Page 27 of Pack’s Pledge

I opened my mouth to tease him—yeah, Ibetshe does—but shut it again.

“You know I’m right.”

I took a sip of my coffee in lieu of responding. What could I say?

She did. It was the same feeling that I’d had when Beau and Conall and I had first gotten matched at the sterile heat center. Something had clicked, had snapped into place firmly enough that we’d decided to make it permanent, despite the strangeness of our trio.

“But,” I said, and Beau finished my sentence for me:

“‘We’re not like that.’ I know. But what if we were?”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Well,” I hesitated, “that would be up to you, I think.”

“What do you mean?” He asked. “Hey, do you want some more coffee?”

I nodded, and held out my mug to him.

“Great, get me some, too.” He slid his mug across the tabletop to me and winked. “Thanks, alpha.”

“See, that’s exactly what I mean,” I said, but smiled nonetheless as I collected both mugs and took them over to the coffee maker. I looked over my shoulder at Beau, sitting sprawled out in the modern design-y chair, and felt my chest clench with a deep satisfaction.Mine.

…And his own. And that’s the way we liked it. “You don’t want to be in that kind of pack. The kind where we call each otheralpha,omega, the kind where you get the coffee because you’re lowest in status, or even the kind where we get the coffee because you’re like,our precious—”

“Iamprecious, thank you very much.”

I rolled my eyes as I passed him back his coffee cup, freshly filled. “Sure you are.”

He blew me an obnoxious kiss.

“But youknowwhat I mean—right now, this pack…” I let out a breath of air. We didn’t talk about this shit. We weren’tlikethat. “The dynamic we have works, right? I mean, we’re good together, right?” I met his eye over the coffees. “We’ve always been good, the three of us. If Britt gets involved with us—and that’s a big if, because—”

“Conall,” he said, and I nodded.

“But if Britt gets involved with us, we won’t be like this anymore. You, me, Conall. Roommates, or whatever. We’d be…”

“…A pack?” Beau raised one eyebrow and smiled at me.

The word resonated in my ears. “Yeah. A pack. A real one.”

I sat back down across the table from him, watching as the smile faded into seriousness. He turned his mug around and around with one hand.

“We’re not getting any younger,” he said suddenly.

“What?” The thought struck me suddenly, with the force of a blow:did Beau want a child?We had never,neverdiscussedthat.I had assumed it wasn’t going to be a part of my life, and I’d come to an uneasy acceptance of it. Part of the compromise we’d made. But—

“Are we really going to be trolling Ardor for alphas for the rest of our lives? Making our quarterly visits, picking up strangers to help me get through it?”

He was talking about his heats. My heart sank, unexpectedly. What did that mean, that I was disappointed? I shoved it aside.

“Don’t you—” he said, and stopped himself, but it didn’t matter. I could feel him through the bond we shared, the bond that Conall and I had brought into lifefor himall those years ago, for Beau, toprotecthim, because wedid—in our own way, wedid—love him. Each other.

Longing.

“You want more,” I said, and he nodded, once. Slowly.

“You want her,” he said to me, a statement of fact, not a question, and I nodded, too.

CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE

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