“Together,” Ben assured me. “We tell her together.”
Chapter 46
When I woke the next day, it wasn’t to gentle strokes and in a sweet haze of pleasure, though Ben tried. He reached for me, ran his fingers over my skin every time he moved during the night, but when morning came, everything we had to face came with it. I tried to change position slowly, so I could slip away from him and let him keep sleeping, but he roused as soon as I rolled over in bed. He looked down at me, all of the tenderness still there in his eyes, but not so much the sweetness, and I knew he was thinking of the challenge ahead of us with Evie. He nodded, then patted me on the arse as he got to his feet. We found clothes, donning them like armour, before going to face the day.
Jasper moved to bring me a coffee when he saw me and I took it with thanks, wrapping my hands around the mug and blowing on it.
“Got your first mark.” Damon’s voice was a feline purr and his fingers were just as sinuous, finding the mating bite Ben had put on my neck, and tracing its shape before my sensual reaction forced me to jerk away. He grinned in response. “It’ll look better when there’s more joining it, but it’s a start.”
“So we’re doing this?” Reed stood in the lounge room looking rumpled and care worn, his gaze moving from me to Ben and then to the rest of his brothers.
“We always were,” Jasper said. “You know that.” Those grey eyes found mine. “As soon as I saw Lily…”
There was a chorus then of small, eminently masculine noises they seemed to use to communicate rather than, say, just words, like regular people did. They all looked at each other and then nodded and that’s when Evie emerged. She looked wan and wrung out, side-eyeing the rest of the room right up until she plastered herself into my side, just as she had when she was a little girl. I put my hand on her back and rubbed it up and down, reassuring myself and her that she was here and she was safe. Whatever was coming for us, we’d find a way, I knew that now.
“You don’t have school today,” I said. “I’m not going into the shop. I thought we’d hang around here, get pizza from your favourite place for lunch and—”
“Mum…” Her voice was small, so small. I willed the room to silence to make a space for it and we did. Everyone was perfectly quiet. “I… I got into a fight yesterday.”
“I know, Ev, the—”
“Am I really an alpha?”
That question wasn’t levelled at me, but them, the men who’d come closer, beasts that were lured in at the request of a girl.
“We think you are,” Ben said, his eyes widening when her face crumpled. Her hands were shaking as they went to her face. “Evie… Evie, what do you think that means?”
“Bad…” Just one word, but it sounded as harrowing as a primal scream. Ben’s hand shot out, and he took Evie’s, but that didn’t stop her avalanche of emotion. Our daughter leant forward, her shoulders hunching as her chest heaved and I hugged her way too tight. “Bossy…” she croaked that out. “Pushy. Noisy. Disruptive….” She let out a ragged little sigh. “Aggressive.”
“No, Evie…” Jasper started to say, but Reed shook his head, his silver eyes locked on her.
“Is that what you think or what other people think?” Ben asked.
“Everyone says that!” Evie snapped, her head whipping up, her eyes flashing. “Everybody says I’m bad! That I never listen, and I don’t let anyone else have a turn! That I won’t shut up and I’m always sticking my nose in everything!” Her chest heaved as she considered the impact of her words on her father before she delivered her coup de grace. “That I don’t belong here because I’m an alpha.”
I watched Ben’s knuckles whiten as he held our daughter’s hand, the slight tremble there the only thing betraying his reaction. Well, that and his face. My teeth sank into my bottom lip as I stared at the alpha’s expression, seeing the twin of my own. That quiet, contained devastation, it was like throwing yourself over a live bomb, knowing it was going to detonate and destroy you, but that you couldn’t allow it to explode over everyone else.
Because that’s exactly how I felt right now.
Evie was my baby. She was growing up so damn tall and had conversations with me of the like I don’t remember having when I was a kid, but she was still my baby. It was like the ache in my arms from holding her was still there, the impression of her tiny body left behind in my muscle memory. And I ached to put her right back where she’d been when she was small, because at least then I’d known what to do.
“Do you feel like you belong?” Damon asked and right then, I wanted to shout at him.Of course she feels like she does!
“No!” Evie snapped, pushing away from me now. Ben didn’t try to hold her back, moving to stand beside her. “No,” Evie said again, and that’s when the tears started. “They don’t want me here. I can’t be what they want.”
She jerked her hand away from Ben, slapping them down over her eyes, but he just moved closer. His hands raised slowly, tentatively, and Evie flinched when he dropped them to her shoulders, but once there he started to rub them in small circles I knew soothed our daughter. I was forced to dash away my own tears, blinking furiously to clear them from my eyes because it was imperative I didn’t miss any of this. Evie was saying things I’d never heard her say before, but I got the feeling now that she’d thought them often in recent times. She spun around then and buried her face in Ben’s chest and his arms went around her.
“You’re not bad, cub,” he said, shooting me a meaningful look. “You’re just strong. Stronger than all the betas in that bloody school of yours, and that makes them scared.”
Evie peered up at him then, for what felt like an aeon, before she frowned. He rubbed his thumb across her cheek, smearing her tears away. But it was Reed that surprised me. He stepped forward, standing shoulder to shoulder with his brothers as he spoke to my child.
“You’re right. You don’t belong there, but it’s because of what you know. You know when the teacher says one thing and then does another, and you tell him when he does. You hear all the rules and follow them, but then other kids don’t. You get given work and you already know what to do, but then they keep explaining things over and over, and then in the yard…”
Reed stared at her, his entire attention focused on her, just as hers was on him.
“You’re stronger, faster, better than anyone else, including those people who think you shouldn’t be any of those things. Girls can’t push you around. Boys can’t either. You’re faster, stronger, better than all of them. And they don’t like that.”
“The older boys have been giving me a hard time since I started there,” she said in a low growl. “They were teasing one of the little kids and I didn’t like it. They thought it was funny, a girl standing up to them, and then they didn’t. I shoved one of them out of the way and he ended up on his butt. His friends laughed at him being knocked over by a girl. That made them try to gang up on me. They’d knock into me in the hallway, call me names… That happened in my old school but… When Dad came. When Dad dropped me off at the gate at school. They saw him and they worked it out.”