Omega's Kiss: M/M Mpreg Alpha Male Romance Read online

  Another, who smelled like an unclaimed omega, asked how he balanced his "personal needs" against his career. Doug had to think for a moment about how he responded to that one. "I can only assume that you're asking that because I'm an omega, and I've never made any secret of that. Nor should I," he added, meeting the young man's eyes for a moment. "I'm speaking to the Omega Student Union tomorrow, in fact, where I'll be speaking about the subject in greater detail.

  "It's not always easy. I won't lie to you. It helps that I had a very supportive father, and some supportive friends. I knew what I wanted, and I've had the right structures in place to help me go out and get them without getting distracted. It might be possible to get through law school with an alpha and kids and all that, but I'm not sure that I'd like to try." He made a face.

  "Yeah, omegas—and alphas—have needs that are a little bit different from betas. That doesn't mean that we can't find ways of meeting those needs without becoming slaves to them, you know? There are ways to reduce chances of becoming pregnant, for example. I can say, if there are any omegas in the audience tonight, that the best thing to do is to be out there and stay in contact with people. You'll be less likely to self-destruct that way."

  They had a few more questions, less personal, before the meeting broke up. Afterward, a few students came down to ask more detailed questions and try to angle for internships. Doug made sure that he got the young omega's contact information; he struck Doug as someone who might need a little more support.

  Once that was over with, and Doug bade goodbye to the professors and to the partner from work, he grabbed his things and made ready to leave. He hadn't forgotten about Langer. He just didn't want to give him more importance than he had to, even in his own mind.

  Langer refused to be ignored. "That was quite the talk you gave," he said, coming down the steps toward Doug with a little grin on his face. "Do you really think we're all on the same side here?"

  Doug scratched his head. "Don't you? We all want safer communities. We all want justice."

  Langer didn't comment on that. He leaned against the desk instead, crossing one long leg over the other. "So, do you do a lot of these, um, pep talks or whatever?"

  "Career days? Yeah, a few. Our firm has relationships with a few specific schools around here." He frowned. He couldn't stop his eyes from traveling the length of Langer's body, but he could stop himself from openly drooling. He wasn't here to make sheep's eyes at a cop, especially not at the cop who'd put his father away. "Are you considering a career change, Detective? Suffolk has a fantastic evening program."

  Langer snorted. "No. No, not at all. I break out in hives every time I have to testify. I'm pretty sure I'm better off right where I am." He braced himself on the desk. "No, I got that list of victims, along with autopsy reports and investigation details for you."

  Doug rubbed at his own jaw. He hadn't expected quite so much detail. "Thanks. I thought I was just going to get names and time of death."

  Langer rolled his shoulders. "Well, I figured you might find it useful. And to be quite honest, I might find it useful too. You found those two victims that weren't his. You were right. We all want justice. And something that I certainly do not want is for someone to be out there killing people and getting away with it because they copied someone else's crimes."

  Doug scowled. He opened his mouth to object.

  Langer held up one hand. "Sorry. Or because someone else took the fall. We'll see where that one ends up. You have your theory, and I have mine, but what we can agree on is that there is at least one killer who is not your father who is at large. Correct?"

  Doug forced himself to calm down. Antagonizing the guy who was holding all of the evidence probably wasn't in his best interests, or in his dad's. "Correct."

  Langer smiled a little. "So, there's a little bar not too far away from here. You want to head over there and maybe go over these things, maybe work out a timeline for where your dad was and when?"

  A bar. The last place that Doug should go with Langer was to a bar. Doug's inhibitions needed to stay right where they were. "Wouldn't my office be best? It's right in the Back Bay, and we'll be able to make copies of anything we need."

  "No worries." Langer grinned and hefted a briefcase. The thing looked heavy; Doug could see Langer's arm struggling to lift it. "I brought extra."

  To the bar it was, then. Doug couldn't quite find it in himself to be disappointed, even if he wanted to be. "Okay. Let's head out."

  They walked over to a little place in a historic building on Winter Street. It had been beautifully restored with a dark, elegant, late nineteenth century kind of feel and Doug kind of wished that he'd changed or freshened up or something before he came out. They ordered exorbitantly priced cocktails, and equally pricy appetizers, and then they went ahead and got started.

  Langer had brought two binders, each identical. The first case in the binder was the last Lakeville Killer victim, Clarissa Baldovini. "I knew her." Doug looked at the photo at the top of Baldovini's cover sheet. "She was in my mother's church group."

  "Was she?" Langer leaned a little bit closer. "Were they close?"

  "Who, Ms. Baldovini and my mother? Not really. Not that I can remember, anyway. She wasn't one of the women who would come over to the house when she was alive, anyway." He shuddered. "I met her a few times at the church, you know. She was nice enough."

  "I noticed you shudder. Do you not like religious people?" Langer sipped from his glass.

  Doug grabbed for his own glass. "I don't have an issue with religion, and I've known some religious people who've done some amazing things in the community. It's just—my mom used to host these prayer meetings at the house, you know? They'd get together and no one else was allowed in, and it would just be all of this muttering and chanting, and to a little kid like me it just seemed very creepy. All they were doing was praying the Rosary, which is about as non-creepy as you can get." He chuckled at himself. "They probably just didn't want a little kid squirming around and disrupting things." He sipped at his drink, barely tasting the beverage. "At any rate, Ms. Baldovini wasn't one of those women. That group had two sides to it. One was the praying side, and one was the service side. Ms. Baldovini wasn't all that interested in the hardcore praying. She was more interested in the service. She was out there a lot, helping older people with meals and such. She worked at the elementary school part time, too."

  Langer nodded. "That's what I remember her husband telling me. She taught art." He flipped the page, and Doug followed suit.

  The next page was a photo of the different parts of Ms. Baldovini all laid out on the autopsy table. Langer looked down and looked up at Doug. "Do you know where your father was on the night of February 9, 2014, Mr. Morrison?"

  Doug noticed the waitress approaching. He turned the cover sheet back over the autopsy photo, and he reached out to do the same for Langer before the waitress could see something distressing. "As a matter of fact, I do. He was out celebrating the retirement of one of his longest-serving librarians at the Lakeville Library. You can verify with Sofia Torres of Lakeville, among others. It was a big party; I was there myself. I'm sure I've got some pictures on my hard drive. Someone else must."

  Langer's jaw dropped. "Okay. Okay. That's…" He took a deep breath. "We thought that one was a slam dunk."

  Doug hid his face with his hand for a moment. "Wait, what?"

  Langer bit his lip, and then he drained the rest of his glass in one gulp. "So, the good news is that your father was never prosecuted for the Baldovini murder. It's always been attributed to him, because it was the same location, witnesses said they saw him—or a man fitting his description—at the scene—and everything else matched up. But if he couldn't have done that one either, we've got a huge problem on our hands." He flipped to the next case, back straighter. "Let's keep going. We might be here a while."

  Doug flipped to the next victim. If Langer was willing to admit that there was a serious problem, there might be some hop
e.

  ***

  Ray looked down at the list of victims. For all intents and purposes, he was going to have to consider Bonnaire and Alumi to be part of the mix again, because there was no practical way to differentiate between Lawrence Morrison's victims and the unknown killer's victims. "So, you can give your father an alibi for at least five of these victims, other than Alumi and Bonnaire, without having to go digging through records or anything like that?"

  He couldn't tell if he wanted to cry or scream. Maybe doing both would make him feel better. Ray and the rest of the team had put in so much work, so much effort, and for nothing. And, of course, there was a killer wandering Southeastern Massachusetts with a free rein.

  "Without breaking a sweat." Morrison met Ray's eyes steadily. He seemed to be torn between resignation, determination, and anger. "What I want to know is, why is this coming up now? I mean I've seen your record. You're a good detective. Even if you were green, the guys on your team have handled some pretty wild, out-of-control cases before. I know that someone, somewhere, should have scratched his head and said, 'Huh. I wonder if the guy has a son who can corroborate where he was.'"

  Ray shrugged. "The guy's a grown man, Morrison. Yeah, it would be best if we could have done that, but if the guy says he was off for a walk in the woods by himself, we're not going to sit there and say, 'Was he really off in the woods by himself? Or was he sneakily off at a retirement party with his son?' I mean that doesn't make sense. No one does that." He reached out for his empty glass and reminded himself that he needed to drive back out to Framingham tonight.

  Morrison tilted his head. The low light hit his green eyes just right and made them look like they'd come alive. Ray could have spent all night looking into those eyes instead of at the crime scene photos. "No one does that," he repeated. His tone rose. "No one does that!" He shook his head. "No one does that, no one expected you to do that." He tapped his pencil on the table, beating out a quick rhythm that sounded almost familiar to Ray. "He had one of our best partners on his case, and even Jared didn't think of calling me up. He just took everything my dad said at face value, and I'd almost certainly have done the same thing. That's what you do, if you're pretty sure that your client is of sound mind."

  Ray frowned. "You're not trying to sell me on an insanity defense over a year after the trial was over." He was pretty sure that Morrison had more respect for him than that.

  Of course, the look that Morrison gave him disabused him of that notion fairly quickly. "No. Of course not. He's perfectly sane. I do think that he made a choice."

  Ray slapped his hand on the table. "You think he's covering for someone. On some, if not all, of the killings."

  Morrison sat back. He was so distracting, with his cotton candy scent and those narrow green eyes of his. Ray figured he could be forgiven if he was a little slow on the uptake. "We'll have to agree to disagree on that whole 'some' versus 'all' aspect. Professional courtesy, of course."

  "Naturally." Ray ducked his head and blushed before he remembered that he was here to do a job. "But who do you think that he's supposed to be covering for?"

  "Detective, if I knew that, I'd tell you. I'd tell you in a heartbeat. I really would, because then we could put this whole thing behind us, and maybe get to know one another a little bit better." He gave a little, slow grin, and the world narrowed until there was nothing but Morrison's mouth and the voice coming from it. Even the words didn't matter much.

  Ray felt his mouth watering, wondering what it would be like to have those lips on his. "Maybe have a drink or two without this kind of grizzly reading material between us."

  "What, you don't think detailed autopsy reports are a good icebreaker? And here I was thinking that you brought them just as a conversation starter." Morrison gave a little laugh. "Come on. Like you didn't include them just as hazing."

  Ray knew he was blushing. He could feel it in his cheeks. "That bit came from Nenci. He's like that."

  "Charming. He has spoken to defense attorneys before, right? Because we've seen, you know, all of this, like a thousand times." Morrison shook his head and slipped his binder into his briefcase. "It's good to know the state police have their own pet troll. We have an office troll too. His name is John. We try not to let outsiders too close to him, though." Morrison sat back. "So, I think we can agree on a course of action."

  Ray could think of a course of action all right. His preferred course of action was to bring Morrison home and see what he looked like under the suit. "Yeah," he said instead. "We need to figure out who your father is covering for and why. And, of course, we need to figure out who killed those victims." He shuddered. The thought of multiple killers was a pretty good way to subdue Ray's libido. "Or how many killers there are."

  Morrison paled. "Yeah. There's a fun thought. I mean this is the town where I grew up, you know? It's bad enough to sit here and know that at least one of them is a serial killer, and let my dad take the fall for his crimes. The thought that there might be more than one? And that they're probably people that I knew, at least in passing?"

  Ray winced. "I can't imagine what that must be like. I've never investigated anything out in Athol. They'd never put me on a case like that." He rubbed at the back of his neck. "It creates too much of a potential conflict of interest, you know? Like in a bigger city it wouldn't be a problem, but in a smaller place…" He let himself trail off. "I'm sorry. I know this has to be hard on you."

  Morrison shrugged, but looked away. "I'll worry about that when my dad is free. I try not to think about things in terms of how hard they are for me. I try to focus on the challenge instead—not 'this is hard for me,' but 'how am I going to get around this obstacle?'" He looked back at Ray. "It works for me. Some folks' mileage may vary." He looked down at his watch. "Anyway, we've both got jobs to do, and it's late. Are you okay to get home?"

  Ray nodded. His one drink had been forgotten long ago. "I'm good. I'll call as soon as I've found anything."

  "Likewise." He shook Ray's hand. Morrison's hand felt oddly warm when it pressed against Ray's skin.

  Ray headed back out to Framingham, to his little Cape house, and went to bed. He had no doubt that Larry Morrison had killed at least some of his victims, but why would a man cover up for another man's crimes? That just didn't make sense. He didn't get it. Sure, there were some men who wanted fame for their kills, but Larry Morrison had never struck him that way. He'd pled innocent. He continued to insist that he hadn't committed the crimes, but he could have very easily introduced reasonable doubt into the mix simply by telling the truth.

  Why would he lie?

  The questions kept him awake for a good long while that night. So did the memory of Doug Morrison's sexy grin, and the seductive timbre of his voice as he discussed "getting to know each other better." No man could have slept with those words echoing through his head, and the rise in heat that accompanied them. Ray had to go and take a cold shower before he could try to get to sleep, and that wasn't like him.

  What was Morrison playing at, anyway? He couldn't actually want Ray. Ray was the guy who had put his father away!

  Then again, what if he did? What if he wanted Ray in spite of himself? A lot of guys didn't believe in soulmates. Ray thought those guys needed to look at reality a little bit more closely. Maybe betas didn't have soulmates. Alphas and omegas were different. How else could anyone account for that sudden, demanding pull toward another human being, that insistent demand that came from every part of a man's being for union with one other person?

  Ray had seen it play out between Robles and his gorgeous omega, Ryan. It had been bumpy, sure, but no one would have ever been willing to try to make things work under those circumstances if they weren't truly destined for one another. And anyone who had seen Morris with his omega, Pete, knew that forces much greater than either of them had brought them together.

  What if Doug Morrison was Ray's soulmate?

  Ray's stomach gave a twist. What if Doug Morrison was Ray's soulma
te, and Ray had sent his father to jail?

  Well, there was nothing that could be done about it now. At the end of the day, Ray was a cop. It was his job to send killers someplace where they couldn't hurt anyone else. Larry Morrison was a killer. If Doug really was Ray's soulmate, then he'd understand that eventually. And if Doug was half the lawyer he'd sounded like he was up in front of those undergrads tonight, he'd have no problem wrapping his head around the concept.

  The next day, Ray went into the office with a renewed sense of purpose. He knew that Morrison was going to be working on finding his father's whereabouts for all of the times of death, and he was the one to do that. Ray could do it, and he'd probably do a passable job of it, but Morrison had a vested interest in getting it done and it would free Ray up to work on other avenues to pursue.

  Right now, he still felt that one of the keys to the case was the missing bodies. No one had been killed, or at least no one had been found to be killed, in between the murder of Emiliana Morrison in 1998 and of Yvette Leveque in 2000. It wasn't like Morrison, once he started killing, to go for two years without taking a life. It wasn't like Morrison to go for one year without taking a life.