The Strength of the Pack

  Pulling on her robe, she went out to talk to him. He’d already showered and was putting his lunch together. “Holy cow, sweetie. You’re up early.” He kissed her on the cheek.

  She fixed herself a mug of coffee and leaned against the counter while she sipped it. “Let me ask you something. A serious question.”

  He paused to turn and look at her. “What’s up?”

  “You wanted kids, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Why? Someone figure out how to get one out of a gay guy’s ass?” He grinned.

  “I’m serious.”

  His smile faded. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Me. If we’re going to do this, it needs to be soon. You guys are married. I’m not going anywhere. Leo’s back to work. There will never be a better time.”

  “What about Nate?”

  “We’re…we are what we are. We’re dating, and we love each other, but he’s told me it’s my call if I want more, and when. He doesn’t even know exactly…what you and Leo know, and said we have to have a talk about that first before we can go any farther. Well, I’m not ready for that talk. Not his fault, it’s mine. But I always wanted another baby. Why can’t we do artificial insemination? She’d be Laurel’s half-sister that way.”

  He stared into her eyes. “You’re serious?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “We’d have to talk to Leo. And Nate.”

  “I know. But…think about it. Please?”

  “Why now?”

  “It’s something that’s always been in the back of my mind. If you want to know the truth, I think it’s something that until we at least try, I won’t be able to finally completely let go to Nate and close that last remaining gap. I know that sounds weird, but I want to do this, with and for you. And it needs to be me making that decision for me before I put myself into another relationship.”

  “Uh, sweetie? You are in a relationship.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  He kissed her forehead. “This isn’t the best time to talk about this. Let me talk to Leo today and then the three of us can noodle it tonight after Laurel goes to bed. Is Nate coming over for dinner?”

  “Not tonight. He’s going out to dinner with Cherise and Wade and Wade’s parents. I really didn’t want to go.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just…” She shrugged. “It’s me, okay? I get it.” She realized her voice was rising and dropped the volume. “I’m kind of a broken toy, but at least I know it now and I’m working on fixing myself. When I was with Leo, I didn’t know. I’m not ready for…extended family stuff. Pack stuff, yeah. Someone else’s family? I kind of need some time still.”

  He took the coffee mug from her and pulled her in for a hug.

  Yep, brother.

  Totally.

  Not an ounce of desire for him at allll.

  Not anymore. Not when she had Nate.

  “That fucker really needs to be planted six feet under,” he muttered. “Hope I never meet up with him again. If I’d known then that night at the hospital, I’d have been in jail for punching him.”

  “You won’t,” she said. “I don’t ever want to see him again.”

  She hadn’t even seen her mom, or her sisters, since the showdown in the hospital, even though she’d talked to her mom and her sisters a couple of times on the phone. Mostly her sisters, who didn’t agree with how their parents had reacted once they heard Eva’s side of the story about that afternoon.

  And her sister Ann had apologized for calling their parents despite Eva begging her not to that day.

  Neither sister knew what had happened to her all those years ago.

  “Maybe you should talk to your counselor about this,” Jesse said. “Before we take this to Nate.”

  “I plan to. I see her this afternoon.” With Jesse living with them, and Leo back to working full-time, the men had asked Eva to reduce her work hours, enough to make it easier for her to take care of Laurel and see her counselor every week.

  “Okay. Then we’ll talk tonight and go from there. Leo might say absolutely not and make this all moot, anyway.”

  “I know.”

  * * * *

  But Leo didn’t. After Laurel went to bed, the three of them huddled on the lanai, voices down, and talked.

  Even though she’d been married to Leo for twelve years, she could sense he was in many ways a different man now. Now, she couldn’t read him as well as she once could. Or, at least, thought she’d could, even though she really hadn’t known him as well as she thought she had.

  After he asked her questions, questions she’d already bandied around with her counselor, he sat back and went quiet for a moment.

  Finally, he broke the silence. “What about Nate?”

  “This is pack business.”

  “But you love him.”

  “I know.”

  Leo cocked his head. “You have to talk to him. If he’s not on board with it, then it’s a no-go anyway.”

  “I’m not collared to him, I’m collared to you two.”

  “Whoa, sweetie, this is Leo and Jesse and Eva time, not BDSM dynamics time.”

  “I mean it. I take that commitment just as serious as if we were married.”

  “But you want to be collared to Nate, so he needs input.”

  “Not yet.”

  Leo studied her again. “You won’t confide in him so he can collar you until this happens, will you?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she quietly admitted.

  “Why? Or, why not, I guess should be the question.”

  It took her a while to formulate the answer. She’d had trouble expressing it to the counselor, too, and wanted to do a better job with this instead of the rambling, stumbling mess she’d come up with earlier.

  “You guys promised me that, no matter what, we’re a pack, right?”

  “Eva—”

  “Answer the question, Leo. Did you or didn’t you?”

  “I did,” he said. “You know I did.”

  “For the rest of our lives, right?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  She looked at Jesse and he nodded. “I’m damn sure not going anywhere,” he said with a smile. “Just try to get rid of my ass.”

  “Okay, then.” She indicated the three of them. “We, and Laurel, are pack. Our baby would be part of the pack.”

  “You don’t trust Nate?” Jesse asked.

  “That’s not my point. If Nate wants to be part of this pack, he has to accept this pack as it is. That means our children. I might not get another chance to have a baby, and I don’t want to second-guess myself because it wasn’t Nate’s baby. He says he’s not going anywhere and accepts what we have, now, as it is, for as long as it needs to be. If he’s a man of his word, he’ll accept this.”

  The men studied each other. “What?” she asked.

  “Honey,” Leo said, “asking him to accept Laurel is one thing. Standing by while you get pregnant with Jesse’s baby is another.”

  “If he is a man of his word, he’ll accept this.”

  “My loving you and staying a part of this pack is not contingent upon you having my baby,” Jesse said. “If Nate makes you happy, I’d rather you guys hook up and be happy. A baby you have with him is pack as much as a baby you have with us. Or me.”

  “No, it’s different,” she said. “Not that I think this will happen, but worst-case. What if I have a baby with him and he leaves and wants custody?”

  “Isn’t that a risk you’d have with Jesse?” Leo asked.

  “No. Because I know Jesse loves Laurel, too. He wouldn’t do that.”

  “Why do you think less of Nate like that?” Leo asked. “I’m confused.”

  So was she. It made perfect sense in her head. She was screwing this up the way she had earlier. “Because you two know the worst about me, what’s happened and what I did, and you two still love me, okay? I don’t know that he’ll even still want me after I tell him. And by then I might love him too muc
h to stand up to him if he tells me no, I can’t do this. I want this to be our baby.”

  Leo and Jesse both reached across the table and took her hands.

  “I don’t think you’re giving him enough credit,” Leo said, “but it’s your body and I respect your wishes. If this is what you want to do…I’m okay with it if Jesse is.”

  Jesse stared at their hands. “I’m not sure I’m good with the risk of him walking over this. Nate, I mean.”

  Eva met his gaze. “Like you said, if he walks, it doesn’t say much about him, does it?”

  She hoped none of them were wrong about Nate.

  But in her heart, the thing she couldn’t admit to Jesse for fear of him thinking it was her main reason—Jesse had saved her life, her family.

  Because of Jesse, she had Laurel and Leo and two men who loved her, broken and all.

  And neither one of them even fucked her.

  Her first loyalty, after Laurel, was to them.

  It always would be.

  “Please talk to Nate,” Leo said. “And if you still want to do this…then go ahead and talk to your doctor about what it would take.”

  Her heart soared. “Thank you!”

  He smirked. “Thank him,” he said, hooking a thumb at Jesse. “He’s the one who’ll have to be jerking off into a cup to make this happen.”

  “Gee, that sounds so romantic,” Jesse snarked. “They probably won’t even have gay porn. Can’t you take me in there, tie me up, and forcibly jerk me off? That’ll yank my chain.”

  “I’ll just send you in there with a butt plug up your ass,” Leo joked. “That’ll make you plenty horny.”

  “TMI, guys,” she said, pulling her hands back and waving them in the air as she tried to disperse that mental image. “I don’t mind accidentally hearing you guys do it through a closed bedroom door, but I don’t want to know the deets. No offense.”

  “Oh, now you get squicky,” Leo teased, getting up to round the table and kiss the top of her head. “You’ve watched me beat his ass at the club.”

  “That’s different,” she insisted.

  “How?” Jesse asked, also getting up to kiss the top of her head.

  “It just…is. I can’t explain it.”

  Like she couldn’t really fully explain her position here. She just knew.

  And as she’d been told repeatedly by everyone, she needed to follow her gut. She’d ignored it for too damn long. Well, her gut told her this was the right thing.

  For her, and for their pack.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A week later, she still hadn’t had that talk with Nate, even though she’d already scheduled their consultation appointment with a doctor in the same practice as her ob-gyn, one who handled fertility issues. It was three weeks away still, so she had time to talk to him.

  But another, more pressing detour cropped up—her sister, Ann, had finally earned her doctorate degree.

  And asked Eva to come up for a large family dinner that weekend—including relatives she hadn’t even seen in years.

  And her father.

  Nate would attend with Eva, but Laurel already had “prearranged plans” with her father.

  Eva wasn’t entirely sure her mom or dad hadn’t been behind the last-minute nature of the invite. If she had to put money on it, she’d be willing to bet it was her father’s doing. With her sisters clueless about what had happened to Eva growing up, they were more open to being manipulated in some ways by him.

  This smacked of his handiwork, of waiting until the last minute in hopes that she would either feel pressured to come, or if she turned them down, he could shift the blame back onto Eva and tell anyone at dinner who would listen about it.

  It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been so devious, or put her down in front of her sisters or other relatives.

  “You don’t have to go,” Jesse told Eva from where he sat on her bed. “You can say sorry, I have to work. Or, sorry, I have other plans. Or, sorry, I don’t want to be within a two-mile radius of that fucking assh—”

  “Jesse, Ann doesn’t know what he did to me,” she quietly said. “And she didn’t do it to me. I’m going for her, not for him. She called me personally and asked me to come. This is her day to celebrate. She’s earned her doctorate degree. That’s a big deal and she’s worked really hard to get it. I love my sister.”

  “But the bastard’s going to be there.”

  “I won’t be alone. Nate’s going with me.”

  “Does he understand the backstory?”

  She sat next to him on the bed and rested a hand on his thigh. “He knows something happened, but I haven’t told him everything, no. And he hasn’t asked for the details.”

  “Why won’t you tell him? And why hasn’t he asked? You guys have been dating for months.”

  “Because he respects my privacy. It’s how we’ve arranged our dynamic for now. I’m working on myself, okay? Nate told me that he’s always open to hearing what I want to tell him, when I want or need to tell it, but that he won’t force me to tell him. That the timetable on when I tell him—and when we take our relationship farther—is up to me. It’s not like I’m collared to him yet.”

  Jesse snapped his fingers. “A-ha! The restraining order. Perfect excuse not to go.”

  “You know damn well it expired when we didn’t renew it.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t remember that.”

  She patted his leg. “I’m not ready to tell Nate yet because I don’t want to tell someone unless I know I can open up to them all the way and be able to have a full relationship with them. He asked me about my scars, so he…knows some of it already without me telling him. He’s very…perceptive. We haven’t even had intercourse yet.”

  Although they’d done just about everything else except actual intercourse.

  “I wish you’d let us go with you.”

  “No, because I don’t want to start a war on my sister’s big day. Besides, if you guys come and Laurel doesn’t, that will guarantee drama from my father. I don’t want to create drama. Ann asked me to come, and I am. I told her I’d be bringing a date, and I am. If my father causes trouble, I’ll deal with it.”

  “Take June. She carries.”

  She laughed. “No. And that’s why I’m not taking Tilly, either. She wouldn’t look good in prison orange.”

  That, and she didn’t want her friends knowing all of the details, the whys of the bad blood between her and her father.

  Not that she didn’t think they wouldn’t support her. She knew they would.

  She didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t want anyone knowing about it who didn’t need to know. It was the ugliest, most awful time of her life, and she preferred to keep it locked away in the dark.

  She leaned against him and he put his arm around her shoulders. “Thank you for not giving up on me that morning. I wouldn’t have blamed you if you’d just turned around and left me lying there on the bathroom floor, took Laurel, and left.”

  He kissed the top of her head, lingering, his face pressed into her hair. “I couldn’t have done that, sweetheart. For one, I love Laurel. For another, I love Leo, and I knew he wouldn’t want me to do that. And three, I wouldn’t have been able to live with the guilt if you had died and I could have saved you. Besides, now I love you, too.”

  “Thank you. I love you, too, Jesse.”

  “You don’t have to thank me.” He reached up and touched her necklace, the tag that matched to his. “You’re part of the pack. We take care of our own.”

  * * * *

  They would have to drive to Tampa. Dinner was slated to start at six at her parents’ house.

  Nate would pick her up around three thirty, giving them plenty of time to make the trip and allow for any traffic delays without stressing Eva out any more than she already was.

  After they left her parents’ house, they’d go to Nate’s for the night. Not only did Eva not want to have to face Laurel immediately after dealing with her par
ents, she wanted time alone with Nate to process whatever might happen and her emotions.

  Hopefully, nothing. Hopefully, her worrying was for naught.

  Also, they needed to talk, and she didn’t want to do that before they got to her parents’ house.

  When Nate arrived to pick her up, he walked in without knocking. He had a key to the house, just as Eva now had a key to his.

  Laurel ran to greet him and Eva smiled as she watched Nate scoop her up and swing her around. Wouldn’t be much longer before she’d be too big for him to do that. It’d only been just recently that Leo had finally regained the strength to pick her up and carry her.

  And holy crap, Laurel would be eight in less than a year.

  Where did the time go?

  Just yesterday, she and Leo were bringing her home from the hospital, Leo having put his foot down and pissed off her father when Leo told them they weren’t going to come down and stay with them for a few days to “help.”

  Once Leo had known Eva’s secret, he’d transformed a previously borderline adversarial relationship with her father into a blatantly confrontational one, stopping just short of openly going after the man in front of others for what he’d done to Eva.

  Eva had begged him not to, because her sisters hadn’t known what he did, and she didn’t want to drive a deeper wedge between them than her father already had throughout the years. Eva also didn’t want to totally cut Laurel off from all contact with her mother or sisters. Not to mention she didn’t want others knowing her pain.

  Then her father had shown his ass when Leo was in the hospital, ordering her and Laurel to go with them and leave Leo there…

  And that’s when something inside Eva had snapped. At the time, she’d been too shattered by the confluence of events to openly stand up to him, but Leo’s attorney and Tilly and Ross had given her the easy out and proposed a deal that to others had looked bad, but to her had been a godsend.

  And it meant Laurel would forever be safe from Eva’s father, even if Eva wasn’t around to protect her.

  I need to tell Nate.

  That larger conversation would have to wait. Tonight, after surviving the ordeal with her family, she planned on talking with Nate about the baby plans. If he didn’t handle that news well, it would render a talk about her father and what he did moot, because Nate wouldn’t need to know.