15. Cam
FIFTEEN
CAM
I was tucking into my lunch after everyone else had eaten earlier, but I sensed I was being watched.
Four heads were stacked around the doorframe, with Jack at the bottom and Price at the top. Their gaze was fixed on me as I lifted the fork from the plate to my mouth.
“I’m having my lunch. I do it every day. It’s not exciting, guys.”
“You’re eating steak, but there’s no salad.” Isla was on tiptoes staring at my food.
Jack waggled a finger. “We need vegetables to be healthy.”
Oh, yikes. He sounded just like me. I was beginning to regret embarking on an eat food other than meat mission with the kids.
“Why is the steak almost raw?” Price smirked as he put a hand to his ear. “I can almost hear it mooing.”
“You can?” Jack and Isla said together as they looked around.
Bea didn’t speak because she was trying and failing to stifle her giggles as she juggled a tablet.
I sighed. “It’s a craving. It happens in pregnancy.”
“That’s true.” Price came into the kitchen with the kids at his heels. “But I think our little dragon likes their meat undercooked.”
I didn’t admit to my mate that yesterday after he was asleep, I’d stood in front of the fridge and pondered whether to eat a banana or a raw sausage, and I’d chosen the latter.
But Bea had caught me last night. She was recording every aspect of my pregnancy—in her deadpan documentary style voice—“for science” because there were so few human-and-dragon-shifter mated pairs.
“The subject consumed a raw sausage. Standing. In the dark. Declined to comment,” she’d dictated.
Price put his chin on my head and both hands over the slight curve of my belly. “It’ll be interesting to see what you’re eating by the end of the pregnancy.”
Bea said a shifter journal might even publish her research and told me the information would be useful for my next baby.
I choked on my decaf coffee, which wasn’t hard because it was foul. “Let’s get through this one first.”
“Is everyone ready?” Price had changed into the overalls he wore at the studio, and he pushed up his sleeves. I regulated my breathing because just like I did when I’d met him, I wanted to climb that man.
“Lead the way.” The kids and I formed a line behind him and marched toward the guest room.
We’d been putting off turning the room into a nursery. Not because we didn’t want to, but the children had opinions about what the baby wanted and needed.
“The baby wants a slide,” Jack announced.
“Oh yeah,” Isla scoffed. “Did the little one tell you that in one of your conversations?”
“Yes.”
Whenever I was sitting down, Jack would drag his toy basket beside me and inform the baby he was going to show them the toys. Isla usually interrupted by telling him the baby couldn’t hear him.
“Babies don’t need slides, sweetheart.” Price was kneeling beside our son, trying to convince him he wasn’t installing a slide above a newborn.
“A small one?” Jack had on his hopeful expression.
“Nope.”
“Shouldn’t the crib be fireproof?” Bea was examining the box containing the crib pieces.
I shot up off my chair and overbalanced, but Price caught me. “Please tell me the baby won’t have fire from birth?” We’d need the fire brigade on standby, though Price could pull fire inside him.
Though I’d accepted the kids were dragon shifters and Price could shift into dragon form, understanding when they needed their bracelets took some getting used to.
I preferred that they didn’t wear them when we were together, and now I was able to recognize the triggers, such as them being overtired, agitated, or excited.
That was when I had them wear the bracelets.
“No.” Price wrapped his arms around me. “Even kids Jack’s age can’t produce a lot of fire.”
Bea whipped out her tablet and dictated, “Subject fails to understand a baby’s fire output. More reading recommended.” Bea was deep into her project, and I gritted my teeth at being labeled “the subject.”
I rubbed my brow, thinking me, my bump, and my human reactions would soon be a headline crawling across a ticker at the bottom of a TV screen.
“This is the color we chose.”
Everyone had an opinion about paint color, but we compromised with a muted green. We’d decided that this was the color of the ancient forests where the dragon shifter had once lived. Bea was typing again, and I dared not look at her screen.
Price and Jack were wrestling with the crib as they put it together. Our son’s involvement extended the process, but my heart somersaulted when our youngest grinned as Price told him, “Good job.”
“That wall needs something.” Isla was pointing at the blank space opposite the love seat and rocking chair.
“What do you suggest, sweetheart?”
She wanted to paint a mural of two dragons and a human. I caught Price’s eye, as I assumed she was talking about her siblings and me and wondered why he wasn’t included.
“So the baby knows all the dads. So the dad that’s here.” She pointed at Price. “And Dad Two.” That was me. She called me Dad to my face, but when talking about me, she added the numeral after my name. “And also Papa.”
I gulped and sent my mate another glance. This family wouldn’t exist without Allan, so including him tugged at my emotions. My eyes filled with tears.
“I love that.”
“I have to do Papa’s beast. Cam showed me how to make the spikes look real ages ago, but I can’t get Papa’s right even after looking at the photos.”
Price crouched beside her. “You draw them how Cam taught you, and I’ll tell you how they curved. I knew your papa’s dragon better than anyone.” He wrapped his arms around her. “We’ll get him right together.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“Human and dragon emotions are causing a lot of tears.” Bea was still dictating, and I was considering putting the tablet in a timeout with Jack’s wings.
Two weeks later, Isla let us see the mural.
She’d spent the whole full-moon school break barricaded in the nursery. Price was sworn to secrecy after he’d helped her sketch Allan’s beast. She led us blindfolded, in a conga line with our hands on the waist of the person in front.
“Okay, look.”
Beside the crib, the wall had become the sky.
Two dragons flew across it. There was Price’s beast with his gray scales shot with pink, the one that flew over our house during the night.
The second one was smaller but looked very much like Price’s beast, half-hidden by a cloud.
That was Allan’s. And in the corner, with a hand raised as if I was waving them home, was me.
Bea had gone quiet. She’s been narrating the reveal. “Subject removes blindfold. Subject reacts.” But she’d stopped. She reached up to the smaller dragon. “That’s him. The spikes and everything.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “I was starting to not be able to see him. But here he is.”
Isla, who’d tried to get the spikes right so many times, leaned against her sister. “I know.”
The spikes tapered just the way I’d shown her, but their shape, that particular hook they had, that was Price and Isla’s work. And that was Allan.
I looked at Price. He was looking at the girls looking at his brother, and he smiled. We were all quiet until Jack announced the baby could see the dragons even upside down in the crib.
Later I found Bea’s tablet on the love seat with the notes still open. The last line said, Subject. She hadn’t finished it.
Days after the mural reveal, the paint in the nursery had dried. The kids were in their rooms, but it was still light outside. Price disappeared into the garage and returned with something behind his back.
“I made this.” He held it up. “And it’s not teardrops.”
It was a circle of tapered glass flames and each one was a different color.
“That’s Bea.” He touched the green one. “Isla’s is navy, and Jack’s the yellow.” He pointed to the deep red one. “That’s mine.” The soft orange I guessed was Allan’s, but there was also a rich caramel one.
“Yours.” He turned it, and it caught the light. “You don’t have a flame, but you’re here whether you breathe fire or not.”
I cleared my throat and tapped the clear space.
“That’s the baby’s. I’ll add the color when their fire comes in. It might be years, but they have a spot. Nobody in this family has to earn their way in.”
He hung it above the window, and it turned in the breeze, throwing its colors over the room. The green, navy, and yellow, the red and orange, the caramel, and the clear space.
We stood with our arms around one another, in a room of moving colored light, waiting for the little one who hadn’t arrived yet.
But in the middle of the night, I couldn’t get the image of the suncatcher out of my head. All those colors that represented our family and the clear space for the baby who wasn’t here yet.
“Nobody has to earn their way in,” Price had said.
I tossed and turned and made a decision, but when I put out my hand to tell Price, he wasn’t there. The one place he'd be if he wasn’t in his home office was the courtyard.
“What are you doing up?” He sat me on the couch.
“Will you marry me?”
“Marry?” His voice rose and squeaked at the end.
“Yeah, you know the thing. I do, you do, and we get a piece of paper.”
“I’ve never needed that because I know what’s here.” He put a hand over his heart.
“We’re fated, so I want something permanent so we’re official, like putting a period at the end of a sentence.”
Price smirked. “You’re comparing us to a piece of text?” He cupped my cheek. “There is something that shifters do instead of marriage.”
I climbed onto his lap. “So tell me? I have to survive a ride on your dragon? What?”
“Dragon mates burn one another.” My brows shot up, and he clarified that the human wasn’t obligated to burn anything.
“Great, that's so much better. I get burned to a crisp and you stay your hot and handsome self.”
Price rested his brow on mine. “It’s a tiny mark, like touching a flame from a lighter.
” He got on his knees, and I thought he was going to propose.
“Confession time. I wasn’t going to tell you about marking because I didn’t need a mark to make you mine.
” He looked at his hands. “I didn’t want you to think you owed me one. ”
My eyes filled with tears that he’d held back, for my sake, thinking I might not want it, that I might be scared.
“I want it, and I’ll mark you too.”
Price tapped my wrist. “Here? On the pulse point?” And I nodded. He lifted my wrist to his lips and the heat in his warm breath increased from pleasurable to a little owie, just for a second, before he pulled away.
“Mate.” He kissed me.
“My turn. I want to do it.” I held up my wrist to his lips and he kissed my mark.
Price went to his study and came back with a slim glass tool, no thicker than a pencil, that he used at work. He yanked off his shirt and breathed fire on the tool.
“Over my heart, Cam.”
I pressed it on his unblemished skin that had never been burned, not at work or by any other omega. He hissed when I scorched his skin but held my gaze until I removed the tool.
“Mates.”