Page 22 of Claimed By Two Alphas

“Threw up?” Joshua asked.

I nodded.

“I’m miserable.” Shane curled up in the chair behind the desk. It was a large, comfortable leather chair. “I haven’t felt this way since I drank myself into a stupor when I turned twenty-one and could legally drink.” He pressed his hand to his mouth, breathed, then dropped his hand away. “I learned my lesson that night. I didn’t drink again.”

“Hearing a ton of voices in your head on top of your nausea probably isn’t helping.” Joshua hunkered next to Shane’s seat. “How’s the head?”

“That’s…not an issue.” Shane uncurled from the chair and sat up. “That was what I was freaking out over while sitting at the bar. The quietness all around me.” He frowned. “I don’t understand why I don’t hear people’s thoughts, but…it’s all quiet now. I should be relieved, but it’s kind of terrifying.”

I looked at Joshua, who looked over his shoulder at me. I shrugged. I had no answer as to why no one else’s thoughts but his own were in Shane’s head. Had our mating done that to him? We’d talked this morning before we’d left the house, told Shane that he was indeed our mate, and that was when he’d doubled down on coming to work.

“It’s not like there’s a doctor I can ask about this,” Shane said with a little too much hysteria in his voice. “I’m not crazy, Delvin. I know why I’m getting sick. You guys knocked me up. Just like Dillon and Casey are now pregnant by their mates. I just…” He laughed and shook his head. “Yeah, maybe I need to go home.”

I had a feeling that Shane was laughing and talking to himself.

Joshua pushed to his feet and turned, his eyes rounding slightly before he took a seat across from the desk, his expression neutral. “I got a theory or an idea that I’m knocking around. Would either of you care to hear it?”

“You have the floor,” I said.

“No, I had the floor,” Shane mumbled. “And the toilet.”

I grabbed the bottle of hand sanitizer off a shelf and then set it on the desk. “Feel free to use the entire bottle.”

Shane pumped it so many times that the pile of gel started to drip over the side of his hand. Half of it hit the floor when he rubbed his hands together, but when he tried to get more, I snatched the bottle away. “I wasn’t serious about using the entire bottle. Your skin can’t and shouldn’t absorb that much sanitizer.”

“You wouldn’t feel that way if roles were reversed,” Shane argued.

I handed him back the bottle.

“Go ahead with your theory,” I said to Joshua as I watched Shane douse himself in the stuff like he was putting on lotion.

“Maybe, since the baby is part shifter, part us, it’s quieting the thoughts in Shane’s head.”

“But Dillon still dreams of things that come true.” It had blown my mind clear open when I’d learned about that. Mikhia had told me about it on our way to rescue Shane from John’s. He’d only told me because Dillon had dreamed of Shane being in trouble an hour before it had happened.

I wasn’t sure who was more in shock of that talent, me or Joshua.

“Dillon can do what?” Shane looked up at me. “Repeat that one more time.”

Someone knocked on the door, and not in a quiet way. I yanked it open to find Janie standing there with her arms crossed. “We’re getting backed up. Would one of you care to help out?” When she tried to look past me to where Shane sat, I blocked her view.

“I’ll be out in a second.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

Joshua was out of his chair in a second, moving past me to stop Janie from leaving the kitchen. “Is there a problem you care to discuss, or are you going to show us how you feel with your bitchy attitude for the rest of your shift?”

So much for Joshua being the charming one. Maybe he was freaking out about becoming a father just as much as I was. Just because you knew you could get someone pregnant didn’t mean you were prepared when it became a reality. I couldn’t be 100 percent certain that was the case, that Joshua had conceived, but I was almost positive that it had happened.

“Okay, we can do this.” Janie dropped her arms. “We can discuss how unfair you are when you let Shane take as many breaks as he needs or how long they are. We can discuss how someone has to cover his shift when he decides he’s done for the night and leaves and how he gets to come into work and sit on his ass while the rest of us are busting our humps.”

Now it was Joshua who spoke. “And would you care to discuss how Delvin let you take two weeks off, with pay, when your mom was sick and needed you to take care of her or the fact that I know you hook up with customers after your shift is over and talk shit about me and Delvin?”

Her eyes widened.

“Didn’t think we knew about that, did you? But did I come to you when I found out that you were talking trash about us? No, I didn’t. You’ve also taken a ton of breaks when you’re having female issues, not that I’m saying anything about that because it’s something out of your control, like Shane’s headaches.”

She glared at Joshua but didn’t say a word.

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