Page 35 of His Reward (Omegas After Dark: Omega Auction #2)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Boston
Iwas over the moon happy. With all the pressure and potential upheaval in my life thanks to the upcoming city budget cuts, I should have been scared shitless.
I could have been on the verge of losing my job right when I’d bonded with an omega who was now pregnant with my baby.
And yeah, Lucien had enough money of his own from his skating wins and endorsements over the years to take care of himself and me, too, probably, but my alpha instinct told me I needed to be the one to take care of him. I needed to take care of our family.
But none of that translated into the stress that it should have, because I was just so damn happy.
“Do you want to tell people?” I asked Lucien the next morning as I rubbed moisturizer into his scars after we’d taken a fantastic, hot shower together, and by that I didn’t mean the water temperature.
Lucien winced, and I felt uncertainty from him. “No,” he said after a long pause. “The station has enough to worry about right now. Let’s wait until things settle down a little bit.”
“Whatever you want, baby,” I said, kissing his thigh where I’d just slathered his scars with lotion.
Lucien tensed slightly, then let out a breath, like he was deliberately letting go of his insecurities and fears. “I can still feel the flogger marks on my back a little bit,” he said with a sheepish grin. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but they kind of make the scars feel better.”
“Are they itchy?” I asked, sitting straight and putting the lid back on his tube of medicated lotion.
“The scars? Always,” he answered. “The flogger marks? They’re just a little warm.” His grin turned naughty, and he added, “The rest of my body? It feels sore and loose and used.”
“Just the way I like it,” I said, leaning forward to kiss his lips lingeringly before standing to put the lotion away.
“Don’t think I’m done with you just because you’re knocked up the way I want you, boy,” I said, quickly putting on my Dom persona and pointing at him.
“One baby isn’t enough. I intend to get my money’s worth out of you. ”
Through our bond, I felt a rush of excitement from Lucien, maybe even euphoria. He moved one hand to his belly and his expression turned dreamy for a moment. That was exactly the sort of peace I wanted to see from my omega, especially after everything he’d been through.
We decided not to tell anyone, but that lasted about five minutes, once we went downstairs.
“Wait,” Roscoe said as I settled in at my desk while Lucien set up shop at the side of the desk with his laptop, which had been retrieved on one of our trips back to his condo to check on Bea. “Didn’t Lucien go into heat yesterday?”
“He did,” I answered with a straight face.
“It’s been less than twenty-four hours,” Roscoe went on, crossing his arms.
Ernie climbed up the stairs to the loft to join us as he spoke. As soon as he saw us, he burst into a smile and said, “Hey, hey! You’ve bonded at last!”
Roscoe’s eyes went wide for a second before he narrowed them.
Only other alphas and omegas who were bonded could see the bonds that surrounded other couples.
Ernie had been bonded to his husband for over thirty years, but Roscoe was still unattached.
“Really?” he asked. “That would explain things. You know what else would explain a heat that lasted less than twenty-four hours?”
“You’re pregnant?” Ernie asked Lucien with blunt excitement.
Lucien and I exchanged a look. We couldn’t keep straight faces and broke down into smiles and laughter. “Yes,” Lucien told them. “Pretty sure I am.”
“That’s great!” Ernie said, genuinely glad for us.
“Yeah, that’s great,” Roscoe said, not quite as enthusiastic. “That should offset the bad news.”
“What bad news?” I asked with a sinking feeling in my stomach that told me I already knew what it was.
“Engine Fifty-Five is on the list of units the city wants to cut and merge with another station to save money,” Roscoe said, crossing his arms in front of his broad chest with a frown. “They want to merge us with Isaac’s station.”
Knowing that blow was coming didn’t soften it at all. “Is there anything we can do?” I asked. I was ready to grab my phone and call Mayor Vincent if I had to.
“Not unless you can come up with a couple thousand dollars to make up for budget shortfalls,” Roscoe said. “And not just for muffins and soda.”
“Thousands?” Ernie snorted. “Try tens of thousands.”
“Why wouldn’t the city invest in the fire department?” Lucien asked, sitting forward in his seat. “You guys are one of the most important things the city does. You saved my life.” The way he looked at me as he said the last bit and my heart swelled to the point of bursting.
“Those city controller people only look at numbers and bank balances,” Ernie said with a growl. If we were outside, I was certain he would have spit on the sidewalk. “They don’t see the human-interest angle of anything.”
“Well, can we make them see it?” Lucien asked, glancing between all three of us. “Can we show them how important we are?”
I smiled over the way he referred to the firehouse as “we”, but that warmth didn’t last long.
“It’s the same problem we’ve had all year,” I said.
“We need to raise money. I thought we just needed to raise money for extras around here, but now it looks like whatever fundraiser we do needs to be a lifeline.”
“The Fire and Ice ball idea we had yesterday could do that,” Lucien said with surprising enthusiasm.
“How would a little ball raise enough money to save the station?” Roscoe asked.
“We wouldn’t make it little,” Lucien said, his excitement growing. “For starters, we could book it someplace beautiful and glamorous. I bet Kincade Slopes would love to host it, especially since their ski season is just about over, but the camping season hasn’t started yet.”
The naughty, heated pulse I felt from Lucien through our bond told me he had a few other thoughts about Kincade Slopes, too.
“And not to brag or anything,” Lucien went on, “but if I am able to call in some favors from my skating friends, and if they attend and participate in the bachelor auction we’d talked about, I bet you could get some really high-value donors attending.”
“Can we do that?” Ernie asked. “Can we do an event aimed at the hoity-toity crowd like that?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “The Barrington Police seem to have tapped into the millionaire crowd, especially after some of those operations to defeat mob influence a couple years ago.”
Ernie and Roscoe exchanged a look, like they hadn’t considered that. They came to some sort of decision, then faced us again.
“Alright,” Roscoe said. “It’s worth a try, at least.”
“I’ll call Mayor Vincent’s office to see if we can make a deal to keep Engine Fifty-Five open and independent if we come up with the money,” I said.
“And I’ll call around to some of my friends to see if they’d be on board with things,” Lucien added, reaching for his phone on my desk.
Ernie laughed. “The two of you are a dynamic duo,” he said. “Between you, I have full confidence that you’ll save this place.
I grinned at him, then turned my attention to the challenge in front of us.
As it turned out, the mayor’s office was open to our idea of a fundraiser.
Part of that could have been because I dropped Lucien’s name and mentioned the theme for the event.
The head of Mayor Vincent’s budget office had seen the segment aired during the Winter Games because his wife was a huge figure skating fan.
Within a day, we were given a provisional go-ahead, as long as we presented them with a comprehensive plan for the event by the end of the week.
That meant that Lucien and I had to work our tails off to get everything planned in a ludicrously short length of time.
“No one plans major events like this in a week,” he said with a sigh a week into our planning, as he ended one call and glanced over his list of people to get in touch with next. “No one. This is insane.”
“Did Benny and Madison say whether Kincade Slopes is free?” I asked.
Lucien laughed. “It is free, but there’s another Dark Fantasies Club omega auction event the day after the night of the ball, so there might be some equipment stashed around the lodge.”
I laughed with him. “I see no problem with that,” I said, scooping him around the waist and pulling him close for a toe-curling kiss.
It was a lucky thing that we were able to find a venue like Kincade Slopes on such short notice.
Enough to make me wonder if Lucien had called in a favor with someone or if Benny and Madison knew we were connected with the Dark Fantasies Club as well as the fire department and the figure skating world.
It was even luckier that so many of the luminaries of the skating world agreed to drop everything to join the event.
We’d pinned a lot of hopes on people being free, since the competitive skating season had just ended but the tours that usually followed in the off-season hadn’t started yet.
Because the exhibition tour would start in Barrington, a lot of the medal-winning skaters were already in town for the weekend when we’d managed to schedule the event.
A lot of them were eager to see Lucien as well.
“Wow! You look fantastic,” Lucien’s friend, Mike, told him as the skaters began to arrive at the beginning of the ball.
It had been a month since Lucien and I bonded, and I’d gotten really good at feeling Lucien’s emotions.
The way Mike glanced Lucien up and down, taking in not only the perfectly tailored suit with its ice-blue, brocade jacket that Lucien wore, but the scarred side of his face as well sent ripples of panic through my omega.
“Thanks,” Lucien answered, doing an amazing job of pretending like nothing at all was wrong. “I’ve been working really hard with my therapy team these last few months.”
He nodded across the ballroom to Gemma and Dr. Barber who, I’d noticed, had arrived together.