Chapter 9
Barrett
Two days later
I eased the canvas against the side of the house, tilting it enough so it wouldn’t fall as it dried. The piece leaned next to three others of a similar nature. I’d painted them all over the last two days.
Since finding out the man I’m interested in is a bear.
And apparently, if we sleep together, I’ll get pregnant.
Let’s not forget, I’m also his fated mate.
No pressure there. Pfft. Not a drop.
My sarcasm might as well have been an actual living thing at this rate. I felt like nothing made sense anymore. Especially not when it involved Nolan.
The man was perfection on two legs. Not once did he pressure me to move forward or ask how I felt about the information he’d shared. It was as if he put the ball in my court with that talk, and now I had to decide what the game winning play would be. That was, if I wanted to win the game at all.
Ugh.
I was so off-kilter, I’d started using sports metaphors. This was truly a disaster.
Lifting my shirt, I wiped away sweat from my brow. It had been an unusually warm day so far. I woke up covered in sweat. Thank goodness cold showers exist. I was able to cool off enough before I got to work on another piece.
Yet now, I was overheated again. It was like my body decided to have hot flashes, just without the flashing. It was a constant heat beneath my skin.
Worse, all I could think about was how I could be getting sweaty in a different way.
When Nolan had shifted into his bear form, I had enough time to take in the view of his body. I knew what he was packing, and I suspected it would feel amazing if I could accept everything that came with mating him.
Could I spend forever with him here in this small town? Would I be ok with the whole pregnancy thing?
I didn’t know much about pregnancy. Even if I did, I doubted this male-mate-pregnancy thing was the same. Where the hell did the baby even come out at?
The thought made me freeze.
Logically, the baby had to come out. It couldn’t stay inside me forever. But how!?
I decided to go to the internet to see if I could find answers. Maybe there was some secretly buried website about shifter babies that I could reference.
My search didn’t take all that long. Not because I found an actual site to get details from. More because I found a fan fiction website with the tag MPreg — short for male pregnancy.
With nothing better to do, I curled up in a chair and dove into the first story. It was about a human and a shifter. A wolf shifter.
I became enthralled by the tale. The writing was beautiful, full of tension and longing. The deeper I got into the story, the more I felt like I was one of the characters.
By the time they were naked and writhing together, I was aching for a knot of my own to sit on. The story made it sound like the greatest sexual experience in one’s life.
Sweat dripped down my face and neck. My clothes stuck to my body from how heated I’d become in the short time I’d been reading.
I nearly came when I read the descriptive orgasm scene. Panting, I placed the book on my chest and closed my eyes. I needed a minute to get myself together.
After taking some deep breaths, I picked back up where I left off. There were a few scenes of intimacy between the couple again, then I got to the part I was most curious about.
The human becomes pregnant with the shifter’s baby. Of course, I didn’t expect some detailed description of how the baby grew and was born. That would be asking for too much.
And also, this was fiction. It might not have been close to the real thing.
But reading it helped my nerves. It made the situation seem less fantastical and more like a possibility.
On the page, the human character started having contractions. I read on as they described the pain, while also mentioning how excited they were to become a parent. The two emotions balanced him enough that he seemed to be able to push through the challenge of childbirth.
While it skimmed over some of the gore involved, the author did explain some type of magic birth line in the stomach that split to allow the doctor to take the baby out. The author explained this as an assisted birth, and that sometimes, when a baby came too fast, they might come out of the anus instead.
I froze.
My ass?! A baby coming from back there?!
Nope. No way. Did not want that.
I shivered as a cool breeze swept over me. How in the world would I deal if I had to give birth from my butt? Again, I realized this might not be the case in real life. But what if it was?
Instead of sinking into the worry, I dove back into the story. I needed the distraction now more than ever.
The author went on to tell about the recovery process and how mates helped each other along. They shared the perspective of the human holding their baby for the first time. “It was all worth it” they said, eyes wet as tears poured from their eyes.
As it all came to an end, I felt tears welling in my eyes. God, I wanted that. I wanted to know what it was like to feel such joy and love. To feel connected to someone so intensely your lives intertwined on a cellular level.
Yet the idea of carrying a child scared me more than I wanted to admit. Would I also think it was worth it? How much of this was rooted in reality?
I needed to ask Nolan. He’d be honest with me if I questioned him. It was one thing I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt.
The sound of tires over gravel drew my attention. He was home. My mate was home.
A sharp pain tore through my abdomen, rendering me speechless as I forced myself to push through it. The overheated feeling I had earlier increased. I was sweating so badly, I even felt it pouring down my ass.
So fucking weird.
Maybe I was sick. Had I caught something on my cross-country road trip?
“Barrett?” Nolan called out as he moved through the house. I could hear him, yet I couldn’t reply to let him know where I was.
It only took him a minute to find me. He made his way onto the back deck, then froze as he saw my curled position in the chair.
I reached my hand out to him. He moved in a blur of speed to get to me.
“Mate! What’s wrong? Tell me, and I’ll fix it. I swear it.”
He was such an amazing man. I knew that he’d fight anything and anyone to protect me.
He’d make a great father.
The idea came to me suddenly. I was in pain one minute, and then the next, I was the horniest I’d ever been in my life. My back arched off the chair as I tugged Nolan forward.
My nose swept up his neck, breathing in his scent. It was masculine and woodsy, with a hint of something so particularly Nolan.
“What—”
“Need you,” I groaned. “Need your knot. Please.”
At my words, he froze. His eyes widened as he inhaled sharply. The normal brown color shifted to a golden hue that mesmerized me for a moment.
“Heat.”
The soft-spoken word pulled me out of the daze. “Heat,” I repeated.
Nolan nodded. “You’re in heat. That’s what this is. It has to be.”
Before I could ask what heat was, he pulled out his phone and dialed a number. Placing it on speakerphone mode, he held it between us.
“Everything ok, Sheriff? Your mate pass out again?” the voice asked as they answered.
The man beside me growled. I whimpered as more sweat poured from my body.
“Oh!”
“Yes, oh. I think he’s gone into heat. How is this possible? He shouldn’t be able to without the bond, right, Doctor?”
At Nolan’s question, the doctor spluttered out a few noises. “Well, actually… In rare cases, I’ve heard the proximity to a mate can speed things along. I’ve never seen studies on this or experienced it in a patient though."
“Is that why you failed to mention it? Because it would have been really fucking helpful to know my mate would plead for my knot when I arrived home today. I can’t ask for his consent now because of the haze, Doctor. If I knot him, he could hate me forever. And if I don’t, he’ll be in pain for hours.”
“Days,” the doctor corrected. “It would likely be days since it’s the first.”
Nolan cursed loudly, then hung up the phone. Whatever other information the doctor would have said was lost to the quiet of the forest around us. The only thing I heard was my heavy breathing and my mate’s muttered words.
“I consent, Nolan. You can have me if you want.”
He whipped his head in my direction. “You aren’t fully aware enough to do this, mate. The heat haze is too strong. I can’t hurt you. I’d never forgive myself.”
I shook my head. “Not too strong. Was – was reading before you came home. Needed to know more before I could say yes.”
His face transformed with a look of confusion. I blushed as I handed him my phone. The story I read was still on the screen.
As I watched, he read a bit of what was there. When he finished, he laughed.
“My mate was curious and didn’t want to ask, huh?” Nolan trailed the back of his fingers over my cheek.
I leaned into the touch, sighing at the relief I felt from his closeness.
“Need you,” I repeated. I was getting desperate for him. He might have thought I wasn’t thinking straight, but I knew enough to understand what I was getting into.
He shook his head again. “You’re so fucking beautiful. I want you more than anything, but I don’t know if I can.”
His words angered me. It spurred me to do something I never would have before now.
Pushing him away, I stood on shaky legs and moved down the back porch steps to the grassy area. I turned to face him, then reached down to pull off my shirt.
“What are you doing?” he asked, voice full of hunger.
He wanted me. I knew he did.
I just had to show him I was as ready as he needed me to be. There was no stopping this. If Fate wanted us together, then it was about to get its wish.
Once my shirt was gone, I pushed down my pants and underwear. I laid them out on the grass to cushion my body from the cool earth. While I would have loved to roll around on it to cool off, I had a feeling Nolan wouldn’t want me to.
“You might not believe my words, so maybe my actions will clear your doubts,” I called out.
With a spin, I sunk onto my knees on top of the bundled fabric and bent forward. I pressed my chest to the ground, giving him a perfect view of my ass.
If he was like the shifter in the story, he’d love this pose. They’d called it ‘presenting for your Alpha’.
Remembering that it also said shifters had excellent hearing, I softly spoke the words I hoped would finally break his calm.
“Come claim me, Alpha. I need your knot. Breed me.”