“No,”Qylar snapped. “Don’t do that. Alex is six months along and needs to be somewhere safe right now. You all should already be gone. He’s barely able to hide it anymore.”
“Butyouneed us here,” Cryss said.
“Your babe needs you there,” Qylar replied.
Cryss sighed, eyeing Alex.
“I’ll be fine,” Qylar said. “I know I don’t look it right now, but… I just need time to process this news and get over my hurt feelings.”
“Try not to take his leaving too personally,” Alex said. “He needs time to process this news, too.”
“I suppose,” Qylar muttered, hopeful that was the case.
But he wasn’t as confident as Alex that Kenji would return to him. He pushed back his sleeves and placed his elbows on his knees.
“Q? What’s that?”
Qylar lifted his gaze at Alex’s question. “What?”
“The mark on your inner arm?”
Qylar rotated his arm out and looked at Kenji’s mark again. He’d been hiding it from Alex and Cryss, thinking Zaadi’s had accidentally made it for months and he didn’t want things getting weird. Now there was no longer a reason to cover it up when they were around, thankfully. “Kenji accidentally made it the night we were together. He was asleep, so he had no idea. It’s no big deal.”
“I did the same to Alex when I gave him mine,” Cryss said. “Instinctively. In my sleep.”
Qylar’s gaze met Cryss’s.
“That’s no accident,” Cryss said. “He’s marked you as his, Q.”
“Well,this story just keeps getting more and more interesting,” Alex said. “Doesn’t it?”
Qylar eyed the imprint again, running his fingertips over it.
Marked me as his?
No… I can’t even consider the possibility of that.
CHAPTER 9
Around the same time Qylar was showering, Kenji stood under his own spray until it turned cold and even then he didn’t rush to turn the water off. He dried his body robotically, his mind spinning. After hanging the towel, he looked himself over in the mirror. He didn’tlookpregnant, but it had only been a couple of months, and he thought it took a little while for it to show. He hadn’t paid all that much attention in health class in school. Why bother worrying about conception when he wouldn’t be knocking anyone up?
Little had he known that someone could knockhimup.
And health class hadn’t covered alien egg pregnancies or mpreg.
Eggpreg?
That was a kink he’d never seen before, but that didn’t mean it didn’t exist. He turned to the side and slid his hand down his abdomen, not noticing any difference in his reflection. Nothing he could see, anyway. He walked from the bedroom and collapsed across his bed, drifting off into a rocky sleep. When he awoke, he checked the clock and realized he needed to be atwork in an hour. He considered calling out. His head was all over the place and potentially dealing with a bunch of drunk assholes might not end up going too well.
Rent had to be paid, though.
Kenji stared up at the ceiling, the pinging thoughts leaving him unable to move. Call it shock or his executive dysfunction going haywire, but he was royally fucked. By an ex-prince who was also an alien, too. Hell, maybe his rich fantasy life had finally erupted and was spewing itself all over his real one andnoneof it was happening. That seemed to make a lot more sense. He reached for his phone and shot off a text to his boss—who was going to lose it so close to opening—and called out. After dropping the phone to his bed, he ran his palm over his abs again, ignoring the dinging of his phone.
With all the times he’d fantasied about mpreg and being a Cavill-Momoa production himself, one would think he’d feel elated that it was possible. Reality was far from fantasy romance, and all he could feel was terrified.
I might not be pregnant at all, though.
Qylar said he wasn’t really sure he’d released them. Then he’d felt around in Kenji’s stomach and hadn’t felt anything. If there were two eggs that big inside him—Qylar would’ve felt something, surely. He sucked in his gut and pressed his fingers around, searching for round, hard objects in his gut. There was nothing that he could feel. The eggs had had two months to grow, so they’d be even bigger and he’d feel them.
