After breakfast, Mori took the baby outside to play in the snow because I wanted a few minutes alone with Wess to give him his gift. Sure, there would be a half dozen gift exchanges before Yuletide was over but as soon as everything really kicked into gear we wouldn’t have a quiet moment not spent sleeping for the next few days. It seemed he had the same idea because as soon as Mori and Baby Andy were outside he pulled out a tiny little giftbag and passed it off to me.
“When did you have time to shop? Do you even know how to shop online?” I asked, curious as to what he’d gotten me.
“I do know how. Now anyway but I didn’t buy this. I made it myself.”
“When did you find time to make anything?” I laughed.
“You’ve been too busy to notice me sneaking off and it’s not like the baby is going to spill my secrets.”
“Yeah. That’s what you think Mister Ice Cream with Repbeys for breakfast.”
“Hey! It was only a few bites!” he said, flashing me a sheepish grin. “Open it! I think you’re gonna love it!”
I reached inside the bag and found a leather cord which I pulled up and out of the bag to reveal a necklace with a little bear charm carved of ice. It was his ice. The ice that remained frozen unless you ate it. He treated that trunk of ice like a precious almost non-renewable resource and he’d taken time and effort and a chunk of the precious material to make my gift. The tears started up again as I slipped the leather cord over my neck. It got hung up on one of my little horns because I wasn’t accustomed to them yet and Wess had to help me sort out the necklace to get it on properly. Then I buried my face in the crook of his neck. How could one person make me so happy? How could one person come in and fill in so many gaps?
“When it’s right, it’s right, mate,” he whispered, rubbing small circles on my back. “And we’re right.”
Once I collected myself and scent marked his neck by nuzzling him, I walked over and sat down on the sofa and pulled a small box out from underneath it. I patted the spot next to meand Wess sat down. I handed him the box slowly, half-worried that he would think I was giving him work for Yule or that somehow the gift that would make so many things official would come off as asking for even more instead of giving him a gift. I bit my lip and he arched a brow in my direction.
“Do you want me to open it up or not?” he laughed, picking up my nerves over our mating link.
“I do. I just….” I said but didn’t have the words not to spoil the surprise.
Wess waited another beat before gently removing the lid off the golden giftbox. There swaddled in tissue paper were adoption papers. If something happened to me it was unlikely my parents and Mori would let anyone try to take Andy from Wess. The baby was already attached to him and family was so much more than a piece of paper, but I wanted it official. Venal couldn’t even bother being on a birth certificate, but Wess had come in and gladly scooped up Andy and became a dad.
Wess’s bottom lip trembled and for a split second, I thought perhaps it was too much. That I was giving him a gift that was more for me and Baby Andy than for him. Then he spotted the gold encased pen I included in the box (it had little polar bears engraved into the gold) and signed the papers without fully getting it out of the tissue paper.
“That’s part of what took me so long to get done. I had to get Clarence Moonscale to sign papers that Venal is crazy and then I got the leaders of the GGB to do the same more or less. We know Venal isn’t coming back but they don’t know. They can’t know that. Not that I think Clarence would hold it against us. Medwin would never let him in a million years. I just wanted you to know—I wanted you to know that you’ll always have a place here withus – that you’re our family now and he sees you that way too. I know he’s a baby and babies love everyone who is nice to them but…” my tears started up again.
Wess closed the box carefully after setting the pen inside and pulled me into a big bear hug. Then he pressed his forehead to mine.
“I love you, Preston, and our baby. I know papers are papers. It’s more for pack files and all that but I know it means something too but I’ll do anything to make you and that baby happy. To keep you both safe. Thank you for letting me be a part of your family.”
We kissed, his tongue darting in between my lips and sweeping around my mouth. It would’ve grown into more but Mori came back inside, laughing and carrying the baby, now in bear form, covered in snow and chewing on a newspaper. We didn’t get the newspaper but the neighbor did.
“Oh, no!” I laughed.
“Well, he found it fair and square,” Mori shrugged. “I just brought him inside before anyone else noticed.”
I made a mental note to be extra nice to the neighbors in the coming days in case they found out my baby was an occasional newspaper thief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mori
Nightshade Bear Territory
That evening, I couldn’t help but notice that Lero didn’t come to unwrap his presents with the rest of us. I didn’t point it out and hoped that he was home with his parents because Colton wasn’t around either. I didn’t point out their absence because I didn’t want to draw any more attention to Lero than he already drew to himself.
After all the presents were unwrapped, I slipped outside, almost wishing that I smoked because that would be a reason to slink off. I sat in the rocking chair on the porch that had been here since my namesake built the house years before my parents even met. I tried to imagine him sitting in the other rocking chair, sipping coffee. A wild wolf ran by with a partially eaten spiral ham in her mouth with a teenager chasing behind her. I had bad news for him, he wasn’t getting his ham back. For the most part, the wild wolf pack that lived around my parents’ home didn’t cause trouble but sometimes they decided it was easier to hunt our dinners than it was to hunt deer or rabbits in the woods. I didn’t blame them. Everyone wanted to take a breakduring the holiday season. Not that my parents didn’t make sure they had plenty to eat.
The snow started to fall again in those big, fluffy white flakes that always let me know I was home. A wolf walked through the snow, head down, carrying something in her mouth. I chuckled, thinking she’d stolen part of someone’s dinner too but she stopped and looked up at me. If that was her dinner, it was still wiggling and the wild wolves around here didn’t torment their prey. They knew my carrier would never let them hear the end of it if they did.
“Hey, mama,” I called out to her, wondering if she was trying to move her puppies during a snowstorm and needed help. Her tail wagged once, something that happened more and more as the pack lived with us generation after generation. She started toward the porch and when she came up into the dim glow of the porch light I saw that she wasn’t carrying a wolf pup in her mouth but a puppy of a domestic dog. It was a fluffy thing – too fluffy – its long ears and brown and white pattern made it look like a basset hound but it’s fluffiness spoke of a saint bernard.
“Where’d this little guy come from?” I asked as she sat him down on my lap and wagged her tail. She hadn’t had any puppies yet. She was a bit on the young side to take up with her own mate. No one in the village had a dog capable of producing such puppies as far as I knew. The little puppy shivered and I looked toward the kitchen window. I could take him inside to warm up but the merrymaking was still going on. Instead, I stood up and headed up. The wolf raced off the way she came from. I clutched the little guy to my chest, realizing I had left my gifts behind at my parents’ house and hoped that Wess and Preston brought them home for me. But this little guy melted something inside me. He was small and still had his tiny little milk teeth. Hisbreath smelled like that of a puppy but some wolf had given him milk too. Perhaps whichever one had would’ve kept it up if the other shewolf didn’t take him away or perhaps she’d grown tired of feeding the strange looking puppy.
“It’s okay,” I whispered to him as he whimpered. “It’s too cold for a little guy to be out here in all this snow, huh? You’re all covered in it. We’ll call you Snowy. You sure have thick enough fur for it, huh?”
