Alphas christmas heir, p.19
Alpha's Christmas Heir, page 19
For now, this is enough.
Warmth, weight, chosen names on paper and whispered against skin.
A pack I picked for myself.
I fall asleep with Caleb’s fingers drawing slow circles on my arm, Noel’s soft breaths in the background, and the quiet, fierce certainty that whatever comes next, we’re not facing it alone.
Chapter 10. Heir & Home
Caleb
By the time the plows have carved the last of the ice off Hollyridge’s streets, the storm feels like a story someone told us instead of something we survived.
The snowbanks are still high along Main—piled up like sugared walls—but the sky is a pale, clean blue. Smoke curls from chimneys. Someone’s already hacked a path to the town green so the kids can climb the drifts and declare them castles. The world looks scrubbed and new.
It feels right that today Noel comes home.
Not the apartment above the station. The real home. The one with creaky floors and quilts older than me. Maggie Vale’s house, which technically belongs to Liam now, and practically belongs to all three of us.
“Careful with that,” Liam calls after me. “That’s my entire nest in one box.”
If I weren’t holding said box, I’d salute.
Instead, I grunt and shift my grip on the carton labeled NEST STUFF in thick black marker, trying not to laugh at the way he’s hovering.
“It’s blankets and pillows,” I say, stepping carefully up the shoveled path. “Pretty sure I’ve carried worse things up these stairs.”
“Blasphemy,” he mutters. “Those quilts are sacred, Hart.”
Behind him, Noel makes a soft, indignant noise from the sling strapped across Liam’s chest, like he’s backing his omega up on this.
Liam glances down automatically, his hand sliding to support Noel’s small back through the fabric. His whole posture softens, shoulders dropping, scent going warm and sweet.
“See?” he murmurs to the baby. “He doesn’t respect the quilts. Maybe we should reconsider the Alpha of Record thing.”
“Mutiny in progress,” I say. “Good to know where I stand.”
The box isn’t actually that heavy, but I let my breath huff out a little as I carry it through the doorway and into the living room of the house I’ve known since I was a kid.
It smells different now.
It used to smell like Maggie’s soap and cinnamon, with a forever-undertone of paint from whatever thing she’d decided to redo that month. When she got sick, the cinnamon faded and the antiseptic crept in. For a long time after she died, the house smelled like dust, old grief, and plywood where the roof had leaked.
Now, it smells like toasted rice and candied kumquat and baby.
The renovations help. The roof got fixed before the first storm; the drafty windows in the living room are now double-paned, still framed by the same lace curtains. A fresh coat of soft white paint takes up most of the walls, but Maggie’s gallery of mismatched frames is back in place. The floors gleam where they used to just... creak sadly.
But it’s the nest in the corner that changes the room.
We set it up first, before any boxes. Maggie’s old quilt trunk, open and repurposed as a low table for a battery lantern and a stack of Noel-sized onesies. The patchwork quilt that got him born spread on the floor, layered with others Ruthie and the Temples insisted we take. Pillows. A folded sweatshirt of mine, tucked in like a scent anchor. The hand-carved spruce ornament we chose together, hanging from a nail above it like a tiny, private star.
I set the box down beside it with exaggerated care. “There,” I say. “Sacred textiles delivered.”
From the doorway behind me, Evan Temple snorts.
“He babies those blankets more than the baby,” he tells his wife.
Mae, trudging in behind him with a box of kitchen stuff, swats his arm. “He birthed the baby,” she reminds him. “He gets to baby what he wants.”
Liam appears in the entry, cheeks pink from the cold, Noel bundled in a tiny snowsuit in the sling, hat with the little star pulled down over his fuzz of hair. The baby’s face is squished against Liam’s chest, eyes closed, mouth open in that ridiculous newborn “I might be thinking about crying in an hour” way.
“We appreciate your service,” Liam tells Evan solemnly. “Now, has anyone seen the box with the mugs? Caleb refuses to drink coffee out of anything that isn’t his ugly brown one, and I’m tired of hearing about it.”
“It’s not ugly,” I protest. “It’s dignified. It has character.”
“It has a crack,” Nora calls from the porch, where she’s balancing a box labeled KITCHEN / MISC and an armful of plastic grocery bags. “Which is why it lives at the station.”
I jog back out to take the box from her before she breaks an ankle on the steps.
“You didn’t have to come,” I tell her. “You worked a double last night.”
“And miss watching you two nesting idiots play house?” she says. “Never.”
She hands me the bags. “Groceries. Ruthie insisted. Apparently the sheriff and the new dad can’t be trusted not to forget to eat now that there’s a small tyrant in the house.”
“Ruthie is correct,” I say. “I did forget to eat yesterday.”
“Case in point,” Nora says.
Inside, the house fills up fast.
Boxes stack in the hallway. The rocker Evan refinished gets pride of place by the front window. Mae disappears into the kitchen with an efficiency that would put a battle commander to shame. Nora pretends she’s just checking the fire alarms but keeps ending up next to Noel, making faces at him whenever he blinks awake.
It’s chaos.
It feels... right.
Liam moves through it all with a kind of careful, sleep-soft grace that makes my chest ache. He’s already lost some of the roundness from late pregnancy, but his body still shows the work it did—new lines, new softness in places, a way of moving that accounts for soreness and the sling both. His hair is tied up haphazardly; he’s in soft joggers and one of my old hoodies we rescued from a box. His scent is everywhere—warm, bright, threaded with baby and nest.
He laughs when I almost trip over a box of Noel’s clothes in the hallway, catching my elbow with his free hand.
“Careful, big guy,” he says. “You break yourself, I’m not explaining that to Mara.”
“I have insurance,” I say.
“You don’t have a spare sheriff,” Nora calls.
“See?” Liam says. “Irreplaceable public service. Watch where you’re going.”
We banter like that all morning.
Arguing about where the couch should go (“Not under the ceiling fan,” Liam says. “Noel will grow up thinking motion sickness is normal.”), whether the TV should be mounted or perched (“Mounted,” Nora votes. “Less chance the kid pulls it over with his eventual freakish alpha strength.”), who’s carrying the heavier boxes (me, always, even when he offers, because I’d like to keep him from re-injuring muscles I watched work their asses off already).
At one point, Evan catches my eye as he passes with a box of books.
“You good?” he asks quietly, dropping his voice low enough that the rest of the kitchen noise covers it.
I exhale, looking around.
Liam standing in the doorway to the hall, one hand absently stroking Noel’s back while he talks to Mae about where to store baking sheets. Nora and Ruthie arguing about whether to reorganize the pantry. Snowlight spilling across the floor like a blessing.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m... good.”
He claps a hand on my shoulder, squeezes once, and moves on.
By afternoon, the big things are in place.
The living room looks almost like it used to, only updated: couch facing the fireplace, rocker by the window, Maggie’s old bookshelf now filled with a mix of her paperbacks and Liam’s design manuals and a brand-new shelf of baby books. The tree is still up in the corner, its lights reflecting off the window. Noel’s stocking, crocheted by Mae in a forty-eight-hour frenzy right after his birth, hangs from the mantel between mine and Liam’s.
We save the nursery for last.
It feels like the right kind of ceremony to do it that way.
The room used to be Liam’s. Posters on the wall, scuffed floor where his bed was, pencil marks on the door frame showing how tall he’d gotten each year. When we were sixteen and sneaking kisses, we’d lie on that bed and plan futures that seemed far away and simple: get out, make art, maybe come back someday and turn Hollyridge into something better.
Now the posters are gone, the floor’s been refinished, and instead of a bed, there’s a crib in pieces and a rocker waiting for assembly.
Liam stands in the middle of the room with a paint roller, staring at the blank wall opposite the window.
“You sure about the color?” I ask.
He looks down at the tray of soft spruce green we mixed earlier.
“No,” he admits. “But if I think about it too much, we’ll still be standing here in March. So. Spruce it is.”
“Spruce for Noel,” I say. “Seems appropriate.”
He snorts. “What did you want, sheriff yellow?”
“Absolutely not,” I say. “He deserves better than high-visibility.”
We spread the tarp and start in.
He takes the top half of the wall; I take the bottom. Noel, freshly fed and temporarily content, lounges in the rocker in the corner, swaddled and staring at the ceiling with the vague interest of someone still learning what eyes do.
Evan and Mae perch in the doorway like spectators.
“You missed a spot,” Liam says after a minute, pointing with his roller.
“I’ll get it on the second pass,” I say.
“Alpha confidence,” he mutters. “Zero actual precision.”
“I am precise,” I object. “I arrest people with very small margins of error.”
“With a badge,” he says. “Not a roller.”
“Same principle,” I say.
He laughs, the sound light and easy.
It’s messy, but it’s fun.
We bump into each other’s rollers. I get a smear of green on his cheekbone. He retaliates by “accidentally” catching my forearm with a splash. Noel makes a soft, delighted gurgle from the rocker, like watching his parents try to paint is the funniest thing he’s seen in his three-week-long life.
When we’re done, the wall is a gentle, foresty green that makes the white trim and the warm wood floors pop. It feels calm. Safe. Like a place you’d want to wake up from nightmares in.
“Not bad,” I say, stepping back.
“Not bad for a sheriff who just read the directions,” Liam says, tossing his roller into the tray.
“I didn’t read the directions,” I say.
He stares at me. “Caleb.”
“I skimmed them,” I amend.
“Give me strength,” he mutters, grabbing the crib instruction packet from the box. “You are not free-styling this. This is where our baby sleeps. We are following every cartoon diagram in this pamphlet.”
“Yes, dear,” I say.
Evan snickers. Mae says, “I heard that,” and wanders off to “help” in the kitchen again.
Liam sits cross-legged on the floor, unfolding the directions with the reverence of holy text. I kneel beside the pile of crib pieces, squinting at the tiny drawings.
“Part A into B, screw C aligns with hole D,” he reads.
“Whoever wrote this hates us,” I say.
“Whoever wrote this saw your last attempt at assembling furniture,” he says. “Hand me that Allen key.”
We manage.
It takes longer than it should. There is swearing. There is a pause where Noel spits up on the only entirely paint-free shirt either of us has left on, and Liam dissolves into giggles while I hold our son at arm’s length and pretend I’m not completely smitten with every gross thing he does.
But eventually, there’s a crib.
Solid. Steady. Spruce-green wall behind it. The new mattress smells like plastic and possibility. Liam leans over the rail and smooths his hand over the fitted sheet like he’s making a tiny bed for his younger self.
Ruthie’s paper snowflake mobile goes up last, hanging from a simple hook in the ceiling, glitter catching the light. It turns slowly in the draft from the vent, flakes spinning above the crib like soft, frozen stars.
Noel lies in the rocker, watching.
“You like it, starfish?” Liam asks, joining him on the floor. “This is your room. Your wall. Your weird paper art auntie made you.”
Noel kicks his feet in the swaddle, eyes wide and unfocused.
“He approves,” I say. “Strong leg energy.”
Liam smiles up at me, and for a second I can see them both older—Noel standing on wobbly legs in that crib, chewing on the rail; Liam leaning over to scoop him up, hair mussed, ring glinting on his finger.
My chest tightens, but in a good way.
* * *
Nights become their own kind of ritual.
They blur, if I’m honest. There’s a point where I stop being able to tell one from the next without checking the little journal Liam keeps by the bed where he logs feedings and diapers and “tiny tyrant shrieked at 2:13 a.m.”
But certain moments stand out.
Noel’s first night in the house, the wind sighs instead of howls. The radiators hiss, the fire crackles, the old walls settle. Liam sleeps in the nest beside the bed, curled around the bassinet, one hand always resting on the mattress near his son.
I fall asleep in the chair by the window, boots still on, because I can’t quite make myself leave the room while they sleep.
At some point, I wake up with a blanket tucked over me that I didn’t put there.
Liam, half-asleep, eyes puffy, shuffles past with Noel in his arms and a bottle balanced in his elbow. He leans down to kiss my forehead, misses by an inch, and kisses my eyebrow instead.
“Go to bed, sheriff,” he mumbles. “We’re fine.”
I go. But I leave the bedroom door open.
Another night, Noel refuses sleep on principle. He squawks every time Liam tries to put him down, tiny face scrunched in outrage.
“Okay, okay,” I say, scooping him up. “Come be a barnacle for a while.”
I take the graveyard shift, pacing the living room with Noel tucked against my chest, his hatless head warm under my chin. His scent is still new, that wild, newborn-tart sweetness, but it’s threaded now with the nest—Liam’s rice and citrus, my smoke and spruce.
I hum tunelessly into his hair, rubbing circles on his back. My eyes droop. My feet keep moving.
Somewhere around three a.m., I sit down in the rocker “just for a second.”
I wake up to sunlight in the window and a stiff neck.
There’s a blanket over both of us, and a photo on my phone taken from the doorway—me tipped back in the chair, mouth slightly open, Noel starfish-sprawled on my chest, both of us dead asleep.
The caption, from Liam, just says: “My boys.”
I don’t cry at that.
Much.
Another night, we crash into each other in the kitchen at some unholy hour, both half-awake and desperate for water.
Liam’s hair is sticking up in six directions. He’s barefoot, wearing one of my shirts and a pair of sweats that hang off his hips in a way that shouldn’t be legal. There’s a faint milk stain on his shoulder, and half the buttons are done wrong.
“You look like a gremlin,” I tell him, filling a glass at the sink.
“Hot,” he croaks. “Say more nice things.”
I hand him the glass. Our fingers brush. His scent shifts, warming, blooming even under the fatigue.
He sips, leans against the counter, eyes closing briefly.
“Thank you,” he says. “For taking the last one. I was going to fall asleep mid-song.”
“His bedtime playlist is too long,” I say. “You’re spoiling him.”
“He deserves ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in full,” he says. “As do you. You’re welcome.”
My laugh comes out tired but real.
We stand there, shoulder to shoulder, silently, while the fridge hums and the house creaks.
Then he tilts his head toward me, eyes half-open.
“Come here,” he says softly.
I go.
It’s barely a kiss at first. A brush of lips, chapped and sleepy, a question more than anything. I answer by cupping the back of his neck, fingers threading into the mess of his hair, and kissing him again, deeper.
He makes a small sound and steps forward, pressing me back against the counter. His hands slide up under the hem of my shirt, palms warm on my sides. The contact sends a shiver through me. My breath hitches; my scent spikes, smoke and sugar rolling out around us.
His scent rises to meet it, sweet and bright, lit from within with something hungry and fond and reckless.
It’s different now than the kisses in the hospital-quiet of the apartment.
We’re both bone-tired, yes, but the fatigue makes it easier to drop whatever last defenses we had left. There’s no room for overthinking at three a.m. when you’ve both been puked on twice.
I let him set the pace. If he wants to lean in, I lean in. If he wants to press closer, I give. His mouth is soft and insistent; his hands skate up my back, pulling me closer until there’s no space left between us. My fingers curl into his shirt, dragging him in, because it isn’t like I don’t want it too.
Heat flares low and sharp. My pulse thuds in my throat. Every part of me is suddenly, acutely aware of every point of contact—his hip against mine, his thigh bracketing my leg, the way his chest moves against my own with each breath.
“Liam,” I murmur against his lips.
He pulls back just enough to look at me, pupils blown wide, cheeks flushed.
“Too much?” he asks.
The fact that he asks makes me want to kiss him harder, not less.
“Not even close,” I say. “Are you—”
