That took me by surprise. “What?”
Shane sneered but didn’t make any moves to come closer. “He just wanted to know what was going on with the baby.”
“Wait a minute. You know Axel?”
“Yeah, I’m his friend. He sent me here the first time to check up on you. I just got a little carried away that time.”
Figures they’re friends,I thought.They’re both creeps.
“I thought you weren’t pregnant with Axel’s baby,” Kaden said to me.
“I’m not,” I confirmed.
“What?” Axel asked, pushing off the wall. Kaden and I braced ourselves but he didn’t approach us. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
Shane’s gaze raked me up and down again, and I tried to ignore the creep-factor because he genuinely seemed like he was trying to gauge how far along I was more than anything else.
Creepy and stupid. I won’t show for another couple months, idiot.
“If you want, I can get it in writing from the doctor,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“No, I believe you,” Shane mumbled.
I didn’t want to say it out loud and agitate Shane, but I also wondered why Axel was too much of a coward to come and have this conversation with me himself. On top of that, he’d lied to me. He promised me the potential baby we’d made wouldn’t be his problem. Not being involved with the baby’s life was one of the mandatory requirements I’d set before we had sex.
But it was all a moot point, because I wasn’t pregnant with his baby anyway. I had Rafael now, and his love was like a protective barrier, shielding me from all the negative thoughts of my past mistake.
“I’ll tell Axel the news.” Shane shrugged. “You won’t see me again. And I guess he won’t bother you anymore either.”
“Good. Well, if this conversation is over, we’ll be going now,” I announced.
Shane nodded awkwardly, then walked off. It seemed like his charismatic glamour had been stripped away, revealing the true man he was, and I was no longer afraid of him.
And it’s all thanks to Rafael.
16
Rafael
The wait was fucking excruciating.
Although Skylar was as impatient as I was, he didn’t want to return to a doctor’s office during cold season to get a pregnancy blood test again, so we waited out the two weeks required for a drug store test.
Our schedules lined up nicely around the two week mark for me to pick up Skylar on the way home from work. But when I pulled up by the curb, there was a group of omegas and a few alphas huddled around by the door over something I couldn’t see.
“Not another litter of kittens, I hope?” I asked, approaching Skylar.
But it wasn’t kittens. Something just as damn cute, though. Two babies of varying ages were being cooed over by all the omegas. I recognized one of them intimately, because I’d been there when he was born. It was Finn, Jake and Griffin’s son.
The latter--who was also the tallest and most familiar face of the bunch--beamed at me before yelling, “Raf!”
Griffin slammed into me with a bearhug, which I eagerly returned.
“Hey, man!” I said. “It feels like I haven’t seen you in ages!”
Even though Griffin and I worked together, he’d been busy with Finn and his boyfriend Jake since they moved in together. Griffin always had varying degrees of eye-bags since his son was born, but he always wore a bright smile, brighter than I’d ever seen before Finn came into the picture.
