Bear With Me
Page 7
August looked at me and smiled. “That’s good,” August whispered. “Because, somehow, I don’t think you have a choice in the matter. This…whatever this is between us, it’s beyond us. We’re together. We’re mates. And…” He looked into my eyes longingly.
“And?”
“And I love you too. Have since the first time I saw you in that elevator. And, I think, I always will.”
August smiled at me, his handsome features seeming to glow as he spoke.
Looking at him, feeling his naked warmth against my bruised and battered body, I couldn’t help but smile back.
EPILOGUE
“I was thinking something regal. Something defined,” I told Rhys as I sat there, rocking gently in the chair as the sounds of chaotic, but beautiful Mumbai filled the air.
Rhys turned to me, his unfading smile still plastered to his face. It had been almost six months since we’d left Black Canyon, and my body certainly showed it. Not long after we’d left the region and Rhys had recovered from his injuries, we’d discovered that - somehow - I was pregnant. The first sign, I had realized, had been the episodes of intense nausea I had experienced just prior to the mating ceremony. I hadn’t caught a bug, and it wasn’t nervousness. It was morning sickness. The next sign, and the most obvious, was my rapidly growing abdomen. The now-huge roll of my stomach stood in stark contrast to my still-muscular body, but something about having his cubs inside my body managed to turn Rhys on in ways that I couldn’t even begin to understand.
We’d left the States, returning to Rhys’s ancestral home in search of answers. Turns out, tigers can only impregnate their mates. Or, rather, they absolutely 100% impregnate their mates, regardless of gender. There had been a few cases of it before, we’d found out, but none had been interspecies. For that, at least, we were a first.
We’d be first and second. Twins and all that.
“Why regal?” Rhys asked me, drawing me back from my thoughts.
I shrugged at him. “They are descended from royal tigers after all,” I offered, noting Rhys’s Bengal lineage.
“Yeah, but they’re also descended from brutish over-grown beavers,” he teased, pecking me on the cheek as he did.
I laughed at him then gazed into his eyes. My bear offered a gentle roar in return to a purr from his tiger, and I couldn’t help but smile once again. Somehow, some way, I’d managed to find myself mated to the single most handsome and compelling man alive. A man who, despite six months of trying, had never failed to absolutely rock my world in and out of bed.
Fate had dealt me a strange hand, one that had taken a long time to fully understand and accept, but I couldn’t be happier. I’d been exposed to a world far more magical and enchanting than the one every other bear I’d ever known had been privy too, and soon, I’d be able to share that world with two miracle-cubs. We still weren’t sure whether they’d be tigers or bears, or perhaps one of each, but we had no doubt that they’d be shifters.
Not that it mattered, anyway. With Rhys at my side, loving me and supporting me every step of the way, the cubs would never want or hurt for anything. They would be loved, infinitely and unconditionally.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: TJ CROSS
Twenty-something TJ Cross has lived his whole life in the Pacific Northwest, where he began his writing career as a cub reporter writing about the environment. Although today he might be an environmental scientist by day and the drummer in an up-and-coming indie rock band…he now triple-moonlights as an author in the one genre that’s fascinated him all his life: gay romance. He lives in Portland with his partner Darren and their huskies Axle and Bowie.