Her fingers played with the light dusting of hair across his pecs and the words sprang forth. “If something changes in the overall situation,” she said, “I promise we’ll move to Idaho until it’s safe.”
He tipped her head back to look her in the eyes. “And I promise I’ll try to chill out and trust your judgment. But if I’m freaking out, I need to know I can talk to you about it and be heard.”
She nodded. “I will. I know this is tough on you.”
His thumb stroked her chin, her lips. “No one thinks you’re fragile, I swear. Not a single damned person. If anything, everyone’s happy for you, for us. Especially the people who’ve known you all your life. They all say exactly the same thing to me—that they see such a positive change in you from before we met. And Iwantyou to be able to work. I just ask that in times like this, when there’s more risk to you, and to our baby, that you downshift. I won’t even overrule you about when you return to fieldwork—that’s up to you.”
“Thank you.” She studied his gaze, loving the myriad flecks of color in his brown eyes. Chocolate and amber and mahogany. “And I want more kids. I want us to have our children now, so they’re close in age to Peyton’s and Trent’s.”
“And Beck’s.” He smiled, pulling one from her.
“And Beck’s,” she agreed as she nuzzled his nose. “I knew you two would become friends.”
* * *
Ken
More than friends—adopted family.
Not just Beck, but Nami and her family by default as well.
“If you’d told me that morning in the kitchen when he was pinning me against the fridge and choking me to death that he’d soon be my best friend, I thinkthatwould have been more difficult to believe and accept than the memo that wolf shifters were not only real, but I’d be marrying one.”
She giggled. “Funny how life works, isn’t it?”
“True.” She snuggled in the crook of his arm and, in minutes, she was sound asleep.
Good. She needed the rest.
He closed his eyes but sleep wasn’t forthcoming to him.
His earlier phone call with Peyton had been about more than asking him to rescind the order for them to come to Idaho.
Peyton had told him he’d be making more trips to Europe over the next several weeks and months, trying to time them so he wouldn’t miss the birth of his first child.
Which, as Peyton had joked, would probably by default be his only child when Gillan neutered him upon his return.
Ken had in a way become a sounding board for Peyton, running “hypotheticals” past Ken that Ken realized werenot.
Hypotheticals, that is.
Things like looking for ideas about tracking where inquiries were coming from, how they might set cyber traps for people so they could hack into their computer system—the usual brotherly stuff.
Not.
What also worried Ken was what Peyton wasn’t telling him. Not because Peyton didn’t know—
But because hedid.
If there were still inquiries seeping in from the Segura affair, someone sniffing around, that could prove very dangerous.
If those inquiries were somehow tied in with the rogue and the potential of someone wanting to capture a shifter for research?
That would be a fucking disaster all the way across the board.
A key part of the Targhee Pack’s success throughout the decades was their secrecy, their ability to blend in with the general population, shell company after shell company that shuffled assets around in a timely fashion to prevent suspicion from falling on them.
Lower-level government officials who were either part of the pack or beholden to it that could help set up new identities for people as they aged out. Or, in Joaquin’s case, needed to disappear from the face of the earth and pop up with a new name and identity.
