Karter

KARTER

I WAS MONITORING a meeting between the marketing and production team, but for me monitoring just meant sitting there and looking intimidating so nobody screwed around or got off track. I kept one ear on the various voices around, but my mind was wandering.

A week had passed since Cameron had agreed to move in with me. We'd worked out the details, which included explaining the move to Ty. At least he'd been thrilled by the idea. I'd had dinner with them at their apartment three times over the week and it seemed he loved having me around.

His adoration gave me a strange sense of pride, and made it easy to enjoy his presence. Not to mention he was genuinely funny and adorable without even trying. Most adults couldn't even manage that. Then again, he had half Cameron's genetics so the adorable part would have been pretty impossible to avoid.

The movers I'd hired had finished unloading the boxes with all of their stuff into my apartment this morning, which meant it would be the first night they'd stay with me. Ty would be dropped off at his new school bus stop, directly in front of the building, and there was a city bus stop there too, so Cam could easily get back and forth to the restaurant. I didn't like the idea of him going back to work where he'd been attacked but as far as I knew nothing like that had ever happened there before, and the man who'd attacked him was in custody.

He still hadn't verbalized to me whether he'd sleep in my bedroom or not. I would be fine with it either way, like I'd told him, but the thought of having him asleep beside me, waking up next to him, was almost too heavenly for words.

I thought back to the packing process, of which I'd been present for some of, and how cute Ty's stories about each individual toy had been. He was so happy and so bright, it was ludicrous to think that someone had actually made a report about his wellbeing and safety. There was no way it had been done in earnest or with any genuine concern. I remembered one of the conversations I'd had with Cameron about it, when he'd been brainstorming who could have possibly been behind the report. I didn't think I had any enemies , he'd said, with genuine hurt and confusion shining from his pretty hazel eyes.

My stomach dropped, the blood in my veins turning to ice as the sentence replayed in my head over and over. Enemies. He didn't have any enemies. He didn't have any enemies, but I did.

Lucas had snatched my phone from me and read Cameron's contact name on the screen for our text messages. He'd known that the person I was texting and the person I'd brought in for product testing were the same. It would have been easy for him to get Cameron's full name from the accounts payable department. They'd needed all of his information on file to pay him for the review thing I'd made up.

I stood suddenly, the chair I'd been sitting in making a harsh scraping sound on the floor as it was shoved back. Every pair of eyes in the room snapped to me. One of our junior executives, standing at the front of the room in front of a projection of a financial document, cleared his throat.

"Are you okay, Mr. Morrison?"

"Fine," I bit out. "I'm afraid I have to leave early, but send any pertinent information to my email."

"Yes, sir," he agreed immediately, watching me with round eyes as I exited the room like a fired bullet. The meeting was going to be over in a few minutes anyway.

Back in my office, I barreled to my chair so I could use my computer. I opened up the most popular social media site I could think of, the one everyone and their grandma had an account on. In the search bar on the side, I typed in his name. Cameron Taylor. And there he was. His profile picture was a cropped version of the one he'd sent me of he and Ty in front of the duck pond.

His profile had no restrictions that I could tell, no privacy limitations. I only had to scroll past a few memes and generic positivity posts before finding one he had personally typed.

"I always knew Ty was a star! Lead role in the first grade production of Peter Pan! #prouddad," followed by a ridiculous amount of heart and star symbols. Groaning, I leaned back in my chair, rubbing my fingers on my temples. It all seemed so obvious now I wondered how I hadn't immediately suspected him. And things had been far, far too quiet since the incident at the hotel. He hadn't shown up in my office or bothered me even once. How could I have been so distracted?

Pulling my phone out from my jacket pocket, I typed out an urgent text message to a friend, asking if he could meet me as soon as possible.

Anthony Becker was someone that I'd gone to private school with all through elementary, middle, and high school. Then we'd gone to the same college, though I'd taken business classes and he'd taken political science before moving on to law school. Now he was an attorney at a prestigious law firm, and married to an omega that we'd also gone to school with.

"Karter!" He greeted me with enthusiasm as he opened the door to his office, closing it behind me. "Good to see you, man. We haven't sat down together since… When?" He wondered.

"St. Patrick's Day," I reminded him. They'd had a silly themed party at their house with dyed beer and Irish food. "How's Malik?"

"Oh, you know." He tilted a hand back and forth in the air. "He wavers back and forth between his undying love for me, and cursing my existence for putting him in his current condition ."

I chuckled a little at the description. Anthony's mate was pregnant with their second baby. "Funny, he seemed happy about it last time I saw him."

"He's over the moon. You know he likes to bust my balls any chance he gets."

"I know." They'd bickered like rabid house cats all through school before getting together in college.

"Anyway, what's up? Your text seemed urgent, so I cleared my schedule for you."

"I appreciate it," I said honestly. "I'm not sure what to do or if there's even anything I can do. I just need your advice."

"Well, go on," he invited, taking a seat across from me at the shiny executive desk. "I'm listening."

So I started at the beginning. How I'd met Cameron at the café, and then again at the restaurant. How I'd brought him into my work in a desperate ploy to get him to talk to me (which Anthony laughed at me for). When I got to the part where Lucas ambushed and tricked me into going to a bar with him, he stopped me.

"Wait, wait." He held his palms up, shaking his head. "Lucas Cromwell?"

"Yes." He knew him as well as I did, as we'd all been in the same grade.

He shivered, making a face. "I didn't know he was still bugging you like that."

I explained how he'd taken it personally that I'd kicked him out of my apartment without sleeping with him after sobering up enough to realize what a monumental mistake I'd made inviting him inside in the first place. He'd been bitterly pursuing me since then, trying to repair his wounded ego.

"When he found out I was seeing someone else, it just made everything worse." I went on through the timeline, giving all the details of my advancing relationship with Cameron, and about the report with CPS. When I was finished, Anthony sighed and mimed the action of wiping sweat from his forehead.

"So you think he's the one who gave them the tip?"

"I'm positive," I said. "Cameron doesn't have enemies like that." He was completely innocuous and harmless. The only reason he was being screwed with now was because of me. The guilt was like twisting a knife in my stomach. But Lucas had ended up doing the opposite of what he'd intended, which was presumably making me miserable.

"Well, I'll be honest with you," he started. "A false report to CPS is just a misdemeanor, more if you get caught doing it twice. But that's only if you can prove he's the one who did it, and that it was under false pretenses."

"There's no way he genuinely believed that Ty wasn't being taken care of. It's obvious."

"Well, if you want to make a case for stalking and harassment, you could try and serve CPS with a subpoena but it's not likely the court would approve it. Reports to CPS are anonymous for a reason, and if they don't protect the anonymity then it makes it so people will hesitate to file genuine reports, because they don't want to be retaliated against."

"It's bullshit," I muttered under my breath, shaking my head. "So in other words, I'm screwed."

"Not necessarily. If we built enough of a case, we're more likely to get the subpoena approved. Do you really want to start building a case against Lucas Cromwell?"

"I don't know what else to do. I've been as clear as I can to him that I don't want anything to do with him, but he can't take no for an answer. And now he's involving Cameron and Ty."

"You know," Anthony said, leaning back into his chair as he smirked at me. "The way you talk about this guy… Sounds like you're pretty smitten."

"What of it?"

He shrugged, but his amusement was evident. "It's just nice to see, that's all. You know Malik talks about how he wishes you'd settle down and get married."

"Really?" I asked, barely able to suppress a wince. Embarrassing.

"You know how omegas are," he said, shrugging. "He thinks you need someone to come home to, rub your shoulders, blah blah."

"Rub my shoulders?" I repeated, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah. It's nice getting your shoulders rubbed."

"If you say so."

"You got a picture of him?" He asked. "I'm curious."

Opening up the gallery on my phone, I flipped past the picture of Cameron's naked body streaked with come to bring up the one of him and Ty, passing it over.

"If you tell me he looks like a teenager, I might come across this desk," I warned him.

He laughed, staring down at the screen. "He doesn't look like a teenager. He just looks young. But maybe that's a good thing for you. You can be kind of a wet blanket."

"Hey," I retorted, but I wasn't really offended. It was mostly true.

"And this is his kid?"

"Right."

"They're cute," he said, handing the phone back to me. "We should all go out for dinner sometime. If we can get babysitters," he added, rolling his eyes. I chuckled in response.

We discussed the course of action of building a case a little more, with Anthony telling me to make a detailed list of the story I'd told him, with dates and times of the events as close as I could get them. Any evidence I had like text messages, the article with the photo at the bar, all that would need to be sent over, too.

"This is my retainer fee," he said, sliding a sheet across the desk at me. I picked it up, skimming over it.

"You must be pretty in demand these days," I noted. The prices were high.

"Hey, I got mouths to feed," he reminded me, raising his palms up.

"Money's no object," I said, sliding the paper back over to him. "I'll be in touch once I can make a list and get the evidence together."

"Talk to you then."

That night, I slept like a log. Cameron had gotten a lot of Ty's things unpacked when he'd gotten home from work, so his room was on its way to being finished.

We'd eaten a dinner of Ty's choosing, spaghetti. I'd tried to order some from the Italian restaurant a few blocks down, but Cam hadn't let me. He'd made it himself, in what was the first full meal that had ever been cooked in my kitchen. And it had been delicious. Not that I'd doubted him, but it was nice that he could actually throw something decent together. I liked the idea of him cooking for me. I hoped that wasn't an offensive thought that perpetuated negative stereotypes about traditional relationship roles between alphas and omegas. My moms had drilled that kind of thing into my head.

He'd put Ty to bed after a bath and some TV, which we'd all watched together. Ty seemed excited and happy to be here, which was a relief. After, when I was ready to go to bed, Cameron had followed me into my bedroom and slipped under the comforter next to me.

I'd wanted to tear his silly little hamburger-printed pajamas off him and show him how happy it made me that he wanted to sleep next to me, but I was forced to resist. Still, being able to softly talk about our day and feelings, snuggled together under the warm blanket had a very specific appeal I hadn't even known I wanted.

I woke up to the sound of hushed voices next to me, something I wasn't remotely used to. Blearily opening my eyes, I grabbed my phone off the stand to check the time. It was after 1:00 AM.

"I'm sorry," Cameron said, glancing over to me when he realized I was awake. Ty was standing on his side of the bed, looking supremely miserable. "He never does this, but he had a nightmare. I think he's just nervous about sleeping in a new place."

" Dad !" Ty hissed the word out, glaring at Cameron. "Don't tell him, he's gonna think I'm a baby."

I blinked as my brain worked overtime to process the scene in front of me. I was not generally all there mentally when I first woke up, and I wasn't used to waking up in the middle of the night.

"No," I managed to say. Their outlines were blurring in front of me. Rubbing my fingers into my eyes to clear them, I shook my head. "No, I can understand. Sleeping in a new place can be scary."

"I'm just going to go sleep on the floor in his room," Cameron said softly, throwing the comforter off his legs as he drew away from me.

"Ah, wait." My hand flew out to grip his wrist, stopping him in his tracks. I didn't want to lose his warm presence next to me. "There's plenty of room in here, so…" My bed was huge, with tons of space on either side of us. I scooted away toward my side, so that he would have more room.

"You won't make fun of me if I sleep in here?" Ty asked, regarding me with the most pitiful pair of puppy eyes I'd ever encountered. I could actually feel my heart clench.

"No!" I assured him. "No way, buddy." I'd started calling him that from our first meeting and hadn't been able to shake the nickname. "I don't mind it at all, but just so you know, I've had this whole place checked out for anything spooky."

"You have?" He repeated, blinking in surprise as he lifted himself up off the floor to wriggle up onto the mattress.

"Absolutely. No ghosts, ghouls, goblins, any of that. Completely guaranteed."

"What about werewolves?"

"Definitely no werewolves."

He glanced up at his dad, as if requesting confirmation that what I was saying was true.

"I told you," Cameron said, giving him an encouraging nod. "You have nothing to worry about."

"Well, okay," he relented. "But can I still stay in here? Just for tonight?"

"Of course you can," Cameron said, tucking the blanket around his little body and pulling him in close. Once Ty was sufficiently tucked in, nuzzling close to his dad, Cameron turned back toward me for just a moment. The expression on his face was ripe with infatuation. He was obviously pleased with how I'd handled the situation. Being woken up was worth it if it made him look at me like that.

They fell asleep quickly, while I was still lying awake long after. The sound of their soft, synchronized breathing was soothing to me. I sat up slowly so I wouldn't disturb them, but so I could stare down at them.

Their features were softer and more relaxed when they were sleeping, and it was even easier to notice the similarities in their appearances. My muscles tensed briefly as my alpha instincts hit me with a quick jolt. This was my family. They were mine to protect. And I would protect them from anything or anyone.

I would get everything sent to Anthony as soon as possible to make sure that Lucas was out of their lives once and for all.