Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
T he hardest thing in the world to do is pretend you’re fine when you’re not. And I was not.
I wasn’t even close to being fine.
When the knock came late afternoon on a Friday a couple weeks later, I’d been on the verge of having a panic attack all morning. Duncan had been aware I was feeling all kinds of ways; he had nudged me more often than usual lately, pounced on my feet in a way he hadn’t done since he’d been a tiny baby, and he’d sent me so many messages of love, I had never been so confident in our bond.
But I was still so nervous.
I couldn’t help it. I’d been dreading this day since Henri had shared the news with me—Franklin confirming it the next morning. I wanted to be calm and cool and mature. I wanted to be ready to roll with whatever happened with my head held high and joy in my heart. Chances were, and I knew it in my bones, that my boy wouldn’t up and decide to leave if these people were like him and he liked them.
He loved me, and he loved the ranch and everyone at it. Some days, I’d swear I could hear him chanting from the nursery “love, love, love” alllllll day.
But there was one tiny possibility that I couldn’t ignore: that he might change his mind. I wouldn’t be able to blame him either. It was obvious how much he’d flourished here . How much more could he benefit from feeling even more included? More accepted? I’d been just fine being something different around so many werewolves, but who was I to tell him what would make him the most comfortable?
Every decision I had made, for years, was with him in mind, and I would always do whatever was best for him.
But I still willed my body not to overreact. Nothing had even happened yet. Since when did I get upset over what-ifs?
There was a sigh from the other side of the door, and I knew who it was before the voice even said, “It smells like a bakery up here, Cricket. I’m coming in.”
My hands were still pressed flat against my stomach when the door opened and Henri slipped in, closing it immediately behind him.
He’d been in here a lot lately. So much, that his phone charger was plugged in to my outlet, and there was a neatly folded undershirt of his on top of my dresser. And that had kept me from having a meltdown too. Knowing he was there. Knowing he supported me in whatever happened next.
But in that moment, the man I was very much crazy over frowned at me. He watched me even closer than I watched him, his hands going to his hips, right over where his flannel shirt met his jeans. “You’re not crying, but you smell like a cinnamon roll,” he claimed.
I frowned right back at the man I’d spent nearly all my nights with over the last two weeks. He’d been working a lot, but we saw each other when he got home every night, with the exception of three days where he’d worked the graveyard shift because a coworker was sick. When we spent time outside with the kids, we usually ended up back in my room after that, even showering in my bathroom. I had wondered if Duncan would get cautious or weird, but my puppy had his spot on the bed and didn’t seem to think twice about the werewolf staying in our room. Lucky, lucky me.
“I feel like I’m going to throw up, Fluff. I don’t want to go down there.” I made a face. “But I can’t cry because I don’t want whoever is downstairs to think I’m weak if they see me with puffy eyes, and then they won’t trust me to be able to take care of Duncan.”
Henri’s face softened. “You’re not weak,” was his first argument. “But you have to meet them. Duncan needs you.”
I nodded, knowing dang well my face and body were both giving off every kind of sign possible I was dreading this freaking meeting. I’d purposely avoided thinking about it as much as I could. The Alaskans were coming, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it—nothing I wanted to do about it—so it was up to me to deal with it.
Henri came over, stopping right in front of me, so close his shins brushed my knees. His hand clasped my chin between his thumb and index finger, tilting my face up and giving me every inch of his amber gaze. “No one is taking him away from you.” He paused. “From us. No one .”
That didn’t help in the way I thought he wanted it to. It was too sweet. “It….” It took me a second to try and get my voice steady, ignoring the way I failed and it still broke as I whispered, “It isn’t that I’m so scared someone will try and take him away. No one is taking my donut unless they want to meet their ancestors.”
His eyes moved from one of mine to the other.
I pressed my lips together and rehearsed the words in my head twice before I got them out. “I’m scared he’s going to choose to leave… and not ask me to go with him,” I whispered. We’d talked about this already, more than once, but I couldn’t help but bring it up again.
Maybe if I said it enough, it would get easier.
Or maybe if I said it out loud, it couldn’t come true.
His thumb drew a line under my chin. “He won’t. If he wants you to go, we’ll deal with it, Nina,” he promised. “I can get a job anywhere, and you can work from anywhere.” He paused and his throat bobbed. “You don’t need to work if you don’t want to. We haven’t talked about it yet, but we should.”
“Talk about what?” And had he said I didn’t need to work?
“Finances,” he explained. I wasn’t going to say he was projecting discomfort, but more… he sort of looked embarrassed? Was he sheepish ? “How the property taxes get paid on this land.”
That was an instant distraction, and I squinted at him. “I did try to guess one day how much you owe yearly but…. Why are your ears turning red?”
His ears got even redder when I called them out. It was adorable. So was the expression that came over his face. “I live within my means, of what I make off my job.”
“What does that mean exactly?”
His cute ears went even more crimson, turning a color that made me think of Duncan’s eyes, and he shook his head very slowly.
“Fluffy Blackrock, are you rich ?” I whispered.
“It’s complicated,” was his reply, definitely 100 percent uncomfortable. “I’ll tell you everything after we get today over with. Deal?”
I wanted to hear everything now because that sure sounded suspicious. “Am I going to give you a hard time?”
He didn’t wait to nod, his features sober, but his eyes… there was amusement there in between his ruby red ears. “There’s a trust, and I got an inheritance when I turned 21. We’ll talk about it later though, yeah?”
“Deal, but it doesn’t make a difference to me,” I told him with a smile that got me one right back. A nice, soft one.
“I know, Cricket,” he agreed.
I poked his forearm. “Were you trying to distract me right now?”
Henri’s eyebrows went up that infamous millimeter. “It worked for a couple minutes.” His smile eased the tension in my body. “But you need to know, Duncan’s not going to choose to leave you. I’d bet every acre of this property, he would live in a nuclear power plant for the rest of his life before he gave you up,” he said, looking me dead in the eye the entire time.
I knew he was right, but….
“The love you two have for each other is the same I smell in every close family. He isn’t going to choose strangers. Duncan thinks you’re his, the same way you think he’s yours.”
It wasn’t like I didn’t know that, but it was different hearing it from Henri. A little bit of relief eased the worst of my stomachache. Only the worst. I had to press my lips together before I said, “Okay… and if they try and take him, you’ll gouge out their eyes for us, so I don’t need to?”
Another line was drawn over my chin. “No, but I’m glad your sense of humor is back.”
I was only partially joking, but I gave him a tight smile and tried to play it off even though I was pretty sure he was well aware I wasn’t bloodthirsty under normal circumstances, but when it came to my donut, I’d become a cannibal.
For him too, I figured.
Fortunately, he didn’t quit smiling. “Come on. The faster we get it over with, the faster we can move on.” He looked at me. “Matti and Sienna get here in a few days, and your parents get here an hour later, and after that, the moon is going to be watching over us under the waterfall, and you’re going to be my mate.”
That had to be the only thing in the world able to pull me fully out of my panic. To give me hope for the future.
Whatever else happened, I’d have the rest of my life with the most handsome, wonderful man I’d ever met.
He bent his head and brushed his warm lips over mine. “Let’s get it over with.”
“I will, but I don’t want to,” I whispered.
The corner of his mouth curled. “I’ll be with you both the whole time.” He eyed my wrist. “Leave the bracelet. You’ve got nothing to hide here ever again.”
I didn’t, did I? With less nerves than ever before, I tugged it off and tossed it onto my bed. That familiar discomfort I’d lived with every time I took it off didn’t circle back to me for once.
Before I could ponder that any more, Henri extended his hand, all long, tan fingers and a broad palm. “Good. Come on.”
I took it, letting him pull me up to my feet too. He was right. The faster we got this over with, the faster we could move on.
We had plans. Important ones. Some I hadn’t been as excited over because I’d been so worried about this.
Henri held my hand as he tugged me out of the room and down the stairs. I took some deep breaths and made a few promises to the universe if it let this go well. Duncan already had his head sticking out of the door to Agnes’s room when we made it to the first floor. He came running over, crashing against my legs before turning and rubbing against Henri’s too. He knew what was happening today. I’d taken a sick day, which hadn’t turned out to be a total lie, because I was sick, but with freaking nerves.
I pet him a couple of times, kissed the top of his snout, and smiled. He knew I wasn’t all right to start with. There was no point in making it worse by opening my mouth and letting him hear it . I could do this. We had multiple plans set up, depending on how everything went.
We weren’t getting split up. No one was leaving anybody.
Henri didn’t make a peep, but his thumb rubbed against the meaty part of my hand softly as the three of us headed down the hall toward the meeting room where there were voices coming from.
“Love,” Duncan said to me before we got to the doorway.
I stopped right there to crouch and hug him, my heart in my arms. “I love you more than anything, Donut. Everything is going to be fine. I’m nervous about meeting these people. Okay? But I won’t let anything happen. I swear on my life.”
A much bigger body dropped to the same level as us, and a hand landed on Duncan’s back a moment before another one did the same to the middle of mine.
We both looked at him.
And Henri said, in that velvet voice, looking back and forth between the two of us, his hands resting on our backs, “You’re both mine, and you don’t have anything to be worried about. Understand?”
I blinked, and Duncan’s beautiful fluffy tail swayed behind us. His “yes” resonating in my head.
The hand on my back slid a couple inches higher between my shoulder blades. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his jaw went tight. “From now on, we go through everything together. All right?”
I nodded, and Duncan… Duncan put his paw on Henri’s knee.
I’d been holding it together with tape, and all of a sudden, the most intense urge to cry hit right in the back of my eyes, especially when the werewolf royalty smiled softly at not just me but my boy too. “Come on, you two. Everything is going to be fine.”
He was right.
Henri had said it—we’d go through everything together from now on.
I kissed Duncan before I stood up and kissed Henri on the cheek too, giving him a smile when I pulled back. Thank you , I mouthed.
He dipped his chin at me, his expression grave, like he was ready to go to battle.
We went inside.
In the room were Franklin and Ema, the elder female with the silver-blue hair. They were standing in front of three men, two I had never seen before, and the other one was Ilya, the Alaskan leader who had invited me to their compound. The two strangers though were much older than him. They were both thin, their hair more white than silver, their faces just as stern as Henri’s usually was.
I couldn’t sense their magic, I realized, and glanced at their wrists to see that they had familiar-ish beaded bracelets on.
Both men were already facing the doorway, their eyes glued to the gangly puppy standing front and center between Henri and me.
The men looked at each other.
“Ah, yes.” Franklin waved us over, beaming like a proud dad. Or uncle.
With my chin held high and, hopefully, all the rest of my emotions carefully hidden, I walked over to the group, with Duncan so close he stepped on my ankle a couple of times. I didn’t smile, mostly because the strangers didn’t either, and I wasn’t sure if that was normal or if it was a bad thing. The older men had their brown eyes glued to Duncan, and Ilya was looking back and forth between Henri and me, a smug expression on his face.
I lifted my fingers at him before holding out my hand to one of the older men; the man flinched a little when he seemed to finally notice me. “Hello there,” he said, glancing at his companions before taking my hand with an unexpected gentleness. Out of nowhere, he grinned before turning to the leader of the community, every inch of his serious face disappearing like I’d imagined it.
Ilya, the Alaskan leader, shrugged. “Told you.”
The older man focused back on me, his grin still in place while he murmured in a surprisingly kind voice, “ You’re the pup’s guardian?”
Duncan leaned against my lower leg, sending me a dose of “love.”
“Yes?” I replied. He seemed amused. What had Ilya told him? “I’m Nina. Thank you for coming all the way here,” I went on, not sure what was going on. When he let go of my hand, I aimed for the other older man and took his too.
He was smirking by that point too.
Did they know who my father was?
I didn’t have time to worry about that though. If they knew, they knew. I gestured toward my boy, watching the strangers closely when I did. “This is Duncan,” I told them.
Duncan plopped on his butt and aimed those bright red eyes at each man. His tail was straight in the air, attentive and watchful. His nostrils flared as he smelled them better. With all he’d grown, his ears didn’t look so massive on his head anymore. I’d looked up pictures of adolescent bloodhounds, and Duncan’s body—with the exception of his tail and coloring—was identical to them. Big ol’ ears, intelligent eyes, long and lean, and still growing.
No one reacted; no one said a single word.
The two strange men continued inspecting Duncan, and he looked at them right back. His tail had stopped swishing and was standing straight up, motionless. I made myself stay relaxed, kept my breathing even, my hands loose.
I hadn’t thought about it until then, but if they were the same as Duncan, could they speak telepathically too?
A silent minute later, one of the older men turned to the other, and they both smiled much bigger than I ever would have imagined from how emotionless their faces had seemed when we’d first walked in.
“He’s perfect,” a voice I didn’t recognize said in my head.
I froze and caught the eye of the first older man who winked at me.
It was Ilya who ordered in that tone that was very close to Henri’s Great Wolf one, “Tell them how you found him.”
Beside me, Henri grunted. “What did I tell you about demanding anything from mine?”
Not making a smug face was almost impossible.
The other leader sighed before narrowing his eyes in irritation. “Can you please tell them how you found the pup, Nina?” he asked pretty sarcastically.
Fluffy looked at me and nodded an encouragement.
This man would always have my back, and I loved him so much. And so, I exhaled slowly, then I told the strangers the story. All of it.
* * *