“You don’t have to share anything you don’t want to, my love.”
Camden smiled up at me. “I’m not exactly exciting, as you know,” he said. I knew for a fact that my One was very exciting, but he seemed to think otherwise.
“You’re very exciting,”I told him through our bond before sending him a memory of just a few hours ago when I’d had him pinned against the wall in the shower. He’d gone between moaning and screaming my name as I thrust in and out of him at a frustrating pace for him. Not quite fast enough to send him over, but not so slow we were both frustrated and unfulfilled.
“That’s so wrong,”Camden growled through our bond.
“Not a whole lot to say. I was born and raised in Bangor. My dad is a wolf shifter, and Mom is an arctic fox. I grew up in Dad’s pack. I have seven older brothers, and we all haveCnames. Ma is?—”
“I’m sorry,” Papochka said, interrupting. “Seven?”
Camden smiled. “Yeah. There are eight of us altogether, and I’m actually the youngest.”
Both of my fathers looked at me, and I could see the disbelief in Papochka’s eyes. I had never gotten a completely honest answer as to why I was an only child. They’d said they were happy having only one, but I didn’t know if that was the full story or not. It wasn’t overly important. I was here, and now I had a One of my own, and we were going to be starting our own family. I wanted at least two, and Camden wanted fewer than eight. That was a good compromise, if you asked me.
“Eight?” Papochka said again. I realized that Camden had continued talking while I’d been lost in thought.
“Some just enjoy having larger families,” I said. “Alpha Maynard and his mate have twenty-three,” I said.
“Twenty-three?” Camden said quietly.
I glanced down at my One and nodded. “Yeah. They’ve been mated forever though. They’ve had over a millennium to have them. It’s not as if they’ve popped them all out within a few years.”
Camden looked thoughtful for a moment while that sank in, and then he nodded. Did I want twenty-three children? No. I was happy to be having the one, and I was more than willing to see what Fate had in store for us going forward. For now, I needed to make sure that Camden didn’t become overwhelmed with the visit from my fathers.
Chapter 14
Camden
There were certain perks to being mated to a warlock. Especially one who was a doctor and could do a magical ultrasound whenever you wanted. Well, we were there. I wanted. I was due in a month, and that meant I was six weeks pregnant. Technically, we could have done the ultrasound last week, but life was busy.
Winston and Lukyan had come to visit and were still here. I wasn’t upset about that at all. Winston, I’d discovered, was actually quite funny, and Lukyan I adored. He was an amazing father-in-law, and he had so many stories of a young Maxwell for me. I loved hearing all of the stories, and in the week since they’d been here, we’d had dinner with them three times. Both had insisted that they didn’t want to overstep, and that was a completely foreign concept to me.
It was a lazy Sunday, and Winston and Lukyan had plans to go visit somewhere else. I couldn’t remember, exactly, but I knew I’d hear all about it tomorrow during our planned dinner. But this morning, I was still in bed and was thinking about rolling over and going back to sleep. That was, until Maxwell came out of the bathroom, looking like sex on legs.
“You know,” I said sleepily, “it’s really not fair that you always look good enough to eat.” His pants were barely hanging on, and I honestly wondered if they would fall off if he wiggled his hips hard enough. “Those pants are indecent around others,” I told him. I could see the top of his trimmed hair, and of course, I knew exactly what that looked like as I’d seen it without anything covering it more than enough times.
Maxwell crawled back into bed and under the covers with me. “There you go. All covered up.”
I pretended to pout. “I meant around others. I very much love the view here in the bedroom when it’s just the two of us.”
“I know. Which is why I teased at all.” Maxwell got comfortable on his back, and once he was situated, I moved to where I was lying on his outstretched arm.
“This works, right? Will you need your arm?”
“I won’t need my arm, and this absolutely works.” I felt Maxwell kiss my hair. “Are you ready to see our baby again?”
“I am. What do I need to do? Just lie here?”
“Yes. Or you could stand across the room. It’s simply easier if you’re in the same room as me.”
I snuggled in. “That’s not a problem. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
Maxwell used magic to close the shades, and after the bedroom was dark, he did that magical thing where he projected our baby in the air in front of us.
“Oh, wow,” I said quietly. “He looks so much different this time.”
“He, huh?”
