Chapter 12 #4
“I’ve got you, baby,” he pants, picking up the pace, his thrusts turning harder, heavier, driving me closer to the edge. “Right here. You’re mine.”
My climax hits like an avalanche. My inner muscles clench around him in tight, rhythmic spasms, and I bury my face in the crook of his neck, stifling my breathless cry against his pulse point.
Boone lets out a harsh, muffled roar against my hair, his hips slamming into mine three more times before he spills inside me, his entire body shuddering with the force of his release.
For several minutes, neither of us moves. We just breathe together in the dark, our chests heaving in unison, the cold mountain air outside tapping softly against the windowpanes.
Wednesday is quiet.
A light dusting of snow falls over the hemlocks, coating the porch rails in two inches of powder.
By midday, the rest of the house has scattered to run errands in town, leaving just Linda and me at the massive kitchen island, surrounded by three wooden bushels of Honeycrisp apples and five rolls of homemade pie crust.
I sit on a tall wooden stool, carefully peeling an apple with a paring knife. Linda stands across from me, slicing them into uniform crescents with terrifying speed.
“You’re very precise,” Linda observes, smiling as she dumps a bowl of sliced apples into a mixture of brown sugar and cinnamon. “Most people hack half the fruit off with the skin.”
"Veterinary anatomy labs make you obsessive about margins," I say with a small, self-deprecating laugh. "If I butcher an apple, Professor Perkowinski will somehow appear in my kitchen and give me a forty-six."
Linda chuckles, but then her expression softens, turning perceptive and serious in that way only mothers can manage. She wipes her hands on her apron, leans against the counter, and looks straight at me.
"You're quiet today, Maisie. Everything okay?"
I hesitate, rotating the apple in my hand. The blade shaves off a neat ribbon of red skin. "Everything's wonderful, Linda. Truly. Your family is... amazing. I've never experienced anything like this."
"But?" Linda prompts gently.
I let out a slow breath and set the knife down on the cutting board.
"I love Boone. I chose him, and I don't regret that for a single second.
But looking around here... seeing him with the pack, seeing how much responsibility he carries...
it's overwhelming. I have four years of undergrad, four years of veterinary school, and a residency after that.
What if vet school takes me across the country?
What if my career doesn't fit into a three-story timber lodge on a mountain? "
I brace myself for a polite deflection or a speech about pack duty.
Instead, Linda reaches across the island and places her hand firmly over mine.
"Maisie, look at me."
I look up.
"Do not ever shrink your life to fit Boone Kinkaid," Linda says, her voice ringing with absolute steel.
"Boone is a werewolf, and he's going to be an alpha.
That means his instinct is to build a fence around everything he loves and keep it safe inside.
But you are not a sheep to be penned, and he knows that.
Nathaniel didn't make Margaret give up her life when Creature University was founded.
He built a world big enough for both of them. "
She squeezes my fingers tightly.
"If vet school takes you to California, Boone will buy a plane ticket or learn to sleep on an air mattress," Linda continues, her eyes fierce and warm.
"He chose you, Maisie Pope. Not an ornament for the pack.
If you shrink yourself for him, you'll resent him, and a mate bond cannot survive resentment.
You keep your dreams. He'll handle the rest."
A tight, painful knot in my chest uncoils, leaving my throat thick with unshed tears. “Thank you, Linda.”
“Now finish peeling those Honeycrisps before I make you roll the dough,” she says with a wink, sliding another apple toward me.
That evening after dinner, Boone and I walk out onto the back porch to look at the stars. The mountain sky is crystal clear—thousands of white diamonds glittering over the black silhouette of the pine ridges.
Boone stands behind me, wrapping his heavy down coat around both of us, his chin resting on top of my head. His warmth seeps straight through my sweater.
“My mom gave you the speech, didn’t she?” he murmurs.
I lean back against his chest. “Which speech?”
“The ‘don’t let my son suffocate your ambitions’ speech.”
I laugh softly, watching our breath fog together in the freezing air. “She did.”
“She gave my dad the same speech thirty years ago.” Boone’s arms tighten around my waist. He turns me until I’m facing him, his amber eyes stripped of all humor and teasing—dead serious, glowing in the starlight.
He takes my cold hands in his large, warm ones and brings them up to his chest, right over his steady, thumping heartbeat.
“I mean it, Maisie,” he says, his voice thick with raw, immovable certainty. “I’m not keeping you in a box. We build a life that fits both of us, or we don’t build it at all.”