I may have begun this journey as a die-hard Beta, but I am walking away from it with the heart of an Omega who longs for the challenges of being a wife and mother, of raising this world’s next generation to embrace the values of their forefathers.
“What are you doing?” Dane asked from over her shoulder.
“Writing my next article.”
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“It’s about a girl who met a boy and realized that everything she’d ever believed was wrong.”
“She sounds a little batty,” he joked.
“If you don’t stop with the bat jokes . . .” she laughed.
“What? You gonna bat-ter me?”
“That’s it!” she joked, getting out of her chair and approaching him with a huge smile and a playful fist waving around in the air.
Dane just laughed and pulled her toward him, her round belly pressed against him. She felt a little movement, and his eyes widened.
“The baby just kicked me!”
“Good. Let that be a reminder as to which side they are on,” she teased.
He put his hands on her stomach and held them there, smiling broadly as the baby kicked away.
“That’s my girl! Feisty like her mother!” he joked, leaning forward to kiss her while the baby continued to kick around between them.
Less than a week later, Adriana gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Neither of them could have been any prouder as they looked down at her big brown eyes and mop of bright red curls. They named her Dawn, after his mother. In the coming months, a generous splattering of freckles would crop up across her perfect nose as she sat giggling in the final days of warm weather. Fall would soon begin to show its colors as they moved into their new house.
The construction company was gone. Dane had let the FBI demolish it and retrieve whatever they needed to go after the bigger fish that utilized the Black Talons to do their dirty work. When all was said and done, he had cleared the land and donated it to the tiny home project for the homeless, keeping his former construction crew on to help build the houses that would get people off the streets of the city he’d once towered over.
They’d kept the penthouse apartment, but only as a place to stay when they wanted to get away or spend a few days in the city. Years later, Dawn would use it as her own apartment as she attended college and began working for her father’s company in preparation for when he would finally step down and hand over the reins to her. Of course, that day was still a long way in the future, as was Adriana even considering retirement from Transformation, a magazine she now owned, having purchased it in the years that followed her original employment as a mere journalist there. What came between those years was a lifetime of happiness balancing love, career, and family.
It was their thirtieth wedding anniversary, and Adriana had a very special surprise for Dane. She and Dawn had planned an impromptu party for him, but first, they had a present of their own. They were both waiting for him when he arrived from work, having told him to hustle home so they could take him out for a nice meal.
They watched as he approached the cake they’d special ordered for him, leaning over it and smiling before looking around and sneaking a finger across the icing for a taste. It had been expected. There had never been a cake bought for Dane Jensen that had not been secretly tasted by him prior to him blowing out the candles and cutting it.
The moment his hand broke the motion detector to one side, the trigger flipped, and the cake exploded from the top, sending confetti and bits of icing spraying upward. Dane jumped back and looked upward at it, bewildered for a moment, but his shock quickly turned to laughter as he spotted two bats hanging upside down from a tension rod put up for the occasion.
He was still laughing hysterically as they dropped behind the counter out of sight, shifted, and slipped on their robes before jumping back up to sing happy birthday to him as he stood smiling broadly at them. When he finally settled down, he looked them both in the eyes sternly.
“That better not have been the only cake.”
They both laughed, each giving him a kiss before going to get changed into their party clothes before their guests arrived.
“I love you girls,” he told them when they came back, finding him sitting at the counter with a fork, carefully carving bites of icing off the undisturbed portions of the fake cake.
“We love you too,” they both replied, as Adriana took the cake remnants away from him and tossed them in the trash, leaving him to look like a heartbroken little boy. Dawn brought over a fresh cake and set it on the table nearby while Adriana cleared the mess from the counter. Friends began arriving shortly after that to celebrate with Dane—a family man, after all.