by Elsa Jade
When she’d almost fainted, he carried her so easily. She’d never quite shed the baby weight, her hips wider, her breasts still bigger even after Aster had weaned himself when he discovered the delights of blueberries by the pint, but Mac had lifted her into his arms like she was a featherweight lichen tuft, bearing her as gently as she’d carried Aster. And that was after she’d so recently stabbed him! Though Mac charging to her door, huffing and snorting, had angered her, maybe he had a right to be shocked.
God knew, she’d been shocked herself to find out she was having a child. That terrified part of her that she’d had to wall off, knowing she’d just made her life a thousand times harder by becoming a single mother, softened in the night air, facing the father of her child.
“I didn’t want to make this your problem, Mac,” she murmured. “It was just a crazy chance. When I stopped through here last time, I was on birth control to regulate my cycle, and you and I only did it the once…”
“More than once,” he reminded her. “And half my problem.” Just the slightest bit, his lips quirked. “But who’s counting? I thought you were the brainy accountant.”
“Well, it all worked out greater than”—she lifted one eyebrow to make sure he appreciated her pun—“I could’ve hoped.”
He grunted, not quite a laugh, then leaned back against the porch rail. “This is pretty hard for me to wrap my head around. We—shifters—don’t have a lot of offspring. Especially not outside our own kind. The change in our blood makes us incompatible with normal people.”
To her surprise, she bristled at the offhand way he said “normal”. Which was ridiculous. Normal was all she’d ever wanted. Almost against her will, she asked, “Do normal people ever become your kind?”
“That’s even more rare than shifter babies. And good thing too, since it’d be harder to keep our secrets if there were a bunch of everyday suburban kids randomly turning into wolves and bears and thunderbirds.”
“At least I didn’t boink a dragon,” she mused.
He shook his head. “You know about them too? Geez, I sure know how to pick the troublesome ones.”
She wanted to correct him—she had picked him—but technically, he had seen her first when he pulled up his truck behind her on the road to Angels Rest. A little pang went through her at the awareness that he hadn’t intended anything more to come of their joining than she had. “I would never betray your secrets or your people,” she said softly. “I know the risks.”
Bracing his hands on either side of him, he stared down at his boots. “Yeah. I’ll wear a condom next time.”
Next time. She frowned.
Before she could run down the idea of a next time, he angled his head to gaze at her. “Tell me about it. What happened after you left here?”
Why did that even matter? There wasn’t going to be a next time or ever again for them.
For some reason, her anger returned. Unfairly, she knew. It wasn’t his fault he hadn’t been there when she’d been burning through graph paper making lists of how her life was going to change—again. Angels Rest was so small she could’ve found him again in a heartbeat if she’d chosen. Heck, she’d proven that just last night, hadn’t she? But her unjustified antagonism added thorns to her response. He wanted to know? So she’d tell him.
“I got to Manhattan and it was great. My boss was wonderful, the work really interesting and challenging. And the city nightlife…” She spread her fingers, jazz-hands style, to demonstrate just how un-Angels Rest it was. “And then I had a couple weeks of throwing up in the morning.” She wrapped her arms over her belly. “But it was the end of flu season, so I didn’t get it checked out. And by the time I realized I didn’t have the flu, it was too late to do anything else.”
He looked at her. “Do anything?”
She met his gaze. “I was new to my job, with school debt to pay off. And nobody around to help. I talked to my doctor about an abortion, but she said I was too far along. Even though it hadn’t been that long since you and I…” The memories of that day and the lonely months after swept over her, and she couldn’t hold his stare.
“Shifter pregnancies follow their own schedules, depending on the genetic mix. At least you didn’t boink an elephant-shifter. Their gestation is like a year and a half.”
That brought her gaze up with a startled laugh.
All glimmer of bear amber in his eyes was hidden, and only the dark shine—so like Aster’s—returned her attention. “It must’ve been hard for you, being alone.”
She swallowed. “I wasn’t, not for long. When my sisters found out, they dropped everything to come to New York. Rita had all these potions…uh, remedies for morning sickness and swollen ankles and whatnot. Gin set me up for freelancing when I was let go at work.”
Mac growled under his breath. “They fired you for being pregnant?”
“They suggested maybe another career would be ‘a better fit’ considering I wasn’t fitting in my pencil skirts anymore.” She shrugged easily, something she hadn’t been able to do back then. “I knew it was going to be hard, whatever I chose, so Gin finding me a way to stay home with the baby was actually brilliant.”
“If all black can be called brilliant,” he muttered.
She chuckled at the note of bewilderment in his assessment. But she sobered just as quick. “Yeah, Gin isn’t much for the bright lights big city. And neither is Rita. Now that Aster is getting older, I know they need to start getting back to their own lives.” Her throat tightened, as if her sisters were walking out the door right this second.
“Have you thought about moving someplace else, maybe someplace more open, where a kid can run around and play freely?”
“Kids can play in a city.” She raised her eyebrows. “Or do you mean Angels Rest?” Before he could answer, she said, “I need high-speed internet and good lattes to do my work, so no, I’ve never considered moving here.”
But she frowned to herself. When Aunt Tilda needed someone to watch the house while her circle journeyed, Rita had jumped at the chance. And Gin had pointed out she needed a place to stay while she finished her last stages of initiation into the circle.
Brandy swallowed hard. She wasn’t making other people’s choices; she was just living her own life. But maybe her sisters hadn’t so much walked out as they simply weren’t coming back to Manhattan with her after stealing Mac’s blood.
“Can I see him?”
The question nailed her out of nowhere, even though Mac hadn’t moved from his stance at the end of the porch, and she had to hold back a startled grunt. “He’s sleeping now.”
“I won’t wake him.”
She chewed her lip. “Why?”
“Because I know mamas punch people who wake their sleeping kids.”
Maybe she needed a glint of murderous bear in her own eyes. “Why do you want to see Aster?”
He straightened. “I can come back tomorrow morning if that’s better—”
“No.” It was one thing for Mac to see her son, but did she want Aster seeing his father now that Mac knew who he was? “You can come up, but…” She tried to think of something to wrench back control of the situation. “You have to take off your boots.”
He gave her a sidelong eye roll that said she was being difficult—as if she needed the reminder!—and obligingly kicked off the steel-toed boats. Oh geez, and she had eighteen years of paying for ever-expanding boy shoes…
“Don’t wake up my sisters either,” she hissed as she eased open the door. She definitely didn’t want to explain this intrusion to them.
“I’m not sure why you think I’m so loud and bumbling.”
“You are a bear.” As if he needed the reminder.
Wondering if she was making the second biggest mistake of her life, she let him inside.
Chapter 9
Mac padded after Brandy through the hallway and up the narrow stairs of the old Victorian. And yeah, he had his gaze on her butt the whole way. It was one thing to see the c
hanges that motherhood had made to the nubile, coed body that had writhed beneath him three years ago, and something else entirely to know that he had made those changes.
He had a child. He had a son.
He gulped, and the sound was louder than his footsteps—because he hadn’t been lying about how quietly a bear could move. As long as no one heard the uproar in his head, anyway.
He had a son. He had a child.
At the top of the stairs, Brandy gestured to two matching doorways at one end of the hall. She pressed one fingertip over her lips in a shushing gesture. Must be her sisters’ bedrooms.
She turned the other direction and tiptoed toward the closed door. It opened soundlessly at her touch. God, his heart was pounding so hard it would be embarrassing if anyone—if she—put that fingertip to his racing pulse. She nudged the door wider and beckoned him forward.
He peered through the doorway and was oddly reminded of descending into Thor’s den. Maybe it was just the dim lighting. Maybe his nervousness. He angled his head toward the small bed with the upright slats.
Nose twitching, he started to take another step within. But Brandy hadn’t ceded the space in the doorway entirely, and they bumped shoulders. She jostled him, not gently. “Far enough,” she grumbled.
“You said I could see him,” he reminded her. “And I can’t see anything in that cage.”
“Crib,” she countered testily.
He put one hand on her shoulder and was surprised to feel the tension thrumming there. “I’m not going to hurt the boy, Brandy,” he chided. “I’m not going to steal him away from you.”
When she didn’t answer, he flexed his fingers a little, half reassurance, half settling her into place. And he stepped forward.
The boy was lying flat on his back, limbs thrown out in all directions and his face turned away. Under the crisp smells of soap and toothpaste lingered a hint a peanut butter and honey, Mac’s favorites.
He gazed down at the sleeping child, wondering at the strange shift of emotions within him. He hadn’t felt this uncertain, this unbalanced since the rite of passage as a teenager where he claimed his bear in front of his proud family and the rest of the small clan—and realized he was now responsible for the security and secrets of all shifters. It was like being stuck mid-shift: partially upright, partially furred, all too vulnerable.
Was this even half of what Brandy had felt when she realized she was pregnant? And that would’ve been when the babe was still inside her, not even yet its own being. How much more terrifying when her secret was out, when she held that new life in her arms and realized she was no longer alone, and she had this small, tender creature in her care, now and forever.
A deep shudder traced down his spine, prelude to a change, and his jaw ached with teeth that threatened to erupt, to guard against all comers.
Though he hadn’t moved after putting his hand on the crib rail, hadn’t made a sound, Aster whuffled softly in his sleep and turned his head to face Mac.
Brandy made a soft warning sound of her own, almost a growl, and moved forward to pry Mac from his viewpoint. But he held tight to the rail, still looking.
The boy was husky, cheeks more like a chipmunk than a bear. But the bony points of his wrists and his knees, exposed by the one-piece pajamas, hinted at a bigger creature waiting to emerge.
“He’ll be big,” Mac murmured.
“Ninety-seventh percentile now.” Brandy’s tone wavered between maternal fretting and pride.
Mac smiled at her. “You would know the numbers.”
When she glanced at him, her cinnamon-brown eyes darkened to black coffee in the dim room, he wanted to kick himself. Of course she knew the numbers. Not only was she a fancy accountant, she was a single mom. She had to know the numbers, all of them, all the time. She might have her two sisters, but still, she was on her own.
Looking back at Aster, Mac tightened his grip on the top bar of the crib. Aster’s wild tufts of dark hair looked so soft, and his chubby cheeks even softer. If it wouldn’t have risked Brandy’s rage, Mac suspected he would’ve given the boy a little poke to make him open his eyes.
So they might see each other.
Again, he made no betraying movement or noise, but Brandy rumbled in her throat, deeper this time, a clear threat. “You’ve seen him now,” she said, her tone brooking no backtalk.
And technically, she was right, he had seen the boy.
So why was it so hard to peel his fingers from the railing to back away?
Once he was clear of the crib, Brandy wasted no time hustling him out the door. He could’ve protested, stood his ground, muscled her aside.
Maybe.
But as he turned to take one step into the upper landing hallway, he found her sisters standing in their two doorways, arms crossed over their chests in identical poses of disapproval.
No way could any bear take the three Wick sisters.
“Everything okay?” Rita’s gaze flicked to Aster’s doorway as Brandy quietly slipped the latch closed.
“He’s fine,” Brandy said. “Aster’s fine.”
“How’s Mac?” Gin’s sly little grin wasn’t very friendly.
“He’s standing right here,” he noted.
Only then did she bring her glance around to him. “And?”
There were undertones here he knew he was missing, and he was at a tactical disadvantage. When an unmovable obstacle like a boulder buried deep needed to come out, only an irresistible force could do the work.
“I just wanted to make sure everyone was recovered from this afternoon,” he said politely. “I guess I can see that everything’s under control.”
Gin made a sort of choked sound under her breath, but when he glanced back at her sharply, her gaze was innocent.
He backed toward the stairs slowly, the sisters advancing on him with each step he retreated. Good thing he was a beast and knew not to turn tail and run, or he suspected they’d have been on him and torn him in pieces before he could yell not all men.
They followed him down the stairs, although Rita and Gin stopped on the last step, to watch Brandy harry him toward the front door.
Aware of their eavesdropping ears, he said only, “Goodnight,” when she opened the door.
“Goodbye, Mac,” she murmured. “Again.”
As the door shut softly in his face and the porch light went off, he contemplated her response. Was it still goodbye if they kept seeing each other again?
***
He left the rental house he shared with his cousins before dawn the next morning, after getting no sleep, his mind buzzing like a hive of honeybees inside a paper nest of wasps inside a power transformer box inside a particle accelerator. Did particle accelerators buzz? He was pretty sure they must buzz. But even if they didn’t buzz, subatomic explosions were very much happening in his brain all night.
His back bedroom in the cottage—which had never struck him as particularly roomy anyway—had felt practically stifling, as if his whole body had gotten bigger, like the little boy dreaming under his mother’s watchful eye, so up he got, slapped together some sandwiches, and took off for the day’s job site.
He thought he’d have some time alone at the county park to dig and sweat and brood before his cousins and the other crews arrived, but a Sunday Landscaping work truck was already in the parking lot. Last night’s rain still dewed the pine needles, but the clarity of the morning air told him it would be hot again by midday. Shit, he hadn’t refilled his thermos.
Clenching his teeth, he angled his truck near the other and ambled over.
Blaze Domingo hopped out, a large sheet of drafting paper fluttering in his hand. “Hey, Mac. Great timing. I was just going to leave this here for you.”
“Thought you were taking some time for your family.” Though Mac did everything in his power to keep the note of indignation out of his voice—Blaze was his boss and could check up on him whenever—he knew he’d failed when the other male side-eyed him.
“I was on night-feeding duty last night, so I was up anyway,” Blaze said mildly. “But I need to be home in time for waffles.”
Mac squinted. “Isn’t your baby a little young for waffles?” What age did they need to be to eat waffles? Since Aster ate sandwiches, he could probably eat waffles too, right?
Blaze chuckled. “Annie likes waffles,” he clarified. “But we were out of whipped cream and fresh strawberries, so since I was stopping by the market anyway, you get the schematics.”
He spread the diagram on the hood of his truck and together they looked over the work. The festival grounds included a place for the food court, a sound stage, an arts and crafts display, and the obstacle course. Since Blaze had already explained the job and Mac had toured the site yesterday, everything seemed clear enough.
“Got it, boss.” Mac hesitated, then ran his finger over the lines. “Just thinking. What if we added a play zone for the littles? Maybe have a volunteer on duty to help keep watch.”
Blaze drummed his fingers on the hood thoughtfully. He was younger than Mac, but he was already a well-respected figure in town, having basically taken over the family landscaping business and expanded its reach from Flagstaff to Grand Junction to Albuquerque. When the old-timers teased him about his focus on sustainable xeriscaping and ecological design, he only smiled at them—showing hardly any of his wolf teeth—and said he had a baby now who would one day inherit the business and the planet, and he wanted to leave both better than he’d found them.
But not so long ago, Blaze had gotten himself into quite a scandal. He’d taken Annie as his mate when she—a common human who shouldn’t have known about shifters—came to town looking for a werewolf bite to protect her from an ex-boyfriend. The Mesa Diablo alpha had been furious that Blaze had brought a stranger into the guarded pack. Angels Rest had a few, rare humans turned shifter, and a few more human allies, but they lived in peace because they kept to themselves. Blaze had risked exposing the pack’s secrets, not to mention risking a girl’s life and sanity with a dangerous mating bite—ah, young love. Yet look at him now, how far he’d come, all esteemed and stuff.