“That would be his truck,” Mason said, obviously having heard the same thing, and he looked back at Kyle. “If you want, you can go up to your room and get ready. I’ll send him up to see you once he gets settled.”
This was all happening way too fast, and Kyle almost felt numb to it all. The only thing he could do was nod his head. “Yeah, sure. I’ll head right on up and meet him,” he said.
He felt like a zombie as he walked out. His brain felt that way anyway. His stupid body was flaring to life at the idea of just seeing Aelius again. His dick certainly didn’t realize the trouble he was in, otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten thicker between his legs or throbbed like it was desperate to be stroked, sucked, anything.
He was dead. He was so dead. Why wouldn’t the world just open up and swallow him whole so that he wouldn’t have to deal with this?
Fuck. He was such a coward.
* * * *
Aelius could hardly believe that he was in this house again. It seemed like a lifetime ago when he’d left it, and Kyle, behind.
Now he was here because his alpha didn’t know how to keep his mind out of Aelius’s affairs.
It was interesting how the alphas all seemed so…overjoyed to see him. Stacy, the human in charge of Mason’s servants, even gave him a hug before she arranged to have Aelius’s bags taken to a guest room. Sonny and Dakota were practically avoiding him. They’d greeted him, but refused to look him in the eyes, which was strange, but the other alphas and their mates were more than welcoming. Aeducan smiled with his arm around Cameron’s shoulder, the smaller man holding onto their newborn pup. Jimmy was also there, but his mate was off doing something else. The man was a healer, so it was likely that he was with Adam, Mason’s mate, who was heavily pregnant and not having an easy go of it this time around, from what Aelius understood.
Stan actually hugged him, like he was glad that Aelius had finally gotten his ass over here. Jasper and Roy slapped him on the back and shook his hand.
Something was definitely going on. The smells they were giving off suggested a kind of anxiety that had Aelius suspicious.
He was quick to excuse himself. He didn’t even go up to the room that Mason was providing him with. The only reason why he was here was because Conner thought there was something that could be worked out with Kyle, and Aelius wanted nothing more than to see the man now that he was here.
He was so fucked. Aelius moved quickly, jogging up the stairs Mason had pointed him toward and walking into the long stretch of hallway with all the doors shut. Aelius could have sworn that most of the alphas and omegas preferred staying in their own houses at the bottom of the hill, but with all the shit that had been going down lately, maybe everyone had just decided it was safer to move into the bigger house.
Aelius found the door that had Kyle’s smell on it, and he lifted his fist, but stopped himself before he could rap his knuckles on the wood.
He inhaled another deep breath, and the smell was the same, but it was that little extra something just beneath the surface, which he hadn’t noticed before, that was tickling the back of Kyle’s nose.
What he smelled was…lust. Aelius was smelling absolute and undiluted lust.
There were only two things in the world that caused an omega to make a smell like that. One of them was being in heat from being denied sex from a mate, and the other was being pregnant while being away from a mate.
Either option had mate in the sentence, which was probably why he felt like his eyes were bulging out of his head already when Kyle opened the door.
Aelius stared into the man’s gorgeous face. That was what he was. Kyle was gorgeous. And despite all the confusion and uncertainty that Aelius had been dealing with, there was no doubt in his mind about that, or about how much he’d missed the smaller man.
Kyle looked up at him, but it was only very briefly as he bit down on his bottom lip and looked down at his hands, which were resting on a swollen belly. “I guess I have some explaining to do,” he said.
No fucking kidding.
Chapter Four
“So, you hid the fact that I’m about to become a father, and that you mated with me, because I’m not gay?”
Kyle looked away from the man as he crossed his arms and bit down on his lower lip. He really wished that Aelius wouldn’t make it sound so unbelievably far out there, as if it didn’t make sense at all. “That’s the gist of it, I guess.”
“You guess?” Aelius shook his head. He was clearly unhappy about this entire thing, and he kept on rubbing at his nose. “Fuck, that smell,” he said, and Kyle winced.
The worst part about all of it was the way that Aelius said that, as if even Kyle’s mating smell disgusted him.