Page 29 of Secret Heart
She shakes her head and holds up the green square. “Bok.” She turns her head and taps the dog on my collarbone. “Duh.”
Scott sets the basket on the floor in front of me and then hands me the bagel.
“She really likes you,” he says.
“Yeah?” I carefully run my hand down her spine the way Beau did in the barn.
He nods. “She doesn’t really cuddle with people, not like that. She loves getting hugs. You saw that Thursday. But relaxing on someone’s lap? Emily and Beau, mostly. Not even Lynn.”
Something warm and weighty spreads under my chest, loosening some of my nervousness even as my skin tightens over my bones again, those cramps getting stronger. Two days until my appointment. I can make it that long without completely breaking down.
I press a soft kiss to my daughter’s temple and then carefully take a bite from the bagel.
Chapter Sixteen
EMILY
Despite her obvious curiosity, Brielle waits until we’re halfway to Jackson to break the silence.
“You want to talk about it?”
I shrug. “It’s not like there’s anything to talk about.”
Brielle just snorts. “Like there wasn’t anything for me to admit about your brother and me?”
She has me there. And I hadn’t even had the decency to ask her some place private. I’d waited until Olivia and Melissa were busy looking at baby things to ask about what was happening between her and Ethan the summer she moved back.
I sigh. “Yes, Penny is his.”
“Obviously.” She sounds almost… smug? I raise my eyebrow in silent question. She flushes and ducks her head. “I told Caleb there was no way that you and Beau made a baby with those eyes. I didn’t take a ton of science classes, but I took enough biology to know there’s no way for you and Beau to have a green-eyed baby.”
I scrunch my nose. “Really?”
She chuckles. “Yep. Brown and blue can’t make green.”
I wonder how many in the family know that, too, and just never said anything. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, revealing her phoenix tattoo and one of her bond scars.
“I also remember you smelling of cloves a couple times,” she continues, “and Beau’s a Beta, so he doesn’t have a scent. I just assumed it was a one-night-stand type thing.”
“And Beau just decided he wanted to be a father, and I was conveniently there?” I keep my voice light-hearted so she knows I’m mostly joking.
She scoffs. “Well, no. I saw how you practically climbed into his lap on the Fourth of July. You don’t do that when it’s just your brother’s friend, no matter how long you’ve known each other.” She tilts her head, and I risk looking over at her as I pass a truck pulling an oversized camper. “But that’s not really what I was asking about, and you know it.”
I blow out a heavy breath and shrug, focusing on the highway again.
“I don’t know,” I grouse. And, because it’s Brielle—the only person not from the families and an Omega who’s had a very messy journey to being bonded to her Alphas—I admit a bit more. “Every time I’ve been in the same room as him, all I want to do is mark him. Physically and with my scent. I want to wipe that fragile look from his face and figure out why he looks like he’s a rabbit caught in a coyote’s vision.”
My scent pulses from me as if to drive home the point. Brielle nods.
“But he’s only here through the month, right? So letting anything physical happen would just be idiotic, especially with Penny in the middle of everything. I know that, logically, but the rest of me? Not so much. It doesn’t care about what Ishoulddo. It just wants him pressed against me and my scent covering his so stupid fangirls stop trying to get to him.”
I turn the radio on, just low enough it cuts through some of the mess in my head without—hopefully—overstimulating Brielle .
“When Beau came home smelling of him on Saturday after the calf emergency, I just about lost my mind,” I whisper. “And that’s never happened before, not even when we were fooling around all summer. It wasn’t even his full scent. It was muddied by the cattle and whatever sour-smelling cleaner they used to deal with the mess.”
“Do you think you might be matches?” she asks.
As in scent matches. I hadn’t even thought about it. I swallow as I think back over that summer.
