Chapter 21
North
I stood flush behind Joel, guiding the knife as he chopped the onion, trying my best not to get distracted by having his ass cradled in my lap. “Slow down. This isn’t a race,” I teased, using my shifter reflexes to pull his free hand out of the way before he could sever his fingertips.
“Tell that to my stomach. I’m starving!” he whined, squirming, which only made me even more distracted.
Gritting my teeth as I debated whether we had the time to take a break from making dinner for me to pillage his ass, I said, “Well, do you want me to take over chopping so the food will be ready sooner?”
We’d taken to cooking meals together, after he’d burned a pot of rice so badly that someone downstairs called to report a fire.
He huffed a sigh, before he relinquished the knife, lower lip stuck out in a sulk. “Fine, but only because my only other option is to eat the entire tub of ice cream for dinner, and I’ve already noticed I’m getting a little pudgy around the middle. I blame you for feeding me too well.”
Honestly, I thought he’d been too thin to start with and found the bit of added weight hot as hell, but I knew better than to say that out loud. “Could you put a pot of water on to boil?” I asked instead, giving him a task.
“Yeah, I’m sure I can manage that much without burning the place down.” He stuck out his tongue before bending to pull a pot out from under the counter, giving me a prime view of his ass, even plusher than usual.
Gods. I bit back my groan, forcing my eyes back to the cutting board—before I ended up the victim of a kitchen accident. We were going to be lucky to get through dinner before I needed to take him again.
“You know,” Joel drawled, filling the pot at the tap, “the weather’s supposed to be nice on Sunday. Maybe we could… go for a hike?” His grin turned lascivious, and there was no mistaking what he meant by “hike.”
I smiled back, preparing for the rush of excitement that usually followed the idea of chasing our mate down and fucking him into the ground, but… there was a strange lack of bloodthirst from my beast. Frowning, I nudged at him in my mind. Hey, didn’t you hear what he said? He wants us to hunt him.
My jaguar gave a lazy shrug. Instead, he coaxed me in another direction entirely. Feed him. Now. He said he was hungry.
Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I chase him around a little? Maybe just around the apartment?
No. Food, then sleep.
Okay, now I knew something was wrong. I peeked over at Joel, who seemed oblivious to the conversation going on in my head. “Um, babe? I was thinking… maybe we should call it an early night tonight. We could cuddle up and watch a movie or—”
“That sounds perfect,” he agreed quickly. “I’ve been so exhausted lately. I guess I’m still getting used to sharing a bed with someone.”
I frowned harder. That wasn’t even remotely true. He always fell asleep within minutes of crawling into bed, usually draped across my chest, and he was in the same position when he woke up a full eight hours later. It was like he hadn’t even moved.
Okay, seriously, what’s going on? I grilled my jaguar. You know something. Tell me.
He yawned lazily, but I swore I could feel his smugness. Can’t you tell? he asked. Then gave me a hint. Take a deep breath.
I did as he said, but with a cutting board full of onions in front of me, it was hard to scent anything else.
Since I assumed this had something to do with our mate, I came up behind him and wrapped my arms around his waist, drawing him nice and close, then nuzzled deep into the crook of his neck and breathed in.
Joel giggled. “Stop that, your whiskers tickle.”
I froze, though, because now that I was paying attention, I could detect the faintest shift in his scent.
Now he wasn’t just mist and moss and delicate flowers; he was also rich loam and ferns.
It was like the individual notes of his scent had deepened and multiplied.
Like instead of chords, there was now an entire orchestra.
“Joel,” I whispered, suddenly making sense of my beast’s need to provide for our mate. “I think… you’re pregnant.”
His whole body locked up, and for a second, I worried he was upset, that it was too soon and he didn’t want our baby.
But then he spun around in my arms, and the look on his face cleared up any misunderstanding.
His eyes were wide and bright, already glassy with excited tears.
“Are you serious? Like… for real? For real for real?”
“I mean, I don’t know for sure, but—”
He wrenched himself out of my arms faster than I could catch him, bolting down the hall toward the bathroom.
“I can finally use that pregnancy test!” he squealed, in a tone of voice that was anything but disappointed.
He emerged three minutes later, shouting, “I’m not just getting fat, I’m pregnant! ”
Our lives had officially changed forever, and we were so excited to see what came next.
It turned out that what came next was… chaos. And the baby wasn’t even born yet.
As excited as Joel and I were, nothing could’ve prepared us for how seriously my beast would take this pregnancy.
He must’ve decided that I wasn’t feeding our mate enough, because it wasn’t long before I found I had started sleep-shifting again.
And it wasn’t for anything so fun as stalking our mate this time.
Nope. This was much, much worse.
“Um… North?” Joel nudged me in the pec with a finger. “North, wake up.”
“Mm,” I mumbled, trying to roll over.
But then Joel said, “It happened again,” and there was something in the urgency of his tone that had my eyes snapping open. Joel was sitting up in bed beside me, knees to chest, blanket pulled up to his chin.
“Oh gods, what is it this time?” I asked, bracing myself for the answer.
Last time my beast had left a dead bunny on the kitchen floor.
I suppose he meant for us to cook it, but both Joel and I were too appalled.
Joel had insisted we take the poor thing to the woods and give it a proper burial.
My jaguar, of course, hadn’t understood why we were burying a perfectly good meal.
I wasn’t sure I could handle another carcass this early in the morning. I hadn’t even had my coffee yet.
Joel, however, turned his wide eyes on mine. “I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not too happy about being trapped in our apartment.”
I blinked a few times, trying to process what he’d said. “I’m sorry, did you just say—?” And that was when I heard it. A frantic scrabbling of tiny claws coming from the living room.
Groaning, I scrubbed a hand down my face. What did you do?
Last time wasn’t fresh enough for our mate. This time… it’s fresher.
For fuck’s sake. I wasn’t sure if this was better or worse. I threw back the blanket and rolled out of bed. “How does one dress to face an unknown wild animal trapped in their apartment?” I asked Joel, pulling on some jeans. “Asking for a friend.”
“Do you have a helmet of some kind, with a cage to cover your face?” he asked. “Or like, a hockey stick or something? Tennis racket?”
I paused to look at him skeptically. “Really? Do I look like someone who plays sports?”
He shrugged, but then he tensed right back up when something made a high-pitched chattering sound. “It sounds angry,” he hissed at me, ducking deeper into the blankets. “Do you think it has rabies?”
I grabbed the blanket and whipped it off him, making his squeal. “Come on. I’m not going out there alone. I need you to protect me.”
“No way! It’s probably going to chew my face off! Don’t you like my face?”
“I love your face, and I love you.” I bent over the bed to kiss him, before I took his hand and started to pull him with me. “It’ll be really easy, I promise. We’re just going to open the window, and then we’ll herd whatever it is straight outside. Easy peasy.”
That was such a lie. There was nothing easy about herding what turned out to be a very irate gray squirrel. It involved a broom, two throw pillows, much flailing, even more screaming, but eventually we managed to coax the thing out the open window.
Joel and I collapsed on the couch, sweaty and sore. “We can’t keep doing this,” Joel groaned, his head dropping onto my shoulder. “I won’t be able to wrangle wild animals when I’m nine months pregnant and roughly the size of a blimp. Can’t you tell your jaguar that I don’t need the extra calories?”
I threw my hands in the air. “I’ve tried! You try talking to him!”
Which, of course, led to me shifting so my mate could have a heart-to-heart with my beast.
My jaguar took up most of the couch, our head in Joel’s lap, as he smoothed his fingers down our flank.
Our body rumbled with a nonstop purr of utter contentment.
“I appreciate that you want to take care of me,” Joel said, rubbing the spot between our eyes.
“You’re such a pretty, sweet kitty, aren’t you, and you just want to help.
This is your baby too, isn’t it,” he said, and the truth of it rang through me.
Of course! Just as a wild jaguar cared for its young, my beast wanted to do the same, and he was doing it the only way he knew how.
“Do you know what I really need?” Joel continued, rubbing our ears between finger and thumb. “A den, somewhere safe and warm where I can keep our baby safe, with pillows and blankets. Do you think you could help with that? You could use the second bedroom.”
I could feel my jaguar’s attention latch on to the idea, and I knew we had him. It was unlikely that I would stop sleep-shifting anytime soon, but at least we’d given my jaguar something a little less lethal to focus on.
Looked like I had some shopping to do, or one morning, we might wake up without any pillows or blankets left on the bed for us.