by Odessa Lynne
“I’ve been considering my options.”
“Considering your options?” Gerald asked flatly. “My mama’s always said you have to grab life like a lemon and squeeze it for every last drop of sunshine you can get out of it. I’m your sunshine, Tanis. This shit is real. Mama didn’t name me fucking Gerald Sunshine Lane for nothing. Your mom was a Diviner, right? Is she alive? What would she say?”
Tanis spoke in a low, deep voice, “She would tell me the universe is vast and the seas are cold but that the wind can carry me anywhere I need to go, if only I will learn to fly.”
“Shit. Ignore her. She obviously doesn’t know what she’s talking about if she speaks in riddles to her own kid.”
Tanis’s eyebrows rose.
Gerald waved his hand, a jerky motion that fit how he felt—brittle as untempered glass. “I’m not ready to give you up, big guy. You’re just going to have to face that. If you go and die and you break my heart, that’s going to make you the shittiest true mate anybody ever had.” He nailed Tanis with his most fierce gaze. “That the legacy you want to leave behind?”
But Tanis answered with a question of his own, “Does your mama always talk in riddles?”
Gerald blinked a few times, then said, “That’s funny. Ha, ha.”
But it was damned ironic, because Tanis actually had a point. To the wolves, without the context of decades and centuries of Earth’s history and culture, some of the shit his mama and Nana said wouldn’t make any sense at all.
Gerald slowed himself down. He had to make Tanis understand.
“I lost my daddy three years before you guys showed up,” he said. “He had a reputation for pissing people off with the truth. He didn’t speak in riddles or metaphors. He just told it like it was. Despite that, a hell of a lot of people still miss him, but only a few miss him the way I do. Don’t you do that to me, Tanis. Grief’s one of those things that leaves holes in you that never fill up. They’re just fucking holes.”
Tanis knelt on the floor and took Gerald’s hands, then leaned forward and rested his head in Gerald’s lap. “My obligations for your care run deep.”
“I know you said you couldn’t love me, not the way I want, but I love you, and I don’t want you to die. Do your duty as my mate and take care of me the way a mate should, you asshole.”
Tanis raised his head, his eyes glowing red-gold and bright. “I care deeply for you. Why do you say I don’t love you?”
Gerald squeezed Tanis’s fingers. “You told me. You made it very clear.”
A frown pinched Tanis’s eyebrows. “You’re mistaken. I’ve never told you I didn’t care for you. I’ve tried to show you how precious you are to me. I’ve tried to spare you any hurt, here.” Tanis pulled one hand free of Gerald’s grip and pressed his warm palm over Gerald’s heart. “I’ve offered to share myself with a man I would never choose freely as a mate. I’ve—”
“You said it,” Gerald interrupted. “I heard you. You told me you could never give me what I want.”
Tanis’s eyes searched Gerald’s.
Gerald stomach flipped in anticipation of a feeling it was too risky to put a name to. If he did, and he turned out to be wrong, it would be like a knife in the gut.
“I told you I couldn’t give you your freedom, human. I said nothing about love.”
“My freedom?”
“The thing you most want. You’re my true mate. I’ll never let you go, for as long as the universe gifts me with life. I’m your life and you are mine.”
“Fuck.” Then, raking his hand down his face and staring at Tanis, “Fuck.” He shook his head. “Mama always said I don’t know how to listen. I can’t believe she was right. Fuck!”
“Words with no meaning,” Tanis said. “But a great deal of feeling.”
“I’ve been worrying this shit to death and it was a misunderstanding. A goddamn, fucking, bullshit misunderstanding.”
“I’ll call you by an affectionate name, the way your people do, so there’ll be no more misunderstandings. My sunshine.”
Gerald groaned a loud exhale. “Sunny. Sunny’ll be just fine.”
Tanis’s hand at his neck brought their gazes back together. “You are my sunshine, Sunny. You are my life.”
“Then give it to me. Give me another fucking fifty years. Or twenty. Or whatever you’ve got.” His voice choked up and he dropped his forehead to press against Tanis’s. “I need them. I’ll give up the job. I was going to anyway. You’ll be my family and it won’t be any different. I won’t tell James a damn thing he doesn’t absolutely need to know about you. Just—”
“Hush,” Tanis said softly, pulling Gerald close.
Gerald slid off the edge of the bed and his knees thudded to the soft carpet that stretched beneath the bed.
“Hush,” Tanis repeated. “I won’t let you go. I only wanted to care for you and give you the freedom you want. I believed Leif could offer that to you, once I had returned to the vastness of the universe. That was why I didn’t rescind my choice.”
“I don’t want it. Freedom is the right to choose. I’m choosing you.” Gerald sniffed. “Leif’s great, don’t get me wrong. Fantastic, really. But he isn’t you. You could break me, big guy. And what would I do then?”
Tanis buried his nose in tight to Gerald’s throat, where his hot, moist breath raised goose bumps on Gerald’s skin. “I won’t break you. I promise. I only want to care for you.”
Gerald wrapped one arm around Tanis’s neck. “You want to fuck me too. You can’t leave that out. We’ll fuck and love and spend the next fifty, sixty years being pricks to each other. I could be happy for the rest of my life doing that.” Gerald palmed Tanis’s dick. “The piece of meat you’ve got could keep anybody happy.”
“You’re flirting again, aren’t you?”
“I don’t flirt. I just tell the truth.”
Tanis brought Gerald in for another kiss.
Later, in bed, for no reason Gerald would ever remember, Leif’s words about the true alpha came to him and he rolled over, putting his hand on Tanis’s slowly rising and falling chest.
Tanis quieted, then gripped Gerald’s wrist before his hand could travel too far beneath the covers to fondle that big dick Gerald couldn’t seem to keep his hands off of.
“Sleep, mate. The morning will be long with the preparations to return to the den. Your responsibilities as my mate will make it difficult for you to find time to rest.”
“Oh? Sorry. I was just thinking about something Leif said. It was weird.”
Tanis sighed and rolled to face Gerald, the dark creating shadows across his face that the pale moonlight couldn’t wash away. “Yes?”
“Devon and me were just about drunk on a bottle of whiskey last year—well, he was more drunk that I was, the job, you know, but anyway, he told me in confidence that Brendan’s been hinting around about being psychic or something, like he’s afraid what people will say if he comes right out and claims it. It sounded like a joke at the time. But maybe it wasn’t.”
Silence followed, broken only by the shuffle of Gerald’s leg under the covers and their quiet breathing.
Another moment passed, and then another, before Tanis said, “Interpretation of the prophecy is a vast and complicated process.”
“Oh come on. Admit that it’s a possibility.”
“He is human.”
“So? Psychic phenomena belong only to you guys? What kind of arrogance is that? Maybe he’s right. Maybe he’s psychic. Maybe he’s going to divine the fate of us all.”
“Maybe you need to go back to sleep before I succumb to your human scent and mate you again.”
“Heat season’s over, big guy.”
Tanis rolled on top of Gerald.
Gerald grasped Tanis’s face in his hands. “If I tell you to kiss my ass, you going to think I’m flirting?”
“If a fesiniteisa and a fesiniteira breed, why do they have no children?”
Gerald stared through the shadows at Tanis’s wicke
dly glowing eyes. “What the fuck.”
“That was a riddle.”
Gerald started laughing and he continued to laugh until Tanis pushed him over onto his belly and held him down and proved one more time that getting caught spying on the wolves was the best damn thing that had ever happened to him.
Sunny was home and it was a damn fine place to be.
* * *
Here ends Gerald’s Lot.
If you’d like to see more stories set in my Wolves’ Heat universe, let me know. I’m always open to revisiting a world! [email protected].
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Also by Odessa Lynne
NEW CANTON REPUBLIC
Of Magic and Mating
Of Mating and Monsters
Of Humans and Mates
Of Mates and Barters
Of Monsters and Love
Of Love and Zembores*
WOLVES’ HEAT
Ian’s Choice
Devon’s Gamble
Brendan’s Fate
Matthew’s Chance
Salvadore’s Luck
Cam’s Fortune
Gerald’s Lot
HEND & YURT
The King’s Guard
The Queen’s Lover
The King’s Gambit
The King’s Deception*
R’H’ANI CHRONICLES
One for Himself
His One and Only
Everything He Wants
All He Needs
One of Many
His Only One
One to Love
His to Keep
His to Take
His Only Weakness
One to Tame*
LOVE IS
Gay for Alex
Taken with Tony*
*Forthcoming
For the most up to date list of books available from Odessa Lynne, visit odessalynne.com/books.
About Odessa Lynne
Odessa Lynne writes male/male romance. After years of reading romance, fantasy, and science fiction novels, Odessa discovered she liked romance in her fantasy, sex in her science fiction, and love between her heroes best of all, and that’s exactly what she puts in all her own stories now, for readers who enjoy the same. Odessa lives in the southeastern United States.
Visit odessalynne.com for information about current and upcoming releases or to sign up to her new releases email list. You can contact her by email at [email protected].