Page 69 of Bred Mate
“I won’t be getting my mate under control. In fact, I think I’m going to let her off the leash more often,” I say.
My father looks taken aback. He got used to me being his yes man before he left. He probably expects deference now, but I am alpha now. He bows to me.
“Well,” Margaret says, straightening her pants. “The two of you could certainly do with some pointers on hosting.”
“We’re not hosting. You weren’t invited.”
“True,” my father says, rising to his feet. “We wanted to see the baby. We saw the baby. It’s a baby.”
“Hm,” I agree.
He helps Margaret to her feet. “We’re proud of you, son,” he says. “This house feels like a home again. There’s two things that make an alpha an alpha, and that’s babies and blood.”
“Alright, Dad. Enjoy your… honeymoon?”
“Oh, imagine if we got married, Orion!” Margaret laughs. “It would make these two step-brother and sister.”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” I growl.
“I could be your mommy,” she says brightly. The chaos in this woman is not contained. I am sure my father thinks he has her under control. I could tell him he does not, but he’s got the silly smile of a man who thinks he knows better. He is about to live out the consequences of his taste, and nobody can save him from that fate.
CHAPTER 15
Ellie
Putting a baby into a real car seat is like doing origami with the most precious thing in my life. Yvie doesn’t like being confined, and reacts to the straps like she’s being water-boarded. Her shrill cries of fury only abate once the car starts moving and the world becomes a mobile for her amusement.
“Where are we going?”
I turn to Karl with a flustered kind of feeling. I swear to god Connor was an easier baby. Or maybe everything is just easier when you’re twelve and have absolutely no outside input.
“Just a drive, dear,” he says. “Why don’t you close your eyes?”
My eyelids were already heavy. I am asleep almost before his sentence ends.
When I wake up I feel refreshed, and I find that I am in an area I know very well.
My home range. My forest.
It’s… back?
It is not as it was. The tall trees are gone, but they have been replaced with dense bushes and saplings. In the distance, some of the old growth still remains. As I look at it, I realize that this is the living equivalent of a stopped watch. The development ceased when Rainer died.
Karl has the baby out of her seat, and has fed and changed her. I’ve loved him for a lot of things, but I think I love him for this most of all.
“Come,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
I follow him through the forest, remembering how it felt the first time we went this way. He had just finished assaulting some forestry crews, and I was planning on kidnapping him and forcing him to buy the land for me. I guess it worked out, sort of, maybe. My mother owns this territory now. She doesn’t seem to have done much with it, but there are signs of restoration. Someone’s put a track in, too, a shingled driveway. I try not to pay it too much attention, because it makes me sad to see neat gray stone paving through what used to be completely wild terrain. This is a place that should be picked through on deer tracks, not driven through.
It’s a nice walk, and I let myself sink into the happy memories of what was once here, the life I lived when I was too young and too simple to even imagine all that would happen to me in the future.
“Here,” Karl says, stopping in front of me, effectively blocking my view. “Come and see this.”
I step around him and gasp.
“Oh, my god!”
A house has been built on the banks of the river I once lived on in the same place the old shacks used to stand. It’s big, but not too big. Just big enough for a family to live in, with a broad covered porch that runs around the exterior.
