“That, technically, I’m already an uncle. Which means I have rights.”
“You have no rights,” Brody muttered without looking up from his plate.
“I have the right to spoil that kid, to teach him how to fight, and to tell him the story of how his father punched his other father in the stomach in front of the entire house.”
Ren set his spoon down on his plate. The heat wasn’t just in his neck anymore. His ears were burning.
“That wasn’t…”
“It was exactly that. I was there. I have eyes.”
Rocco coughed up something that sounded suspiciously like a stifled laugh. Zev kept typing, but Ren caught the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
“Besides,” Jax continued, serving himself more stew with absolute nonchalance, “I want it on record that I was the first to know you were pregnant. Before Brody. Before anyone. Because I have a nose for it.”
“You’ve got a big mouth.”
“And you’ve smelled like a pregnant man for days, so don’t give me that…”
“I smell like what?”
“Like a pregnant man. Your scent has changed. You used to smell like those sour lemon candies, the ones that sting your tongue, and now you smell like that, but sweeter. Like someone poured honey over them. It’s pretty…”
“Finish that sentence and I’ll break your nose.”
Jax shoved an enormous piece of bread into his mouth and chewed with his eyes wide open, the very picture of outraged innocence.
Brody placed his hand on Ren’s knee under the table. The gesture should have calmed him down. It didn’t.
“Hey, it’s a compliment. You smell good. You smell like a fertile, bonded, happy omega, and if that offends you, well…”
Ren stood up. The chair scraped against the floor.
“Say that again.”
Jax swallowed the bread.
“Which part?”
“The part where you call me a fertile omega like I’m a cow.”
“I didn’t say cow. I said…”
Ren grabbed the piece of bread left on his plate and threw it at his face. Jax dodged it on reflex. The bread bounced off the wall, and Rocco let out a hearty laugh that shattered the tension in the kitchen like glass.
“Hey!” Jax stood up, palms flat on the table. “We don’t waste food in this house!”
“Well, don’t call me fertile.”
“But you are! It’s a biological fact, not an insult!”
Zev looked up from his tablet for the first time all dinner.
“Technically, he’s right.”
“Nobody asked you, Zev!”
The kitchen turned into a crossfire of voices, Jax gesturing with half a piece of bread in his hand, Rocco doubled over with laughter over his plate, Zev returning to his tablet as if the surrounding chaos were white noise. Ren felt the blood pounding in his temples and his stomach tightening with something he was slow to recognize.
