Page 97 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

The room Hudson and Lincoln had given me looked different now. Less like a guest room in a London penthouse and more like a place a woman might survive the next few months. The bed sat near a wall of glass, the curtains half open to a gray morning and the Thames below.

The ultrasound photos were on the bedside table, tucked beneath a glass paperweight because I couldn’t bear to put them away and couldn’t bear to look at them too long.

Two tiny shapes. Two heartbeats. Two people who had taken one look at my life and decided it needed a more advanced difficulty setting.

I touched the edge of the photo. The paper was smooth beneath my fingertip. “Good morning,” I whispered.

I got up slowly, because the nausea held veto power. The nest tugged at me as I left it, soft and scented. Lincoln’s hoodie and Hudson’s scarf carried clean rain with controlled whiskey under it, a scent that made my thoughts stand up straight and then misbehave.

I shouldn’t have had their things in my bed.

Beyond the bedroom, the penthouse was already awake. Somewhere down the hall, a coffee machine hissed. An elevator chimed behind the private lobby doors.

I paused in the hall.

Hudson and Lincoln were in the glass-walled study off the main living room, working from home. Their home, technically, though I’d been there two nights and still moved through it like someone expecting a museum guard to ask if I’d touched the furniture.

Hudson sat at the desk in a dark polo shirt with his laptop open, hair perfect, jaw clean-shaven. He wore glasses that rested low on his nose while he read something on the screen with the focus of a man deciding whether a village deserved a future.

Lincoln stood by the window on a call, wearing a black button-down shirt that stretched across his broad shoulders. One hand in his pocket, the other holding his phone to his ear while he listened. His expression was warm enough to be polite and dangerous enough to remind me that warmth wasn’t the same as softness.

Hudson looked up. His gaze found me immediately, and the serious line of his mouth softened. “Morning.”

Lincoln turned from the window. His eyes moved over me with the slow, bright attention of a man cataloguing signs of sleep, sickness, and whether I might need food. He mouthed, “How are you feeling?”

“Like a miracle of modern reproduction and poor planning.”

Hudson’s mouth lifted on one side.

Lincoln ended his call. “Breakfast?”

“I’d love something to stop my stomach from rebelling.”

Hudson smiled as he leaned back in his chair. Lincoln’s smile reached his eyes, and for one weak, dangerous second, I felt less like a scandal in borrowed space and more like someone they’d been waiting to see.

Then I saw a woman walking toward me.

“This is Sienna.” Lincoln introduced me to my new bodyguard, who I'd found out from her paperwork that she was thirty-six and a beta.

“I really don’t need a bodyguard,” I whispered as I stared at her. She was at least five foot nine, brown-skinned, calm-eyed, and dressed in black pants, a soft gray sweater, and boots that said she could kick someone hard.

“Mary,” Sienna said, shaking my hand. “I’m here to make your life easier, not smaller.”

“Did Lincoln brief you about my life?”

“Extensively.”

“Did he use the words my omega?”

Lincoln coughed into his coffee.

Sienna’s expression didn’t change. “He did. And that you needed protecting.”

I looked at him. He looked back, completely unrepentant and slightly red at the tips of his ears.

“Interesting,” I said.

“Is it?” he asked.