Jayne laughed. “Okay!”
“Okay,” Nikki said, but the word had been said so many times that to Jayne, it had lost meaning. “Be right back.”
She darted into the house and disappeared.
“Do you think she’ll run out of steam eventually?” Shep asked once Nikki was gone.
Jayne shrugged. “I’ve never raised a six-year-old before, and from what I can remember, Simon’s always been quiet and shy. I was in college when you were six, so I have no idea.”
“If you have any decency at all, you’ll order two-hour shipping on a pair of earplugs.” Shep jostled the overnight bag slung over his shoulder, then started up the steps. “I might not make it out of this one alive.”
“It’s not too late to change your mind and come home.”
“Nope.” Shep sounded more resolute than ever. “Not happening. I’m staying here with Parker until I know for sure that your internet friends aren’t bad news, chatty little girl or not.”
One day, provided Shep didn’t turn into one of the crotchety doctors who drove Jayne up the wall, his hardheadedness would pay off. Until then, Jayne would shoulder the burden that was raising a headstrong teenager. He went to follow Shep up the stairs when suddenly, a man appeared in the doorway. He was slender and of average height, maybe a little short. Thick burnished curls crowned his head, streaked with silvery grays woven through like threaded gold. The onset of wrinkles deepened his brow and his laugh lines, and the faintest trace of them was visible in the outside corners of his soulful, pale blue eyes. Those same eyes took Jayne in, and Jayne, who’d spent a significant portion of his adult life dismissed by the medical community for being young, fabulous, and unashamedly omega, felt kinship with him right away. The man’s distinct genetic variance carried in his scent, and even if it hadn’t, there was a certain vulnerability in his eyes that Jayne often saw in older men and women who’d grown up in a world where not everyone agreed that it was the person, not their parts, that mattered. Unlike those men and women, however, the man in the doorway stood with confidence. When Jayne looked him head-on, the man looked back.
Something about him struck Jayne as eerily familiar.
The feeling, it seemed, was mutual, because as soon as their eyes locked, the man’s confidence dissolved into shock, then turned to anger.
“What are you doing here?” the man demanded. He broadened his shoulders and stood straighter, like by doing so he might scare Jayne away. “This is private property! Please leave!”
Parker, whose mouth would one day get them both into trouble, took it upon himself to reply. “Baaa.”
The man’s ire instantly mellowed. He looked from Jayne to Parker, then back again suspiciously, like Parker was somehow a trap meant to lure him into a false sense of security.
“It’s me, xV,” Jayne said uncertainly. Was the man xV? Jayne had always been under the assumption that TD was the only other omega in the Single Dad chat, but xV was notoriously private about his life—worse than even Knot, about whom Jayne knew next to nothing. There was a chance that this man and his friend were one and the same. “You know, Glit?”
The man’s mouth rounded, and Jayne witnessed a shiver jolt his tense shoulders. “…Glit?”
The commotion had attracted an audience—a second man came to the door. He was taller than the first, but almost as slender. A mess of brown hair was swept back from his brow, longer on top than it was on the sides, and his dark eyes looked over Jayne in disbelief.
Jayne couldn’t blame him—he was sure he had to look equally startled.
They’d met before.
“GlitterDoctor,” the man said with a shake of his head. “I should have known.”
“Dr. Rhyne?” Jayne squeaked in return.
“At your service.”
Doctor Vincent Rhyne, Synecta’s newest reproductive endocrinologist and the medical professional Jayne had discovered embroiled in an affair with one of his clinical trial patients, was none other than xVerity, and the older omega who stood in the doorway, glaring daggers at Jayne, was his patient.
29
Caleb
“Are you sure he’s going to like it?”
The associate smiled his brightest smile, which Caleb knew was retail-speak for, “Fuck you, can you please go make your purchase and leave me the hell alone?”
What came out of the young man’s mouth was far more polite. “If what you’ve told me is true, I think he’ll be thrilled.”
“It’s a good selection,” Everett confirmed. He tucked his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and nudged Caleb’s hip with his own. “I mean, I’m not going to pretend I know the first thing about this stuff, but from what I do know, I don’t think you could have done a better job.”
Caleb frowned. He looked down into the cloth basket the greeter at the door had given him and nudged some of the items inside to get a look at the ones hidden beneath. Like Everett, he had no idea what he was doing, but from the look of the products the associate had picked out for them, Caleb thought Jayne would be happy.
