Page 29 of The Alpha: Part Three
“How long will you be gone before you come back?” Mateo asks.
I sigh. “I don't know. A few weeks at a time. To be honest, I'd like to come here towards the end of fall and stay until spring. The winters are cold back home.”
“So about half a year in each territory?”
“Round about,” I nod.
“What about fire season?” Michael asks.
Desir'ee puts the towel she was holding on the counter and turns to look at me with a pinched expression. I can feel how much she'd like me to pull the lead alpha card and tell Michael that there will be no more fire season, but I can't make that decision alone. “What about it?” I ask, trying to sound neutral.
“Me and Ben will need to be back for fire season. That's around the end of summer and into the early fall. We can come back ourselves. You and Desie don't have to come until after.”
Before I have time to form a response that's polite enough for the kitchen table, Desir'ee makes her opinion of that perfectly clear. “No. No more fires. One of the things I was looking forward to when we went to the East Coast is that you and Ben won't be able to try to kill yourselves during fire season. No fire season, Michael.”
“It's important to us, Des.” Ben crosses his arms. “We need to do our part to keep everyone safe. You know that.”
“I don't care, Benjamin,” she huffs. “It's important tomethat you don't get burnt up on a hillside. You're going to have a child by then. Do you want to risk him growing up without you?”
“That's not fair, D.” Lucas says gently. “They have been going out to fires ever since they were old enough to join up at the station.”
Desir'ee puts her hands on her hips and doubles down. “I don't care if it's fair. It isn't fair for them to put themselves at risk.”
Michael rubs the back of his neck. “Since we're already arguing about it, you might as well know that we put in a few inquiries at firehouses near the distillery."
Desir'ee turns her ire onto him. “Did you think that Mateo and Lucas would keep you safe? Absolutely not. You are not going to put yourselves at risk like that. No.”
Michael reaches for her and she reluctantly goes to him. He pulls her down into his lap and rests his chin on her shoulder. “We know you don't like it, baby. We know it scares you. But it's something we need to do. We're always careful. And we know what we're doing when we're on a job. We'll always come home to you.”
“Can we sit on this conversation for a little bit?” I ask. “If I'm honest with myself, I don't much like the idea of you and Ben putting out fires any more than Desir'ee does; and I know how important it is to you. We've got time to work everything out. We don't need to go back and forth about it right now.”
“Fine. But I'm not going anywhere until after Amber has her baby. I've been waiting too long to be an aunt to miss it.”
When we finally get back home Desir'ee is a little less prickly. I know she's more anxious about the twins being firemen right now than she would be because of the baby. So are they. It's understandable. Emotions and fears are far more intense when pregnancy and children are involved. We'll just have to work through this like we've worked through everything else. That being said, less prickly doesn't equate to being snuggly and Desir'ee shuts herself up in the back bedroom almost as soon as we walk through the door.
“She'll be alright,” Ben sighs as he drops down onto the couch next to me.
Michael sits down heavily on the other side, dropping his head back onto the back of the couch. “She just doesn't like it.”
I nod. “I don't like it.”
They both look at me.
“I don't,” I continue. “I'm fairly sure I hate it. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of you. What you do is amazing and hard. But it's dangerous and I don't want my pack in danger. It's bad enough with all this council mess. I know it's something you need to do, but I'll never like it.”
I'm about to go into the detailed list of reasons why I don't like it when my phone rings with a call from...Jasper.
Jasper never calls me.
Something must be very, very wrong.
I answer the call, feeling like the bottom of my stomach fell through the floor. “What's wrong?”
“It's no wonder you and Talia get along. It's always what's wrong, what happened, where are you, and never a plain old hello.”
I blow out a relieved breath before I respond. “Hello, Jasper. Is everything alright?”
Michael and Ben are both staring at me with their eyebrows raised in identical expressions of worry and dread. Until this very second, I forgot to notice that I no longer see them as identical. They're both so different that I simply forgot that they're identical, and now that they're giving me the exact same face it's making me remember the first time I saw them when I first came to the West Coast.
