Page 102 of Omega's Heart

She smiled when he slowed down and reached across the car to pat his arm. “I never thought it would.”

Kaden laughed and grabbed her hand to squeeze it before she could pull it away. “Good. I didn’t want to worry you.”

“A mother always worries. You should have come home anyway.”

Just what he hadn’t wanted. Kaden didn’t say it, though. Instead, he nodded and turned onto the highway. “I could have, but I didn’t want you watching while I figured things out. I still make an idiot of myself on a regular basis. Luckily, Felix seems to be besotted enough he doesn’t notice.” There, he’d made a bit of an opening for her to start talking about how she felt.

His mother remained silent.

“Mom?” he asked when it became obvious that she wasn’t going to comment.

“I knew things wouldn’t be easy for you.”

He risked a glance away from the road. “I didn’t want to go through this part of the rehab in the heart of the family.”

“You know we would have helped you as much as we could.”

“I know. And that was the problem. I needed to do this for myself, figure out what I could still do and what I had to find ways around. I don’t want to be dependent. What I want is to be a useful member of the pack.”

“I don’t like you working for those humans. It’s risky. You know that if something goes wrong, they’ll blame it on you.”

“They might, but since when have we ever won anything without a little risk? My job isn’t up for discussion, anyway. I listened to the pitch, I thought about all the ways it could go wrong, I thought about what we had to gain if it went even a little bit right. And it’s worth any risk on my part if I can make the lives of our people as a whole a little better.”

She sighed and leaned her head against the window, smiling slightly, her eyes obviously not seeing the traffic passing or the trees flying by. “You should come home to Salma. That’s exactly what the Alpha of a pack would say. Hiram’s getting older now, he’s ripe for a challenge.”

“One Alpha in the family isn’t enough aggravation?” he joked. “I think I’ll leave that for Quin. From the sound of it, it’s all paperwork and nitpicking and I’m pretty sure that would drive me lunar. Besides, I think Felix would get bored if all he had to do was boss around the housekeeper and plan meals. He likes to be busy.”

He’d hoped, even knowing it wasn’t likely, that her nostalgic mood would last through his re-introduction of the topic of his future mate, and he suppressed a sigh and focused himself back on the road when she straightened in her seat, the line of her jaw going tight.

Once again, she gave him the silent treatment, which was eerie in an alpha who was never at a loss for words.

A couple of times he opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again and let the silence ride, hoping she’d break first.

With each mile that rolled underneath their tires, his grip on the steering wheel tightened. By rights, he should just wait her out, but he was on a deadline here. They needed to have this conversation before they got to Mercy Hills, for his own peace of mind.

She likely knew that. His mother was, at heart, an excellent political strategist inside the pack, even if those skills tended to break down around her sons. It kind of hurt that she was starting to treat him like an opposing alpha, instead of her son.

He caught a twinkle of silver in the far distance. Damn, my time’s running out. Almost without thinking, he let off on the gas and coasted down to just under the speed limit, fighting to stretch the drive.

She won. She usually did when she played these political games and he hated that he was going to have to have this conversation from the low ground.

“Mom—” he began, but she interrupted him.

“No, we’re not going to talk about it,” she snapped, raising one hand between them.

“We have to talk about it,” he said, trying for reasonable.

“No, we don’t. I don’t want to lose my two younger boys the way I’ve lost the older ones.”

He heard it then, the hurt in her voice. “Mom, you haven’t lost them. But you didn’t raise us to be independent and alpha just so we’d blindly agree with whatever you told us. We’ve had that conversation how many times?”

“I’m your mother. I worry. And I didn’t want you all mated to someone who would hamstring you just by being who they are.”

“Holland is exactly what Quin needs. Another alpha would have burned out by now, with everything that Quin throws at him. Bax is perfect for Abel, because what else but family is going to drag his head back out of the clouds? And for that matter, what business did you have pupping a frigging genius into the family? Do you know how hard those pawprints are to follow in?”

The joke worked; some of the tension in her body eased and her scent softened. “He’s a lot like your father. He was a brilliant shifter, an excellent Alpha.”

“He’s a lot like you,” Kaden told her dryly. “Look, we’re almost there and I’m not going through the gates until we’ve had this talk.”