16. Chapter Sixteen

Keeping calm was the best thing to do in most situations. Keeping calm was what I had been paid to do most of my adult life. Nothing rattled me. No amount of danger spiked my blood pressure. None of the shit Jamie had pulled while we had worked together–or even after–made me ever break a sweat.

I was a handler, a fixer. It was what I did. I cleaned up messes left by agents to rid the world of the worst of the worst of criminals. My ability to stay calm served me well in my role of sheriff and was something I used daily. Even in a town like Sweet Alps, where the crime rate was low, I still had to deal with people. And most people didn’t stay calm when the situation warranted law enforcement being called out for any reason.

The thin omega sobbing in front of me had me nearly pulling my hair out by the roots. Because I had no clue what had caused his outburst or what to do to stop it.

Full disclosure, Wyatt’s meltdown, for lack of anything better to call it, had me low key freaking out inside. Crying omegas were not where I excelled.

Julianna squirmed in my arms, letting out a soul piercing cry that nearly matched Wyatt’s, just as Jamie picked up my call.

“What’s up, Daddy-O?”

Ignoring his joking voice and what the actual fuck he had just called me, I whispered, “I think I broke him.”

“Who is making all that noise?” Jamie demanded, because Julianna had worked up to top-notch screaming. Her cries somehow made Wyatt sob harder.

“Wyatt. And Jules. Both of them.” Hating to leave Wyatt in the state he was in, but needing to heat up a bottle for the baby, I walked into the kitchen. “I think I broke him.”

“You already said that.” I could picture Jamie rolling his blue eyes and smirking at me. “What did you do now?”

Popping one of the bottles I had prepared earlier into the bottle warmer I had found already set up on the counter last night, I pushed the buttons on it. It had taken me a few minutes to figure the damn thing out, but I’d eventually gotten it to work.

I was thankful that Miss Rose and Gigi had managed to set part of the kitchen up, along with the basics for the bathroom. Wyatt hadn’t been able to rest yesterday, not with Jules being so fussy, and the last thing he needed to deal with was trying to find needed household and baby items. It hadn’t escaped my notice when I’d been making bottles for the baby, that there was little evidence he’d taken the time to fix himself anything to eat last night.

Wyatt Cooper needed a keeper if anyone ever did. He might be brilliant in many, many different ways, but self-care didn’t appear to be one of them.

“Why do you assume I did anything?” Hissing into the phone, I tested the bottle against the skin of my wrist when it dinged. Satisfied with the temperature, I rubbed the nipple against Jules’ lips and she sucked it in greedily. She was a good eater and would bring the house down with her screams when she was hungry. The fact that Wyatt had slept through all her demands for feedings through the night proved just how exhausted he truly was, and had needed the rest.

“Your behavior the last few days.” Jamie sounded like he was trying hard to hold in his laughter. “Give me the facts.”

“Wyatt is…well, he’s crying uncontrollably and I don’t know why. He’s been crying for two days straight.” Peeking around the wall of the kitchen, I could see him sitting on the sofa, his body still shaking with the force of his sobs. “And Jules was just hungry, but I’ve got her sorted out.”

Gently taking the bottle from her, I held it up to see how much she had eaten. Situating the burp cloth, I placed her against my shoulder on the cloth and gently patted her back. I held the phone to my ear with my other shoulder, so I could still hear Jamie. Putting it on speaker would have been nice, but I didn’t need Wyatt to hear our conversation and get more upset than he already was. If he used his shifter hearing he would probably be able to hear anyway, but most of us tried to not eavesdrop. It was just considered bad etiquette, though it had come in handy on missions.

“Okay,” Jamie breathed into the phone, “one problem solved then. Let’s go back to Wyatt and why you think you broke him. I mean, it couldn’t have been with your dick because he just had a baby.”

Scowling, I growled, “Not the time for jokes, Jamie.”

Jamie howled in laughter, and I muttered, “I need new friends.”

“Tell me what happened,” Jamie sounded sincere and businesslike now, “I promise not to laugh.”

Rolling my eyes, I grinned as Jules let out a hearty belch any linebacker in the NFL would be proud of. “Nice baby girl.” Juggling the baby, bottle, and phone again, I told Jamie, “Wyatt woke up, freaked out, started crying really hard, and that’s where we’re at.”

“Hmmm,” Jamie’s tone clearly suggested I was leaving things out, “I’m putting you on speaker.”

There was the low murmuring of voices between Jamie and his husband, and had I been paying attention I could have heard what was being said. Since I was concentrating on feeding Jules her bottle, I missed the conversation between the two.

“Okay Becks, tell us what happened before Wyatt started crying?” Jamie instructed.

“Wyatt woke up, came running down the stairs, then started crying uncontrollably. I couldn’t understand it all, but he seems to think the baby doesn’t like him.”

Yeah, okay, I was leaving a shit ton of facts out of the story and I knew it.

“I think you need to start at the beginning so we can try to help. You picked him up from the hospital yesterday and took him home?” Jamie had known I was planning to do that.

“Yes.” Sighing, I rubbed a hand over my bearded jaw. “I picked him and Jules up and brought them home. They were fine when I left yesterday.”

Left. Asked to leave. Kicked out. Same difference.

My wolf snorted, and I winced. There was a difference, and I had a law degree from a very prestigious and expensive school back east that made sure I knew what the differences were.

“What time did you leave?” Jamie questioned, sounding very much like the government agent he used to be. Can’t say I liked being on the receiving end of one of his interrogations.

“Around six.” If I had sat in my car down the block until it had gotten dark, then parked in front of the house watching Wyatt until all the lights had gone out, that was my business. Jamie didn’t need a play-by-play of my movements.

“There’s a lot of missing hours between then and now, Becks.” Jamie commented, his tone even and giving nothing away of his thoughts. “What happened this morning when you arrived?”

Jules was nearly finished with her bottle because she was a fast eater, so I sat down in one of the kitchen chairs and went about coaxing another burp out of her. She was going to need a diaper change soon too. “Um, well, about that…” My voice trailed off sheepishly.

“What did you do?”

The sharp accent belonged to Jamie’s husband and I winced. Bash was a small, thin omega, with unruly dark hair and green eyes. He had worked for British intelligence when he and Jamie had first met on an assignment. His unassuming and often quiet nature caused people to underestimate him.

In shifted form, Bash was a honey badger. He was small, relentless, and deadly. Sebastian Hollingsworth-Sinclair could fuck your world up without breaking a sweat. He had killed a cobra in Jamie’s mother’s backyard after being injected with cobra venom. Bash was a badass and you didn’t want to be on his bad side.

Jamie and Bash both knew me well, and we had all been in the same field of work prior to this. There was no way I was going to be able to get away with giving them half answers, or vague talk my way around anything. Better to just come clean now.

“Look, I was just trying to help,” I started, and there was no mistaking the long-suffering sigh from Bash over the line, or his muttered, “Goddess help us all from alphas just trying to help”.

“Wyatt needs rest. He needs time to heal. He shouldn’t have to take care of a baby by himself.” Considering Bash had gone through a pregnancy, birth, and raising his and Jamie’s oldest son on his own, in a foreign country for eight years, it probably wasn’t the best argument I could use on the man. “I may have picked the lock on his door after he got Jules down and went to bed. I may have gone upstairs and gotten Jules from her crib and brought her downstairs and took care of her all night.”

Not sure how to decipher the deafening silence echoing from the other end of the phone, I just plunged ahead, right over the cliff I’d been teetering on. “And when Wyatt woke up and realized the baby hadn’t woken him up all night, and then he saw her crib was empty, he might have gotten a tiny bit upset.”

Silence. Crickets. I couldn’t even hear anyone breathing on the phone. Pulling it away from my ear, I checked the connection.

Finally, Bash questioned very slowly, his voice filled with sarcasm that somehow sounded ten times more sarcastic with his accent, “Did you just say he might have gotten a tiny bit upset? Honestly, did you just say those words? Out loud? I imagine the poor man went into a full-blown panic attack! Because I don’t have to imagine what went through his mind! The same things that would have gone through mine! Might I remind you that you are the fucking sheriff? Breaking and entering, kidnapping…” Bash’s voice trailed off, before disgust littered his voice, “I literally have no words for you. None. Jameson, get your friend under control, because I can’t even deal with this idiocy. I need a cuppa to calm my nerves.”

“What in the actual fuck is wrong with you, Becks?” Jamie hissed, sounding dumbfounded and pissed off all at the same time. His usual joking sense of humor had vanished. He was dead serious and sounded like he thought I might have lost my mind. I was beginning to wonder if maybe I had. “Like, seriously, are you having some kind of mental episode? Is this actually you having a mid-life crisis? Do we need to call someone? Because what in the actual fuck is wrong with you?” He repeated his first question.

“I don’t know!” Shouting, I startled Jules, who let out a small cry of annoyance at being disturbed. Soothing her, I shushed her quickly. Wyatt’s sobbing had quieted down in the other room, and I stood and peeked around the corner at him. Goddess, was I seriously hiding out in the kitchen from a crying omega who weighed next to nothing soaking wet? Yes, yes, I was.

“Look, that’s not what started his crying,” I told them, though I knew it all had more than likely been contributing factors. “He’s upset because Jules seems to like me better, which is nuts because she’s only a couple of days old. He said nothing is going like he planned it, and it’s all a lot harder than he thought it would be. I couldn’t really understand the rest because he was crying so hard. There’s been a lot of crying, okay. Like buckets of tears. You know I’m no good with tears.”

Jamie was my closest friend. His family had basically adopted me, made me feel welcome in their homes and in their hometown. They were the only family I had now, even if we weren’t related by blood. If I couldn’t admit the truth to them, who could I admit it to?

“I don’t know what to do,” I told him honestly. “I don’t know what to say to him. He–we–need help.”

Everything in my world had been upside down and backwards since I had pulled Wyatt over. Had it only been a couple of days ago?

“He doesn’t want me here, but I can’t seem to stay away from him. Either of them. They’re mine, Jamie, and I need to take care of them both. But I’m fucking it all up royally.”

For some reason, caring for Julianna came surprisingly easy to me. Maybe because Jamie and all his brothers and found family were popping out pups fast enough to make my head spin, and I had suddenly found myself surrounded by babies at every family function. Whatever the reason, bottles and diapers and the two a.m. feeding last night hadn’t fazed me. And Wyatt was right; Jules was one chill baby for me.

But I had watched him pacing the floor with her last night through his still curtainless windows. Her loud frustrated, angry cries had traveled all the way to me sitting in my car. I had forced myself to not go back and knock on his door and try to help last night. Knowing he didn’t want me there. It had taken everything I had to keep my ass planted in my car, until he had finally gotten the baby settled and taken himself to bed.

Because I had wanted to be inside, helping take care of our daughter. Taking care of my omega. It was my job as his alpha to make sure he was resting and healing, but he was determined to fight me every step of the way. My wolf didn’t care that we barely knew each other–didn’t know each other at all–all he knew was we were fated mates, and that was our pup. My alpha pheromones were in hyper-drive, and it was a new and weird experience for me.

Whatever Jamie started to say, I missed as Wyatt stomped into the kitchen, hazel eyes red rimmed and glistening from his tears, but filled with fiery anger.

“Hold on,” cradling the phone against my ear and shoulder, I waited for the explosion I could see was building.

“Get out!” Wyatt hissed, reaching for the baby, “And give me back my daughter!”

“Oh fuck,” Jamie muttered in my ear.

Oh fuck was right.