“She’s going to make it, though?” I asked, afraid of the answer but needing it all the same.
Arik clearly heard something in my voice that I’d tried to keep to myself, because his frown softened. “Yeah, Nate,” he said, gently by his standards. “Yeah, she will. Just don’t drop the baby until we can hand her back to her mother. I’m sure you can manage that much.”
Relief left me without a comeback. I knew I’d think of one later, probably in the shower, but in that moment I was okay with nodding and letting him walk away with the last word.
These kids might grow up to be angry, furry nudists, like most of my in-laws, but at least they’d grow up with their mom, the way neither Arik nor I had managed to do.
That had to be enough for now.
Chapter 3
Ian
It took fifteen minutes to get back to the pack house—I estimated how slowly Nate would drive on that snowy road with unsecured children in the back, and then took off an agonizing five miles an hour, creeping along at a pace that nearly made me lose my mind. If I’d put the baby out the window, she could’ve crawled faster.
But I could feel Nate calming down through the bond and hear his heartbeat settle from a frantic rushing race to a more normal rhythm. That made it worth it. He hated my usual driving. A lot of the time it was fun to push his buttons, but I didn’t think my mate had any buttons left tonight that hadn’t been mashed until they broke.
Thank every goddamn deity there was, someone had thought to grab a few of the pack’s actual parents from their scattered cottages and bring them up to the house. My second cousin Amy, unshakably calm mom of two under two, was already waiting as I stopped the car, reaching down to take the baby from Nate before he’d even tried to get out. I cranked my head around and watched as the big brother started to cry, torn between clinging to Nate and grasping his baby sister’s blanket to keep yet another stranger from tearing her away from him.
In a feat of dexterity and strength that owed nothing to her shifter nature and everything to just being a mother, she scooped the toddler up in her other arm, somehow turning the baby to drape comfortably against her shoulder as she did so, and carted them both off without missing a beat. For a second, she looked so much like my mom when she was young that I had to blink to clear the illusion.
Suddenly empty-handed, Nate seemed completely, shockingly at a loss, staring down at his lap. One leg of his jeans sported a big damp patch. So did his jacket sleeve.
He absolutely reeked of stale baby, now that I had a second to think about it. Mostly piss, but also a couple of other fluids I didn’t want to analyze too closely with my sensitive nose.
If I knew Nate, he’d want a shower more than he wanted his next breath. Hell,Iwanted him to have a shower before I took another breath.
“How about if I drive straight down to our place, and we can come back later once we’re cleaned up?” I offered. It came out sounding weirdly stilted. Our interrupted conversation from earlier still hung between us like another bad smell. “I think they have it covered. I’ll text Matt and have him let us know what’s going on in a little bit.”
Nate flexed his empty hands, still gazing down blankly as if he couldn’t quite believe he wasn’t holding a baby anymore. He’d probably gotten kind of cramped.
“Sure,” he said after a too-long pause. “Yeah. I stink.”
Yeah, he did, but I didn’t think teasing him about it would be my best plan ever. When we first mated I’d have commented on it before he did, which showed how much I’d grown as a mate and a man since then, I thought. Who said you couldn’t teach a stupid werewolf new tricks? Or something like that, anyway.
A minute later, I pulled up on a bit of gravel a few yards from the cabin Nate had long ago dubbed my Shack of Solitude. A shack it still might be, although I’d been fixing it up quite a bit when I had the time, but it no longer offered me any solitude. And thank God for that. Sharing it with Nate made it a home.
He headed straight inside, uncharacteristically without a word, and went into the bathroom.
And shut the door.
I reeled back half a step as if he’d closed it right on my nose.
Okay, so maybe he needed to actually use the bathroom before he took a shower, it wasn’t like we didn’t have any privacy boundaries at all. But after the shouting fight we’d had earlier, and the quieter continuation of it in the car, all of my Nate-alarms were flashing at once. Angelo? Seriously? I mean, objectively, Angelo was pretty hot, but he wasn’t my type. My type had narrowed down to dark-eyed, dark-haired little warlocks named Nate. How did he not know that?
But aside from any sexual jealousy, Nate didn’t have any more friends outside the pack than I did. He spent most of his time with Arik, actually, since they’d started a magic consulting business together. Matt, Jared and I had placed bets on which one of them would crack first and try to turn the other one into a diseased toad or something.
Weirdly, it had been neither. They genuinely liked each other, depended on each other, and had started taking each other’s sides in the arguments that arose when groups of people lived close together…and neither one seemed to be aware of it.
Now we had a bet on which one would figure it out first. My money was on Arik. Nate and denial went together like peanut butter and jelly.
So while Nate stayed on the pack lands most of the time, I’d branched out. It hadn’t really been intentional. I’d originally tracked down the oddly intense little vamp who’d come to us for help last winter because he’d been so miserable about his thing with the out-of-town alpha not working out. On paper we didn’t have a ton in common, maybe, and I’d made a hobby out of antagonizing and trading punches with the Lancaster vampires over the years. But I guess I’d had a bit of an empathetic soft spot for someone who had to keep up a tough, unemotional frontwhile pining away like a little bitch for someone who didn’t love him. I had a lot of experience in that department.
Not that I usually admitted it—though I had to Angelo over the ninth or tenth beer one night, which cemented him in my list of friends.
Now, since Jack had come back to Angelo after sorting out his own problems, Angelo and I mostly hung out and bullshitted about local news and the occasional movie we agreed on. Jack came too, sometimes. Nate had been invited but always had some reason he didn’t feel like it that day.
I’d just assumed he was tired or something. Maybe I’d been…not paying enough attention. Taking Nate for granted, something I ought to know better than to do after everything we’d been through.
