Page 86 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“Then?”

“You should know the full truth before the scan.”

Lincoln shifted beside her. He knew what I was about to say. We’d discussed it that morning in my kitchen, over coffee neither of us drank.

I’d agreed.

Then we’d both stood there for far too long, silent and thinking of a boy at three years old with sandy hair, a too-large backpack, and jam on his sleeve.

“Damien isn’t our biological son,” I said.

Mary’s fingers stopped moving on the bottle.

“What?”

“He’s our stepson.”

Lincoln’s hand rested on his knee, palm open. He didn’t reach for her. He gave her the room to hear it.

“But he calls you Dad.”

“Yes.”

“Both of you?”

“Yes,” Lincoln said.

Mary looked between us. “I don’t understand.”

“His mother came to London when Damien was three,” I said. “She had left Damien’s biological father in Boston. We were younger, ambitious, and unsettled in the way alphas can be when they are too young to know better.”

Mary listened without interrupting, which was new. It wasn’t because she was incapable of listening. Silence usually made her feel cornered, but today she let the story come.

“Were you scent-matched?” she asked.

“No.”

“But you were together?”

“For a long time.”

“And the two of you?”

“Pack,” I said. “Not lovers. We never have been.”

Lincoln huffed. “Brothers, near enough. I’d take a bullet for the man, share an omega, but not share a bathroom with him.”

“Okay.”

Lincoln looked out the window. “I’ll be honest with you. We liked her. We liked her enough to move to Boston when she got homesick.”

“She needed us,” I said. “And we needed an omega to settle us, or we thought we did. Damien was the bonus.”

Mary’s face softened. “You loved him.”

“Yes.”

“From the beginning?”