“Marc and I did,” Shawn retorted calmly.
“Yeah, because you’re human.His Lion wasn’t threatened by yours.We’d…” Trip gritted his teeth.“We might start fighting if we were to take her together.”
El’s eyes widened in response to his gruff response.“Seriously?”
The Triad nodded, their expressions grim .
“I won’t be able to stand this for long,” Ryan stated coolly, not to El but to his brothers.“We need to get this done.”
Not appreciating being spoken around like she wasn’t there, El stacked her hands on her hips, but Ryan bit off, “Don’t move a goddamn muscle.”
She froze in place.“What?”
“Every time you move, you send pheromones into the fucking air,” Marc snarled, closing his eyes and gulping like she’d just flooded the air with a toxin.
“I don’t mean to.”She hated the wobble in her voice but they were acting…
Like they didn’t want her.
And though her brain totally understood that the trouble lay with the fact they did want her, their rejection of her was fucking painful.
Shawn was closest to her, and he pressed a hand to her shoulder.“Hey,” he told her, a low hum to his voice as he tried to soothe her.
Trip swallowed.“Of course you don’t mean to, baby.But it’s your body’s way of getting us ready to service you, and it’s just very hard to focus when you’re presenting the way you are.”
“How long does this shit last?”Shawn asked gruffly, tugging her deeper into his side.
Ryan’s tone was grim.“Until she gets pregnant.”
Shock slalomed into her so hard, she jerked out of Shawn’s hold as she took a step back.
“No!”
Ryan closed his eyes.“None of us are ready for that,” he told her softly.“We’ll have to go to the healers, get them to help us.”
“Help us how?”she demanded, folding her arms across her chest protectively.No way was she ready to be a mother.And that was compounded by the fact that none of them were ready to be parents either!
Hell, they hadn’t been together long enough for one, and for two, someone kept trying to either murder them or abduct them!
She gulped.“Where is the healer?”
“She’ll come to us.”Trip reached into his pocket.“I’ll call her and get her to come now.”
“What will she do?”Shawn asked, taking a seat on the sofa and pressing his elbows to his knees as he leaned forward.
“She’ll give us a kind of drug,” Ryan replied, sounding just suspicious enough to have her studying him.“Drop our testosterone for a while.”He rubbed his nose.“And if we fuck, we’re going to have to use a rubber otherwise youwillget pregnant, El.”
She turned her back on him and headed for the window that overlooked the yard again.“Call her.I don’t want to be a mother.”
“Yet,” Marc tacked on when her words fell into the silence of the room.
She jerked a shoulder.“I don’t know how I feel about being a mother, period.I just know that if we can’t figure out what the fuck is going on, I’ll never feel safe enough to bring a child into this world.
“And,” she continued though her throat was thick with tears.“What kind of kid would we have?Some kind of Panther-Lion hybrid?I’m not bringing a monster into the world because we want to be mommies and daddies.”
Trip’s sigh traveled across the room and wrapped her in a hug… a move he followed up on when he strode over to her and pressed his chest to her back.
She shivered at his presence, then whispered, “Should you be over here?”
