“How often do you have those types of dreams?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Not often. Like…” I thought about it. It wasn’t something I’d spent a significant amount of time considering. Everyone had déjá vu, didn’t they? It wasn’t an uncommon thing. “… a few times a month, I guess,” I responded, finally.
The truth was it probably was more like once or twice a week. And those were just the instances where I didn’t remember the dream until it happened in real life.
There were also the dreams that kept me up at night. The ones that I remembered in vivid detail before they happened in real life. But it’d been a long time since I had one of those.
Ms. Elsie gave me a look, her lips thinning. My gut twisted. “Maybe like once a week,” I amended.
Her smile returned, the creases around her eyes wrinkling.
“But I don’t think this means what you believe it does.”
“Let’s prove it.” The pregnant woman stepped forward. She grabbed my hand and planted it against her belly. “What am I having?”
“I wouldn’t…” I trailed off as a quick image of a little boy running and laughing crossed my mind. I snatched my hand back and shook my head. “That doesn’t—I mean, that’s not what you’re thinking.”
“What did you see?” Ms. Elsie asked, her eyes lit up like the Fourth of July.
“A little boy,” I admitted.
The other women gasped, and some clapped.
“We just found out yesterday that it’s a boy, and we haven’t told anyone yet.”
The women gasped as if that solidified it.
“You all know there’s a fifty-fifty chance I just guessed correctly?”
“Oh, this is so wonderful,” Ms. Elsie gushed as if I hadn’t said anything. “Does Alpha know?” she asked and then laughed. “Probably not. In the short time he’s known you, he probably hasn’t had enough time to find out all of your secrets.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “We all know what mates do when they are first acquainted.”
The women behind her laughed and high-fived.
“I went into heat soon after and was pregnant with our first pup within days of meeting my mate.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and averted my gaze. That certainly hadn’t been the case between Chael and me. Yeah, he’d pleasured me, but he’d been more distant than not.
I squashed the line of thinking my mind started to take me down. There wasn’t a need to go down that lane. I wasn’t what Ms. Elsie thought I was, and heck, I doubted I was Chael’s mate.
“He’s been looking for so long,” Ms. Elsie said as she clasped me around the shoulders, spinning me toward the dirt path that led us down there.
“Exactly how long?” I asked, with so many questions ping-ponging around in my head.
“At least a half a century.”
“At least?” I screeched, stopping in my tracks. “Exactly how old is he?”
She wrinkled her forehead and looked skyward. “Let’s see now. I was middle-aged, and my boys were sixty when he took over as alpha. Oh yes,” she snapped. “He’s ninety.”
I gasped.
Ms. Elsie patted my hand. “Yes, well advanced in his mate-finding years but still so young.”
I blinked. “That’s crazy.”
She peered at me with her head tilted, then her eyes widened. “Oh, I forgot you humans age so quickly.”
“How long do you all usually live?”
