by Tami Lund
Felicia stepped into the kitchen. “You do that, and I’ll finish cleaning up,” she suggested. “It’s so hard for me to kneel next to the tub now,” she explained with a pat to her belly. “By the way, I’m getting my little girl,” she said with an impish smile.
Ben’s gaze darted from her face to her belly and back again. “Really?”
Felicia’s grin widened. “The Lightbearer healer says we are. Finn says he would know. Can you believe it?”
Ben strode across the room and embraced his mate. “Thank the Fates,” he muttered wryly. “I was afraid you would want to keep having pups until we had a girl, and I can barely keep up with the two we have.”
Felicia laughed and pushed him toward the doorway. “Go give those boys a bath. We’ll celebrate later, after they’re in bed.” She winked broadly. Ben hurried from the room.
Cecilia eyed the protruding belly. She had to be less than two months from birthing her babe. Or whelping, as shifters called it. She thought about Olivia, who was randy nearly all the time. But Olivia was only four months into her pregnancy and was hardly showing. Felicia was carrying around the equivalent of a beach ball on her belly. It struck Cecilia as…difficult, if not damn near impossible.
“You really can still, you know…?”
Felicia chuckled again and set to rinsing dishes and loading them into the dishwasher. When Cecilia noticed she grimaced every time she bent over, she insisted upon taking over the task. Then she used her magic to clean the kitchen in just a few moments.
“To answer your question, yes, we can still have sex. Shifter style is the most comfortable, which is okay because Ben always gets ridiculously overprotective at this point of the whelping, and that reconnection helps him feel more secure.”
“Is that a shifter thing, the overprotectiveness at the end of your pregnancy?”
Felicia shrugged. “I suspect it’s a mate thing. Ben hates for me to be in pain, and as you know, whelping a pup is not exactly pain-free.”
Cecilia didn’t know, not firsthand at any rate, although she supposed it was common enough knowledge that giving birth, regardless of a female’s species, was difficult and painful.
Felicia abruptly changed the subject. “What is your relationship with my brother?” she asked, a note of warning in her voice.
Cecilia wondered what Finn would think, if he knew his sister was attempting to defend his honor. “We do not have a relationship,” she admitted.
“Then why are you and the healer here?”
“I told you. We just wanted to check up on him.”
“I think it’s more than that.”
“You can think whatever you want,” Cecilia retorted. She didn’t like the line of questioning, nor the way Felicia was suddenly sizing her up, as if she was trying to decide if she approved. Cecilia had done nothing wrong. Why was it a bad thing for her to drive six hundred miles to ensure that Finn was alive and well?
* * * *
Felicia’s frostiness carried over well into the evening. After their baths, Ben ushered the boys into his bedroom and read them bedtime stories, while Felicia, Dane, Finn, and Cecilia retired to the living room. Finn offered Dane a beer and poured a glass of wine without Cecilia asking, and then returned to the living room juggling two beers, the glass of wine, and a glass of water for Felicia.
“Sure is good to know you can cook,” he teased Cecilia as he settled onto the couch next to her.
Cecilia blushed. The blush deepened when Felicia coolly said, “It isn’t hard to make a roast when you have magic at your fingertips.”
Finn shrugged. “Come up and visit the coterie someday. When you try Carley’s cooking, you won’t knock it, I promise.”
Cecilia felt the first real bloom of hope since she’d arrived earlier that day. Finn had just implied that he intended to return to the coterie. At least she hoped that was what he was saying.
“I certainly don’t see myself traveling that far north any time soon,” Felicia said with a sniff. “And besides, if you don’t go back, there isn’t really any reason to, is there?”
Cecilia stiffened and slanted a sideways glance at Finn. He sat very still, deliberately drinking his beer and not looking at Cecilia. The silence hung in the air, thick and unrelenting as fog, until Dane abruptly stood and announced that he was rather tired and would not mind retiring to his bed.
He helped Felicia out of her chair, and she led him down the hall to one of the boys’ bedrooms. Finn stood and motioned with his head for Cecilia to follow him. He led her through the kitchen and out the back door and onto the deck. He stepped off the deck and walked across the backyard to where a swing had been hung from the branch of a massive oak tree.
“What are the sleeping arrangements?” Cecilia asked.
He held the swing steady so that she could sit, and then he sat next to her and used one foot to swing them to and fro.
“The boys are camping out on the floor in Felicia and Ben’s room. Dane’s in Austin’s room and you’re in Bryan’s.”
“What about you?” she asked, feeling disappointed that he wasn’t joining her in Bryan’s room.
“I get the couch.”
They fell silent for a short while, as Finn gently rocked the swing. After a while, Cecilia commented, “It is a great deal warmer here than it is back home.”
“We’re quite a bit south. Felicia says they barely have a real winter.”
Cecilia blurted her question without pausing to think. “You’re thinking about staying, aren’t you?”
* * * *
Finn contemplated his answer. “My family is here,” he said after a long pause.
Cecilia looked crestfallen. He found that fascinating. Was she really concerned?
“You want me to go back?” he asked.
She toyed with the tiny pearl buttons that ran the length of her cardigan sweater.
When she didn’t answer, he asked, “Cecilia, what’s going on? Is something wrong back at the coterie?” He’d talked to Tanner a few hours ago, and Tanner hadn’t indicated anything at all was wrong.
“No.” She shook her head.
“Then why are you so damn nervous? And why the hell are you here?”
“I don’t want you to stay,” she admitted. She looked up at him with her big blue eyes, blinking rapidly, as if she was confused by her own words. “Here, I mean,” she added.
He wanted to kiss her. He shouldn’t be surprised by that thought, considering what happened in the bathroom a few hours ago. The feeling had been so mind-blowing that it had been better than sex with any other woman, and that was saying something, considering all he’d gotten out of the experience was a hell of a case of blue balls.
While the urge to kiss her wasn’t necessarily surprising, the strength of the urge was. It was almost as if he wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to take his next breath, if he didn’t lean forward right then and—
“Hey, come inside and play cards with us,” his brother-in-law called from the deck. “Felicia says you were a hell of a card shark when you were younger, Finn. Let’s see what you’re made of.”
Cecilia’s sigh was so deep, so heartfelt, Finn couldn’t help but laugh as he pushed away from the swing and pulled her with him. “Relax, Cici,” he teased. “You aren’t going to get rid of me that easily.”
Chapter 10
“Uncle Finn, Uncle Finn! Grammy and Pappy are here! Grammy and Pappy are here!”
Finn reluctantly opened one eye in time to react when three-year-old Bryan took a flying leap and would have landed on his very depressed and blue balls, had Finn not lifted his leg fast enough. Bryan bounced off Finn’s thigh, landed on the floor, and then scrambled to his feet again.
“Wait, did you say Grammy and Pappy? As in, my mom and dad?”
“Yep,” Bryan said matter-of-factly. “Daddy’s mom and dad are called Mamaw and Papaw.”
“Shit.”
“Mommy!” Bryan shrieked at the top of his lungs. “Uncle Finn just s
aid a bad word!”
“Fates, Bryan, you’re killing me,” Finn muttered as he grabbed his head and struggled into a seated position on the couch.
He, Cecilia, Felicia, and Ben had played cards until far, far too late last night, and Finn had drunk far, far too many beers. He’d had to, because if he hadn’t been so drunk, he sure as hell would have crawled into bed with Cecilia, despite the fact that Bryan’s bed was a twin and was barely large enough for the petite Lightbearer. It wouldn’t have mattered to Finn, since he’d had no intention of sleeping anyway, and the activities he wanted to do involved two people getting as physically close as two people could get. A twin bed would have been just perfect.
Now he regretted his actions on two counts. One, because he hadn’t slept with Cecilia last night, and two, because his head felt like someone was banging on it with a hammer.
Crazy how the tables had turned, compared to a few weeks ago. Hell, a week ago Finn had felt as though he could barely stand the Lightbearer, even though he had acknowledged his sexual attraction to her almost from the start.
But all those traits he’d thought annoyed the hell out of him were suddenly endearing. Endearing? His brain really was fucked-up.
He sat up and put his head in his hands. “Are your parents up?” he asked his excited nephew.
“I dunno. Austin went to tell them. I got to tell you. Next I’m going to go wake up the Lightbearers. Do they glow when they wake up? It’s pretty funny how the girl one glows whenever she touches you.”
Finn’s head shot up, and then he groaned as the pain of his hangover hit him. He held his head with one hand and opened one eye to give Bryan a curious look. “She glows when she touches me?” Finn couldn’t say he’d really noticed. To him, Cecilia seemed like she glowed all the time, if ever so faintly. He thought it was a Lightbearer thing. They all glowed, to some extent.
Bryan nodded solemnly. “It gets real bright,” he explained, lifting his hands as if he were forming an O, which Finn assumed was meant to emulate the sun. “Then it dims again when she stops touching you.”
Huh. That was a little piece of information that Finn would have to store in the back of his brain to analyze at a later date. He was certain that Cecilia was attracted to him on some base level—considering that every time he managed to get within kissing distance she attacked him like a dog in heat—but the fact that his touch caused her Lightbearer magic to brighten was curious on a whole different level. Mutual sexual attraction was one thing. According to Tanner, though, the glow was the result of an emotional connection, not a physical one.
The front door burst open, and his parents stepped into the house on a chorus of, “Hello! Anybody awake yet? We brought doughnuts!”
As fast as hungry young shifters, Austin and Bryan were at the door, eagerly greeting their grandparents and clamoring for the box of donuts their grandfather held over their heads.
“How come there are two trucks outside with Michigan plates on the bumper?” his mother wanted to know. She stood over him, hands on hips, practically glaring at him as if he’d done something wrong.
Finn’s parents were typical shifters of their generation: they’d grown up in the same pack, played together as children, and started dating while they were still in high school. They mated shortly after graduation, and Vera whelped Finn before her twenty-fifth birthday. Reid came along a year and a half later, and Felicia two years after that. Vera stayed home and raised her pups, while George worked on a ranch that was located near to the pack. They raised their children to be shifters, making sure they were schooled by a pack-run school instead of the local human public schools.
Finn was the first on both sides of the family to go to college. He recalled fearing that Quentin would deny him the privilege at the end of his senior year in high school, even though he had earned a full-ride academic scholarship, and the college was interested in him trying out for the football team, despite his never having played for a local high school. Finn knew, because they were first and foremost loyal to the pack, that his parents would stand behind whatever decision Quentin made.
Luck had been on his side, because Quentin had decided allowing Finn to go off to college really wouldn’t be a bad thing, because maybe, just maybe, he’d catch sight or whiff of a Lightbearer while he was out exploring the human world. He didn’t, of course, and after he graduated, he returned to the pack and took his place as a tracker, quickly moving up the ranks to lead tracker, and storing away his experience out in the human world, but not really regretting or pining for it. It had been nothing more than that: an experience.
His parents had been thrilled when he returned to the pack. Shortly thereafter, Felicia had met Ben during a hiking trip she’d taken with a small group of fellow pack mates. While Quentin had tended to keep his pack physically close, other pack masters were not quite the dictator he was, and Ben and a few buddies had taken a trip out West to do some hiking of their own.
Felicia had returned from the trip with the tale of how she’d rescued Ben after he’d nearly broken his neck trying to impress her, and oh-by-the-way they’d mated and wasn’t everyone happy for her?
The mating wouldn’t be official, though, until both pack masters gave their approval, and while no one was concerned over Ben’s pack master’s decision, everyone held their breath over what Quentin Lyons would decide to do.
Finn couldn’t believe he’d actually told Cecilia that story. It had been one of the most painful experiences of his life—both physically and emotionally. His family had been tightly knit at the time, and letting his sister move away to Tennessee had been difficult, despite the fact that he’d stepped up and allowed himself to be pummeled nearly to death just to let her do it.
Finn’s parents weren’t reverent in their following of Quentin and his ideals, but he knew them well enough to know that they’d accepted Quentin’s decisions as law because he was their pack master, and that’s what one was supposed to do. He was, therefore, leery of how they would react to meeting Cecilia and Dane for the first time.
“We inherited a couple of extra guests yesterday,” he muttered as he groaned and pushed himself to his feet.
“You look like hell,” his mother stated. “What in the world did you all do last night?”
Not what he wanted to do, that was for damn sure.
“Played cards. Drank too much beer. Excuse me, I need to use the bathroom.” Finn dragged himself across the room and down the hall. Cecilia stepped out of the bathroom just as he reached for the door handle.
“Oh,” she said as her cheeks reddened while she took a startled step backward.
If he were in a better state of mind, Finn would probably find it amusing that he could instantly scent her arousal. Unfortunately, at the moment, all it did was irritate him because there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
“I need to piss,” he muttered as he stepped around her. He grabbed her arm just as she was about to head out into the living room. “Hang on. Don’t go out there yet. Go back to the bedroom and wait for me to get out of here. I just need a minute.” He shoved the door closed and willed his erection to deflate so that he could piss in the toilet instead of at the ceiling.
After he made quick work of brushing his teeth and splashing cold water onto his face, Finn hurried from the bathroom, but it was too late. His parents had already learned that there were Lightbearers in the house.
Dane was busy trying to appease them, working to convince them that their daughter hadn’t done anything wrong by allowing him and Cecilia into her home. Cecilia stood to the side, glaring at his parents in much the same way she looked at her own parents. She turned her head when Finn reached the end of the hall.
“Nice parents,” she commented coolly.
“Pretty sure I said the same thing about yours,” Finn responded.
“They believe Quentin’s propaganda?”
“I don’t know, actually. They never talked about it. They never claimed to support him
or said they disagreed with him. My siblings and I all formed our own opinions, for the most part. Although I had a little help from my own Pappy—er, grandfather—when I was probably about Austin’s age. He was pretty damn vocal about his disapproval of the pack master teaching all of us younglings to believe in his obsession.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“It was,” Finn confirmed. “Quentin killed him when I was eight.”
“I’m sorry.” He could feel her empathy.
He pushed it away and shrugged, tried to pretend indifference. He did not need the Lightbearer to feel sorry for him because of something that happened more than half his lifetime ago. “Come on. Let’s meet the parents.”
They didn’t react with as much shock as Felicia had, and neither did they shift into the form of large animals and try to attack Cecilia and Dane. Instead, they were coolly polite as they struggled with their shock over having discovered two Lightbearers had spent the night in the same home with their daughter, their grandchildren, and one of their sons.
“You aren’t the one Tanner stole from the pack master,” Finn’s mother remarked.
“No,” Cecilia replied with a swift glance at Finn.
“That’s Olivia,” he explained. “She’s the daughter of the king of the Lightbearers. She and Tanner are mated now. Expecting their first pup, actually.”
“Oh my,” his mother said faintly. “A Lightbearer, whelping a pup?”
His father was fascinated on a scientific level. “What will it be?” he mused. “A shape-shifting Lightbearer?”
“No one knows,” Dane interjected. “But Olivia is being watched by the top healer in the coterie. Alexa is practically a miracle worker. She will ensure Olivia births her babe—er, pup—without issue.” Based on his tone, Finn didn’t think Dane quite believed his own words, but he didn’t think anyone else noticed.
The fact was, no one knew what to expect. A Lightbearer and shifter had never mated before, let alone procreated. Not ever in the history of magic, according to Finn’s father.