, walking around the bar and heading for the doors.

Jillian heaves another sigh, following closely on my heels.

When we exitJinx,I stop in my tracks, causing Jillian to run into my back. She yelps when her face makes contact, cursing under her breath, but I ignore it. My eyes widen as I take in the sight in front of me.

“What the hell, Rion?” Jillian grumbles, glaring at me when she walks around to my side, rubbing her nose.

When she sees my face, she follows my line of sight, and when she takes in all the boxes, her jaw drops while she stands there beside me, just as stunned.

Boxes upon boxes are being wheeled out of the back of a delivery truck and set down in front of the door.

Big, small, flat, square, rectangular.

“What…” Jillian’s mouth opens and closes like a fish, and it’s almost comical with how wide her eyes are, but I feel it’s in my best interest not to laugh. “Whatisall of this?”

“Oh, it’s baby stuff. A complete nursery set up from what I can tell,” the delivery driver says as he looks out over all the boxes as well, having gotten closer to us when I wasn’t paying attention.

Nursery?

Does Ramsey not already have a nursery set up? She’s about five or six months along now? I’d have figured she and her alphas would have already set that up months ago, long before they’d died.

I glance at Jillian when I hear the hitch in her breath. Tears are forming in her eyes, but she blinks them away. Slowly, a smile spreads across her lips and an incredulous laugh escapes her as she shakes her head in disbelief.

“Those bastards! Come on, let’s hurry and get all this inside before Ramsey drives by or something. We can put it all in the back room they used for storage. Don’t need her getting curious and seeing everything before I can figure out what to do,” Jillian says to me, wiping away the few tears that fell.

There’s a bit more pep in her step as she heads directly for the biggest box she can find in the pile. I roll my eyes when she nearly topples over, reaching over to grab ahold of it, and subsequently her, before she can fall. Taking the heavy box, I pass her a much more reasonably sized box, and heft the one she tried to get over my shoulder. She sticks her tongue out at me, making me chuckle and shake my head as I do what she said and start moving boxes to the empty room in the very back of the bar.

The room fills rapidly, boxes lining the walls and stacked nearly to the ceiling in some spots. Granted, it’s not an overly large room, but you can definitely tell it was intended for storage.

There’s no way this is just for one nursery… right?

I mean, I guess there would need to be a lot of extra stuff because she’s having three…

Damn.

That’s a lot of baby shit she’s going to need.

A lot of help, too.

Jillian and I stand in front of the doorway of the room once all the boxes have been shoved in, the smallest bit of space left to be able to get it all back out again when the time is right.

Looking at this all, I guess it would probably take Ramsey and Jillian the rest of Ramsey’s pregnancy to put it all together. Maybe even longer than that, depending on how difficult some of this might be.

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