Page 72 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“Eat,” I said.

Mary looked at me, the cake, and then me again. “Have you always been this bossy, or did my pregnancy activate your subscription to How To Be Overbearing Weekly?”

“Always,” Hudson answered. “No subscription is necessary.”

“Traitor,” I muttered.

“Yet accurate,” he said, looking at Mary. “Now do I need to feed you?”

Mary smiled. “You wouldn’t.”

Hudson picked up the fork, pressed it into the cake and lifted the full fork to her lip. “Open. And never again tell us you’re fat.”

She licked her lips before opening them and letting Hudson feed her.

The waiter came. Hudson ordered soup, chicken salad for him and for Mary, because he knew she needed more than cake. I ordered the steak because I needed to sink my teeth into something that wasn’t her neck or those breasts she complained about.

“Mary, about Damien.” Hudson started with the thing neither of us could keep circling.

Her hand stilled on the napkin. Then she nodded once. “Yes.”

“You were his girlfriend.”

“Ex-girlfriend.”

Hudson glanced at me, but his own scent had changed too, the whiskey easing by a fraction.

“Definitely his ex?” I asked.

Mary looked straight at me. “Yes. Ex.”

“When?”

“The day in the hotel was the day it was over.” The day she had crossed the hallway dragging a blanket and trying to call it anything except part of her nest. The day she’d come to us shaking with pre-heat and still somehow made me laugh hard enough to ache.

“Before us?” Hudson asked.

Mary’s brows lifted. “Yes, before you. I do have a basic sense of chronology, despite recent evidence.”

The waiter returned with drinks. I waited until he moved away.

“My friend Nina warned me he was cheating,” Mary said. “Or close enough to cheating that only a lawyer would care about the distinction. Of course, I didn’t listen because I was being loyal, which is apparently what clever women call stupidity.”

I smiled.

She saw it. “Don’t look entertained.”

“I’m not.”

“You absolutely are.”

She lifted the water to her mouth but didn’t drink. “It was only when I saw him that I understood she was right. He said we weren’t exclusive. In public. While I was going into heat. Then later he called me a bitch because he thought I was with alphas.”

The glass in Hudson’s hand made the smallest sound against the table.

I wanted to find Damien and say several things that wouldn’t improve our family dynamic. But I also remembered him at seven, asleep on the sofa with a hockey stick tucked under his arm.

Fatherhood was a rotten arrangement at times.