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I mean, do I regret the wedding?
How do you regret that wedding?
Still, it would have been nicer if we could have had what we wanted, for everyone. I don’t think the alphas were jealous—not of me. Maybe they wished they could have the official title of husband or to be legally connected to me like Devlin was. But if so, they didn’t let on. Maybe they didn’t want to look at it too hard. Sometimes, we simply can’t get everything we want in life. And sometimes, staring too baldly at that hard, painful truth is too much. Sometimes, we just don’t look at it. And I think, as a coping mechanism, that’s probably just as healthy as anything else. It’s better than punching a wall that won’t move until your knuckles are bloody, after all.
Someday, the Queen was going to die.
Which wasn’t a happy thought. It wasn’t that I disliked the Queen personally, more that she represented an old guard, a way of existing that didn’t jive with the modern world. And when she was gone, and the next generation took over, when Mark was King, then maybe things could really change. Maybe then, we could get actual scientific studies of people with designations and we could discover why commoners were presenting.
Because, of course, Maguire and I were only the first, but we weren’t the last, and as the designations cropped up in people without royal blood, it became harder and harder for the palace to tow the line that they’d been towing.
All we could do for now was wait.
Admittedly, it got more difficult for us to be concerned about it after we started having babies, because something changes within you after you become a parent. The world narrows in this beautiful and primal way. You care about the world around you, of course you still care, but the hierarchy shifts. Your own children and their well-being become the most important things.
I had Sinclair’s baby two years after the wedding to Devlin.
It was Sinclair first because he was the one who kept bringing it up. I think the rest of us were nervous about it. It was a big step, having a child, bringing some new life into the world, especially a world in which we knew that the baby would be in the public eye from the first moment he or she took her first breath. We all wanted it, but in a sort of abstract-someday way.
And Sinclair wasn’t that way. At first, when he kept bringing it up, we’d all bring up objections.
“Sinclair, if you’re a father,” Rohan would say in that gentle, affectionate tone he always got for Sinclair, “you’ll have to stop going to clubs and taking party drugs and getting in bar fights.”
Because Sinclair was just, well, Sinclair, even if he’d stopped smoking cold turkey when I told him to. None of us knew why that worked. I’d tried it again. I’d ordered him to stop scoring ecstasy pills at clubs, and… he didn’t stop.
However, the prospect of fatherhood seemed to ignite something in him. He put himself into rehab and he started going to AA, and he took anger management classes and he just changed.
Soon enough, there were no more objections.
I’d lie in the circle of his arms at night sometimes and he’d lie behind me, both of his hands on my then-flat belly and breathe in my ear, “Omega, I want to watch your belly swell with my baby, and you know you want it too.”
Or he’d kiss me while he was inside me, his knot stretching me and making me see stars, and he’d say, “I can’t wait to see how pretty you are when you’re pregnant.”
By this time, we weren’t all sleeping in a pack-pile in the nest, not all the time. We all had bedrooms, though basically we never slept alone, none of us. The alphas rotated in and out of my bed, mostly, but Maguire and Devlin often stayed in Devlin’s bed and Sinclair slept in Rohan’s room a lot of the time.
I won’t say there weren’t a few tussles now and then about fair access to the omega, which I should have put a stop to more quickly than I did, but I couldn’t help it. There was something about having these huge, hulking men fighting over me that made me a little hot under the collar, and it made the sex good, too.
However, by the time we were planning the baby, we’d worked most of that out of our systems, and I was glad of it. Maybe sometimes I got a little wistful for the fire of it, the excitement, but mostly, mostly we were settled and boring and ready.
Little Jennifer was planned.
Mostly.
I did go into heat unexpectedly and there was a flurry of getting Sinclair’s injection countered so that he could impregnate me, but he did. The purpose of heat was to procreate, and we got it done, first try.
I’d been nervous.
I think all women are nervous about it, because it’s such a big deal—creating another human inside your body, the way everything changes, including your appearance and your emotions and your capacity to remember things… I was worried about pregnancy.
But I liked it.
My alphas worshiped me at the best of times, but when I was pregnant, it was different. Everything deepened and became more intense. We all grew even closer.
I ended up getting pregnant again only four months after Jennifer was born. I had all four of the babies within a year of each other. We were lucky in that there were five of us and we could give them our attention. Also, we didn’t have the kind of difficulties and distractions that come from having outside jobs. Our jobs were just to be royal, and that was handy when it came to having a family.
The eldest of our children was named Jennifer. Then came Felix and then Nicholas and finally Madeleine. Though we knew which children were biologically each of my alphas, we were one big family and they were all dads to all of the kids.
The kids knew, for instance, that if they wanted to be given permission to do something, to ask Sinclair, who was “Daddio.” (Devlin was “Papa,” Rohan was just “Dad” and Maguire was “Pops.”) Daddio was likely to agree to any wild scheme, whereas Pops was more likely to say, “Ask your mother,” and Dad and Papa were more likely to be even more strict that I was.
