Page 79 of Abel's Omega

And at that moment, I was made very aware how close a beta could be to being alpha.

Becca picked up her phone, her lips compressed so the skin around them turned white.

“Hey, what’s up?” Jason asked from the door.

A wave of relief washed over me. “Jason, what are you doing here?”

“I came to sign Macy up for daycare.” He bounced his little girl, her hair flaming in the sunshine streaming in the window. “Is something up with Fan again?”

“No. Could you do me a favor?”

“Sure. What do you need?”

“An escort to the clinic?”

“Are you sick?” Jason took a step into the room, then stopped, frowning. “Are you…? Oh, shit.” And he started to laugh. “Maybe we are related.”

“It’s not funny, Jason,” Becca snapped. “There are other explanations.”

Jason sobered instantly. “Sure. Okay, I’ll go with you. You should call Abel, though.”

I stood. “Not until I know what’s going on.”

At the clinic, I got the same strange looks until I was ushered into a separate room. Luckily, Adelaide was a gamma wolf, not nearly as likely to get excited over this aberration in my scent as an alpha could be. She came through the door shortly after her assistant ushered me into the exam room. “Hi, Bax, how are you?” She stopped dead about three feet away from me and sniffed. “That’s interesting. Are you two related?”

“No,” I said shortly.

“Did you check your ancestries?”

Jason and I stared at each other for a moment.

“No,” he said slowly. “It was a ruse.”

“You should,” she said, then turned to me. “Bax, I’ll take a blood sample and do a physical exam, but I have to send the blood out. It could be a couple of weeks before I know anything.”

And my mating was only two days away. “Do it anyway. Maybe you’ll notice something.”

“All right. If you could lie down and undo your shirt and pants.”

I grimaced and did so, then stared blankly at the ceiling while she prodded at my belly.

Jason was on his phone, talking to someone. I didn’t pay much attention to his chatter, more concerned with what Adelaide was doing. At the end of the exam, I sat up and put my clothes back together while she tidied away her equipment. “So, what do you think?”

“I don’t feel anything that shouldn’t be there, but I’d like to send you for an ultrasound, just in case. It’s a bit of a drive and we’ll have to think about who we can send with you if this hormonal issue is still going on.”

I nodded. “I’ll think about it.”

“We can ask my dad,” Jason said. “I’ll go too.”

She nodded. “In the meantime, call Abel and tell him you have to work from home. And let him know you’re going to need to postpone the mating. You can’t go out in public like that. I’m tempted to give you some birth control to try to control it, but if it is some sort of growth, the hormones can make it worse. And, the pills are designed for regular shifter females—I don’t know what the hormone levels would do to a male omega.”

I nodded. We were kind of left out of most things, us omegas. I slid off the table, feeling numb and uncertain.

Jason touched my shoulder. “Come on. I’ll take you home.”

“Okay.”

I had only just barely gotten in the front door of the apartment, and Jason hadn’t even left yet, when a knock sounded. Jason looked at me for permission to answer it, and I shrugged, my mood settling down into something close to depression.