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16
Sebastian
Present Day
“Sebastian, darling, we need to talk.”
That was all it took for Sebastian to know he was in trouble. He reluctantly looked up from the figures he was studying on his computer, one brow raised.
“Oh, put that look away, dearest,” Perry chirped. “Trying to look innocent will do you no good, you know.”
“I wasn’t trying to look like anything,” Sebastian complained.
“Nonsense. You’ve been secretive and tiptoeing around me and I do not care for it one bit. And now Williams has told me she’s under orders not to drive me anywhere? I wish to go shopping, darling. How am I supposed to get out of the house if not driven?”
Sebastian ignored the main gist of his mate’s complaint and said, “There isn’t anything you can’t buy online.”
Perry smiled, but it was hard and tight. Internally, Sebastian winced. “Oh, of course I can buy anything online, but I can’t precisely shop, can I?”
Sebastian tried to puzzle that one out and lost, so he ignored it as well and just looked at Perry, trying, and likely failing, to seem patient.
“I see,” Perry said, his tone darkening. He tapped a finger against his upper lip. “Well, Everard said that very gentle exercise would be good for me. I think I should like to go for a walk. It’s quite mild out for the time of year, you know, and it would be a shame to waste such a great opportunity to go outside. I’ll take the children to the park and sit while they play. I’m sure they’d be delighted, and I can’t see Everard objecting to it.”
A walk. Good lord. What a terrible idea. Their neighborhood was a gated community with security. Under normal circumstances, a short walk would be just the thing, but not now. Not with Bertram’s little security problem endangering the family. Raven’s hostility toward the most vulnerable of the Drakes meant that eight small boys and an unaccompanied pregnant omega would be too tempting a target. The very idea made Sebastian’s blood run cold.
“No,” he said. “I forbid it. I have built the whelps a jungle gym. It will be sufficient.”
Perry opened his eyes wide. “I beg your pardon.”
Heat flooded Sebastian’s face, but he ignored it. He hated to make Perry angry or deny him anything, but this was too important. “No,” he repeated. “It’s not safe.”
“I see,” Perry said darkly. “Why, pray tell?”
Sebastian studied his computer monitor in the hopes it might give him a good answer to Perry’s question.
It did not.
Perry came closer and leaned across the desk toward him in a series of dainty clinks and bright jingles. The small diamonds on one of the bangles he wore glinted brilliantly in the sun. “I need you to talk to me, darling,” he said. “You must see that. You can’t just wrap me up like a precious bauble and tuck me out of sight.”
The hell I can’t, Sebastian thought, but wisely didn’t vocalize.
“Seb, darling, please.”
Sebastian sighed. He was defenseless against Perry, and Perry knew it. “There are things I’m not supposed to discuss,” he hedged. “I just want to keep you and our children safe. All of our children.”
Perry’s hand drifted down to his rounded belly. “Does this have anything to do with Bertram?”
That made Sebastian freeze in place. “Bertram? Why on earth would it have anything to do with my brother?”
After a tense moment in which Perry’s lips tightened, he went to sit in one of the study’s more comfortable leather chairs. It was made large to accommodate Sebastian’s frame, and when seated in it, Perry looked like a child. Sebastian told himself to be careful. Youthful appearance or not, his mate was no child and had not been one for a very, very long time. Perry was intelligent. Frighteningly so. And Sebastian knew no other man—or reptile, for that matter—who possessed such uncanny insight. Sometimes, though, like now, Sebastian thought he was too smart for his own good.
“A little bird told me,” Perry said at last.
Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “A little bird? Which little bird?”
“It doesn’t matter. The important part is that I have reason to believe that you think I’m in danger and that Bertram is not to be trusted.”
Misha. The informant could be no one else. He’d been there to witness Sebastian and Bertram’s argument after the rescue of his clutch, and with a devious mind like his, must have seen it as an invitation to figure out what their little spat had been about. With his aptitude for technology and his sharp intellect, it was no wonder he’d discovered what it had taken Sebastian half a millennium to figure out—that Bertram’s erratic behavior was linked to his ties with a certain troublesome omega.
