Heat Race - Tanya Chris Page 0,33

expectations people might have. He doesn’t need to make babies for us to love him.”

“What if he can make babies though? How do we shield him from that?”

Saul pondered the question. Jack Henry was a dancer. And young—only just out of high school. What if they’d gotten him pregnant last night, before they’d even known it was a possibility?

“Shit. Do you think he could already be pregnant?”

“If I’m remembering my lore right, and assuming the lore is accurate, he has to be claimed to trigger the hormonal changes that will tell his body to release an egg. Jasper didn’t claim him until after.”

“You think Jasper knew?”

“No idea. I definitely wasn’t thinking about it at the time. I was too busy thinking with my dick. But I’ve been thinking about it since, and until either Jack Henry says he wants to have a baby or we know for sure he can’t, we’d better use condoms.”

Wow. Saul sure hoped Jack Henry could have a baby. And that he would want to. Imagine how wonderful that would be—three alphas, one omega, however many children Jack Henry was willing to have. A whole family. Saul’s birth family sucked. That was the only way he could put it. His father was an alpha who’d married a woman and then resented her for not being an omega. Saul’s mother had run off rather than live with the unending hostility, which had left Saul alone with a man who saw him as inadequate compensation for what he’d lost. Saul had grown up praying he would present as an alpha so his father would finally love him, but then he did and still nothing.

When he’d gone home to grab his things just now, the house had been empty, and he hadn’t waited around to see if his father would turn up. He’d packed what he couldn’t stand to lose and left a note saying he’d mated with Jack Henry and they were moving to Galvetta. More than that seemed unnecessary. His father wasn’t likely to come visit, and Saul couldn’t imagine what he would say if he did.

ELIAS

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Elias had expected to be able to check in with Jack Henry on the drive to Galvetta, to see how he was feeling and give him a heads-up about his possible baby-making capabilities. Instead, he was making the drive with Saul, who he knew only slightly better than he knew Jasper. That was going have to change if the four of them were bonded, and given how they’d reacted to that perceived threat back at Jack Henry’s house, they were definitely bonded.

Elias’s story books—history books, they called themselves, but it was a very idealized version of history—claimed uber-alphas had the ability to form almost telepathic bonds with their mates. Elias had always assumed that was nonsense, but something had happened back there. Without Jasper saying a word, Elias had understood that there was a threat and that his role in facing the threat was to watch Jack Henry. He’d felt big and certain, the bond giving him access to a power he’d never had before.

Then the opposite happened. When Jasper insisted Jack Henry ride with him, Elias’s alpha had been put into place so forcefully it’d hurt. He’d wanted to fight, to prove Jasper didn’t have any more claim to Jack Henry than he did, that Jasper wasn’t bigger or more important than he was, that Jasper wasn’t the boss of him.

Except all those things were true. Jasper was Jack Henry’s true alpha, the one who’d claimed him. And thanks to the bond, he had the ability to impose his will not just on Jack Henry but on all of them. That was what their coordinated response had been—Jasper imposing his will. At that moment, they’d shared a common goal—keep Jack Henry safe—so Jasper’s will hadn’t felt like an imposition, but as the later incident proved, they weren’t always going to agree.

Since Saul had finally put a tape in, Elias turned up the radio, preferring music to his thoughts. This was his favorite song, with its worshipful lyrics about someone out of reach. He’d sung it into his hairbrush dozens of times, thinking of Jack Henry as he did, and he sang along with it now, grinning when Saul joined in for the chorus. That was something they had in common—they’d both longed for Jack Henry.

They talked between songs, getting to know each other through that shared longing, until they reached Galvetta, which consisted of a single commercial street less than