Bleacke Spirit

by Lesli Richardson

  She kissed him. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

  He nodded. “Tell me the story. We’ll talk later about this. I want to know about them before they get here.”

  She hugged him. “I swear,” she promised.

  He finally hugged her back, hard, and the way his voice choked ripped at her. “Don’t you ever fucking scare me like that again.”

  She tearfully laughed. “Like you scared me by driving off a mountain?”

  He froze, but when he started laughing, she sensed the worst had passed. “Okay, to be fair, you have a valid point.” He nuzzled noses with her. “So that makes us even, right?”

  She smiled. “No, I’m always going to try to make this up to you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  December 22nd

  Dewi sat sideways behind her desk in the office, her laptop balanced on her lap and her feet propped up in another chair. Dewi, and those still left in Florida, were all flying out to Idaho tomorrow morning. She’d received a phone call that morning from Peyton that had…complicated matters.

  Nami, Malyah, Lu’ana, Da’von, and Bebe had flown out last week to Idaho, because Dewi suspected there was a secret baby shower being planned for her. Although the excuse had been that Gillian and Asia wanted to take them all, including Brianna, to a ski resort spa for a few days. Gillian, Asia, Tamsin, and Nami would enjoy the resort’s spa facilities and take care of Bebe, while the others went skiing with Lu’ana, Da’von, Brianna, Asia’s kids, and some other close pack members.

  Dewi, Ken, Badger, Beck, Duncan, Reggie—and everyone else—were flying out tomorrow to meet at the pack compound to celebrate Christmas, staying until January second, when they’d all fly home together.

  Except…

  Sigh.

  There’d been a…complication.

  Brianna and Da’von had fallen for each other—fallen hard.

  Fortunately, Nami had already decided she loved Brianna and had basically adopted her into the family by the time Gillian and Asia caught on—and caught Brianna coming out of Da’von’s room that morning.

  Then Gillian and Asia had sat the two of them down and got them to confess they were in love.

  Keep in mind that Da’von still had no clue about the “wolf stuff.”

  Malyah stumbled across the discovery while it was in progress, but Nami and Lu’ana didn’t know yet.

  Which left Peyton in a pickle, of sorts. He swore everyone to secrecy—including not telling Nami and Lu’ana—and called Dewi to tell her and put her on the phone with Brianna.

  And of course Peyton gleefully passed the pickle to Dewi to handle, since she was in Florida with Brianna’s protective brother and brother-in-law. Brianna begged Dewi to tell the men for her so she didn’t have to worry about them being upset at Da’von upon their arrival.

  But that wasn’t the only reason Dewi needed to talk to the two men this morning. Hopefully, the shock of the first bit of news she’d be dropping on them would help offset the shock of the second bit of news she’d be dropping on them.

  Goddammit, Peyton.

  When Carl appeared in the open doorway, with Mateo behind him, Dewi waved them in.

  “You wanted to see us?” Carl asked.

  “Yeah.” She pointed at the two chairs in front of her desk and turned to face the men, putting her feet on the floor. “Need to show you something Badger, Asia, and Gillian dug up.” She clicked on the file, a .pdf, and turned her laptop to show them, setting it in front of them on the desk so they could read it.

  Carl grokked its meaning first. That much she could tell from the shock that filled his expression. “Holy shit!” he whispered, making her smile.

  Mateo blinked, tears filling his eyes. “Are…are you sure?” Carl laced fingers with him and brought Mateo’s hand to his mouth, where he kissed it.

  “Yep.” Dewi smiled. “Welcome to the family, Mateo. Again. You and Brianna are Joaquin’s third cousins, for starters. Small world, huh?”

  Dewi decided to blame her pregnancy hormones for the way her eyes grew misty over Carl’s emotional smile as he leaned over and kissed Mateo on the lips. She really did like the men. She was about ready to sign off on them getting their own place, but for now had them helping Beck, Badger, and Ken with a number of things, keeping them busy and earning their keep.

  And they’d eagerly volunteered to help out around the house with chores, so they definitely were happy to be safe and free and once again with their own kind.

  People who accepted them, and didn’t give a shit they were gay.

  “What happens now?” Carl asked.

  “Well, I already talked to Peyton about that. As you know, we’re an expanded pack here. A satellite office, so to speak. I would normally say we’re good at the number of Enforcers we have locally, buuut…”

  She patted her tummy, which was starting to get a little rounder. “I’m going to be restricted to nothing but desk duty soon. If you can pass the tests that Duncan, Badger, and Beck come up with and put you both through, and the three of them agree they think you should be Enforcers, then I’ll officially add you to the team. For obvious reasons, I’d have you work as a pair. Mateo might be able to hold his own against non-shifters and full humans, but you and I both know it’s a lot more complicated than that if dealing with shifters.”

  “And Brianna?” Mateo asked.

  Dewi sighed and leaned forward, clasping her hands on the desk. “Here’s where it gets…sticky. I told her I’d break this news to you for her, because she’s kind of terrified to.”

  “Terrified?” Carl asked with a scowl. “Why?”

  “Sooo… She asked if I could tell you this now, before we all fly out there tomorrow. While she’s been in Idaho, she ended up falling for someone. Falling hard. I’d call it a mate bond, except neither of them are shifters, although she’s from a shifter line, and the guy also has a couple of shifters in his lineage. But it’s a very…complicated matter.”

  “Why?” Mateo asked. “Complicated how?”

  “Because he’s my brother-in-law, and a clueless human,” Joaquin said from the doorway.

  Dewi sighed. “Way to steal my thunder, dude. Thanks.”

  Joaquin wore an evilly playful smirk as he stepped inside. “That’s what you were going to say though, isn’t it?”

  She sighed and sat back, waving her hand at him to come in and take the other chair, which she nudged toward him with her foot so he could pull it around to the end of the desk.

  “Yeah, it is.” She looked Mateo in the eyes. “He’s Da’von, Nami and Malyah’s brother. You’ve met him. And he is a human. A clueless human. But we’re going to need to bring him in and sit him down to talk to him.” Dewi glared at Joaquin. “And why were you eavesdropping?”

  “I wasn’t. I was on my way to your office to talk to you and caught what you were saying. Hey, your door was open.”

  “Talk to me about what?”

  He playfully smirked. “Well, I was going to ask if there was something going on that I needed to know about, because I received a strange text from Malyah this morning saying she had something to tell me, that no, she wasn’t pregnant, but it’d have to wait until after she got the okay to tell me. Apparently, you just answered my question.”

  “Smartass.”

  He grinned. “Admit it. Life is less boring with me around, and you know it.”

  “That’s not exactly how I’d phrase it, buddy.” She returned her focus to Carl and Mateo. “Providing you two pass the test—or, providing Carl does, at least—we’ll get you on the payroll. But there is another catch.”

  “Another catch?” Carl asked.

  “Tamsin and Brianna have become good friends, and Tamsin needs all the friends she can get right now. Emotionally, she’s in pretty rough shape. I mean, she’s going to be giving birth in a few months, and she’s still grieving, obviously. Trevor’s men have Faegan and his men on the run, so it’s just a matter of time before she can eventually return to the UK. />
  “Gillian and Asia think it’d be good for Tamsin to stay with Brianna. They’re like sisters now. Meanwhile, I need Brianna here, in Florida, because Da’von’s in school. His next semester starts soon. We can’t have him quitting school. With Manuel Segura out of the picture, it means it’s reasonably safe again here in Florida. We’ve let it ‘slip’ that Tamsin is in Idaho and under pack protection. So we won’t tell anyone she’s not. The pack will help you get a house locally, something big enough for all five of you and a baby. Your main priority will, of course, be protecting Tamsin, and then her baby. Oh, and not killing your soon-to-be brother-in-law.”

  Mateo looked understandably stunned, but Dewi felt hope when he leaned over and hugged Joaquin. “I guess this makes us brothers-in-law, too?”

  “I suppose so,” Joaquin said. “And Beck. But I will give you the best piece of advice I was ever handed, courtesy of Beck.”

  “That is?” Mateo asked.

  Joaquin smiled. “Treat Nami like a big sister and defer to her. That is the fastest way past her walls and into her heart. Once she considers you family, she will defend you to the death. Until that happens? Just hold on and pray really, really hard.”

  “That reminds me.” Dewi smiled. “Joaquin, I do have an assignment for you, as your boss, and as head of the expanded pack council.”

  “Yessss?”

  Her grin widened, showing teeth. “Nami and Lu’ana don’t know about Da’von and Brianna yet. You get to be the one to tell them about all of this when we arrive tomorrow.”

  Joaquin threw his head back. “Nooooo!” he mournfully howled. He finally lifted his head and glared at her. “I thought you liked me.”

  “I do like you.”

  “You sadistic bitch.”

  “And your point is?”

  He sighed melodramatically. “She’s going to want to neuter me. I mean, worse than she already does. I’ll need Malyah to protect me. Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

  “And, again, your point is?”

  “Dewi, you’re fucking killing me.” Joaquin looked at Mateo and Carl. “You sure you want to belong to this pack?” he joked.

  Carl smiled and slung his arm around Mateo’s shoulders. “You have no idea how badly we want to belong to this pack.”

  * * * *

  Later that evening, after dinner, Dewi was in the office and working through some e-mails when Badger walked in and gently closed the door behind him.

  In his hand, he held a tablet.

  Immediately on alert, she sat up and closed her laptop. “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t bother saying anything. He opened a page on his tablet and handed it over.

  It was a genealogy site, a results page.

  “What am I looking at?” None of the names looked familiar.

  “A dead end,” he said.

  “What?”

  He leaned in and tapped on the browser menu bar to open another tab for the same site.

  That name being displayed she knew intimately well: Heathcliff McKenzie Ethelbert.

  Her husband and mate.

  Badger tapped Ken’s name, and links to two other people appeared--his mother and father.

  Lyssa Solomon McKenzie, and Bartholomew Michael Ethelbert.

  Dewi wasn’t sure where Badger was going with this, but she sensed from his mood that it wasn’t…good. Not bad, maybe, but definitely not good.

  When Badger tapped Bartholomew’s name, a family tree appeared, sprawling back through the ages, all the way into the 1700s in New England, and even beyond.

  “Any wolves?”

  “Still workin’ on that. This is what I needed to show ye.” He swiped back to Ken’s parents and then tapped on Lyssa’s name.

  Nothing returned beyond her mother and father, whose names both bore asterisks next to their names.

  “Wait…what?”

  Badger sat back with a grim expression. “I am positive Ken’s mother was adopted. She was born before all those kinds of records were automatically put on a computer. The courthouse where the adoption apparently took place was in West Virginia, an’ destroyed by a fire years before anythin’ from that time was digitized. The records depository was completely gutted.”

  “But…Ken never mentioned his mother was adopted. He told me she was a third-generation native Floridian. She was born up there while her parents were on a visit to see family.”

  “Then he doesn’t know. She might not have known. From what I can see, her parents both had family in an’ around the region. Her mother an’ maternal grandmother were both born in Florida, yes.”

  “Then how’d you discover she’s adopted if there aren’t any records? How do you know this is even accurate?”

  “There’s a collection of church notices on that site, part of a large batch that someone digitized from a tiny little town up near the border with Maryland an’ Pennsylvania, where a lot of his father’s family lived. It was offering congratulations to Helene an’ Ronald McKenzie on the adoption of their baby girl, the son an’ daughter-in-law of members of that church. An’ that date matches what must be a modified birthdate on the birth certificate that was issued for Lyssa to her parents.”

  “What about hospital records? Didn’t her birth certificate list a hospital you could cross-reference?”

  He shook his head. “Listed as unknown.”

  “Attending physician? Don’t they keep records?”

  “Funny thing is, there wasn’t any listed. Unknown. Time of birth was listed at noon exactly on that day, the date of her birth an’ the date the birth certificate was issued.”

  He leveled a gaze at her. “There was also a news report from that same time period of a newborn baby girl, only a few hours old, being abandoned at the parsonage of a small church in that same region. Different church than the one with the church notices. When I tried to research that, I found that the church has been closed for decades. No idea where the records ended up, or if they even still exist. I couldn’t find anyone who might have first-hand knowledge of the events. No further reports in the newspapers if a mother was located for the abandoned baby girl, an’ the law enforcement case was never closed. All dead ends.

  “But, if that is the same baby girl, she would have been only two weeks old when they adopted her. One of her mother’s married an’ older sisters lived just three blocks from that church, where the baby was abandoned, an’ apparently worked with the minister’s wife. Plus, one of Lyssa’s father’s uncles was a family judge at the courthouse that burned down.”

  Dewi’s head dropped onto her hands on the desk. “Let me guess—they’re all dead?”

  “Long since. No one I could track down who might know the events.”

  “So we really have no idea of Ken’s mother’s true lineage? And she might not have even known she was adopted? They just told her she was born on vacation?”

  “Correct. There aren’t any pictures of his grandmother when she was pregnant, no hospital pictures of his mother as a newborn. They kept a baby book—Ken showed it to me—but there’s no hospital bracelet. They didn’t list a hospital name, either, just a city.”

  “Let me guess—where the courthouse was?”

  “Correct.”

  She sighed. “Shit just can’t be easy, huh?”

  He stood, taking his tablet back. “All a part of life, lass. Would ye like to tell him, or would ye prefer I do it?”

  She didn’t lift her head from the desk. “I’ll do it,” she muttered. “He’s my husband.”

  She just didn’t know how he was going to react.

  Or what other things it might mean.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Later that night, after making love, Ken cuddled Dewi against him and nuzzled his face against Dewi’s head while she broke the news to him about Da’von and Brianna. She’d opted to hold off telling him the rest, for now. She wanted Badger to finish running through the rest of Ken’s family lineage first, to see if there were any wolves in his f
ather’s line.

  When Ken finished laughing at Dewi’s retelling of the events, especially about how she’d ordered Joaquin to be the one to tell Nami, he sounded amused when he next spoke.

  “There is one thing I’d like to know.”

  “One thing?” Dewi asked.

  He snorted. “Tamsin’s pregnant with a wolf shifter’s baby.

  “Yeah?”

  He met her gaze. “I know I can’t say this around her, but I know I can ask you.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Is she having a corgulf or a worgi?”

  Dewi laughed. “Good thing I don’t believe in Hell, or I’d be going there, wouldn’t I?”

  He wore a playful grin. “Worgi’s funnier, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. It is.” She gently smacked his shoulder. “You’re an enabler.”

  “I don’t hear you complaining.”

  She smiled. “No, I’m not.” She pulled his arm tightly around her. “I’m definitely not.”

  She thought he was almost asleep when he spoke again. “God, what if Malyah, Brianna, and Lu’ana all catch baby fever, too, and you’re all pregnant at the same time?”

  She chuckled. “Then Goddess help all of you, because Badger, Duncan, and Martin will probably find a safe bunker somewhere to hide out in until it’s safe to come out.”

  * * * *

  Abundio stared out his office window and didn’t bother turning when he heard the rap on his office door. “Come in.”

  He knew without looking it was Miranda. “You wanted to talk to me, Father?”

  “Yes. Close the door, please.”

  He waited to hear that before he turned, smiling. “It’s been over a month. Any word on Manuel?”

  “No.” She took her usual seat in one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Nothing. According to the hotel, he checked out. I claimed I was his daughter.”

  He slowly nodded. “And what about Carl and Mateo?”

  “Nothing. They all checked out, and that was the last they were heard or seen.”