Epilogue #3
“There he is,” I said softly. “Took you long enough. I’ve guessed for two weeks, and only because apparently Mate Bonds laugh at IUDs. My OBGYN says it likely came out sometime in the last few months and I never noticed.”
“You—” His voice came out wrecked. “Dkaar. You’re—we’re—”
“Pregnant.” Saying it out loud for the first time cracked my own composure clean in half; my eyes went hot and my grin went wobbly, and I said it again anyway, because it was mine to say, and I’d been hoarding it. “I’m pregnant. You’re smelling your baby, Dakvaar.”
The sound he made—I don’t have a word for it.
It wasn’t the Kteer snarl, and it wasn’t the purr.
It was both at once, torn out through the middle, and then I was flat on my back in the pillows with an orc bent over me, pressing his forehead to my stomach through my sleep shirt, both hands framing my hips like I was something sacred, saying words in his own language, low and rushed and reverent, that I didn’t need translated even a little.
“A kit,” he said finally, in mine, hoarse. “A kit. Ours. Rosa is going to—” His head snapped up. “Rosa. A sibling. We have to—no. Not yet. Tonight it’s only ours.”
“Only ours,” I agreed.
“You should be asleep.” He was already going into protective mode. “You’ve been tired—of course you’ve been tired, you’re building an entire person—and you were on your feet all day at that fire, and tomorrow you are lifting nothing—you understand me? The cleanup is mine, the dishes are mine—”
“Querido,” I tried to interrupt.
“And the café? You can’t think—” He winced like a male stepping onto thin ice, which, to be fair, he knew something about. “Dkaar. The double shifts? The heavy trays.”
“I’m going to keep working.” I said it gently, but I said it with my whole determination, and I watched him hear both parts.
“As long as I can. Sensibly. I’ll sit when I need to, I’ll let Maggie take the heavy trays, but I just got the job I actually want and a town I actually love, and I’m not spending the next seven months wrapped in wool on your couch. ”
He groaned. It came all the way up from his boots—he was naked, but you know what I mean. It was the groan of a male who had known, before he ever opened his mouth, exactly how this argument was going to end…because my Mate can deny me nothing, and we both know it, and I only exploit it for good.
“Sensibly,” he finally said sternly.
And I, knowing I’d won, nodded immediately. “Sensibly.”
“Maggie takes the trays.”
“Maggie takes the trays.”
“And if you’re tired—”
“You will smell it on me from across town and appear at the café within eleven minutes,” I said. “Yes. I know who I married.”
And then his mouth was on mine, and the negotiations were over.
He made love to me the way he had the very first time—that unhurried, devastating thoroughness, like there was no clock anywhere in the world—but with something new layered under it now, a carefulness that wasn’t hesitation but ceremony.
He peeled my sleep shirt away like unwrapping something breakable, kissed his way down my body and stopped at my stomach, lingered there, murmured something in Orcish against my skin that made my eyes sting, and then continued on until my thoughts went blurry at the edges and my hands were fisted in his hair and I came apart with his name in my mouth and his palms holding my hips like an offering.
He worked me there again, slow, patient, greedy in the quietest way, until the second one rolled through me like warm surf, and I lay there afterward boneless and glowing while he prowled back up the bed and gathered me against his chest.
And stopped there.
I found his jaw in the dark. “Hey. Don’t you want to—we can keep going.” I didn’t mind getting a little messy and cinnamon-y smelling if it meant I could feel his pleasure too.
“Dkaar.” He caught my wandering hand and brought it to his lips, and when he spoke, his voice was in pieces—my husband, my Mate, my big strong protective orc, thoroughly and completely undone. “How can I think of my own pleasure right now? Look at what you’ve given me.”
His hand spread warm and huge over my belly, covering it entirely, covering everything.
“You’ve given me everything. A year ago, I had eggs and a booth and the hope you’d learn my name.
Tonight I have a wife. A daughter asleep down the hall who calls me Dad.
A kit growing under my hand. You have made me the happiest male in two worlds, and I want to lie here and feel it. All of it. That’s what I want.”
Well. What’s a woman supposed to do with that except burrow into her enormous husband and feel unbearably smug about her entire life?
I burrowed. I was smug. His heart thudded under my ear, steady as a metronome, and outside our window the last embers of Kap’parral winked out one by one under a sky full of stars and satisfied gods.
“I love you,” I murmured into his chest. “My Mate.”
His arms tightened—my anchor, my wall, my favorite customer.
“And I love you, my Mate,” he rumbled into my hair. “Both of you. All of you. Every one of you I am given, for the rest of my life.”
Our future. Right here, under one roof, down the hall and under his hand and wrapped up in each other.
We’d already begun.