It was, and, a moment later, she pulled away.
“I’m sorry.”
“Never be. But I do have a favor to ask, if that’s all right.”
“You can always ask. I want you to,” she said, sounding a little surprised at herself. “If you’re okay hearing no, you can always ask.”
“I am always okay hearing no. But please. Tell me what your name is?”
She blinked at him, and then for some reason, she started laughing. This wasn’t the soft laughter he had heard before, it was a full-body laugh, and then to his surprise, she threw herself into his arms.
“Okay, I don’t mind this in the least, but what’s the big joke?”
“Me. You. All of this. You’re really trying, aren’t you?”
“Every day of my life,” he joked, which won him another laugh “Yeah. I absolutely am.”
“Thank you. I mean it. And I’m Ilona. And I think you’re handsome, and, oh God, this is really happening, huh?”
“It is.”
“All right,” she said, decisively dusting off her hands. “You’re my fated mate, your name is Turner Cole, you turn into a wolf (which I very much want to see again), and we’re going to go visit a unicorn. Let’s go.”
She grinned at him, and for a moment, nothing in the world existed for Turner but her eyes, her lips, and her joy.
CHAPTER SIX
∞∞∞
Walking to the barn, Ilona felt as if something great and heavy had rolled off her shoulders. The day was still gray and cold. She was still living at her great-aunt’s house and she was still unemployed, but she had a true mate, and God, was he good-looking. She found herself stealing glimpses of him out of the corner of her eye, taking in his clean profile, the slant of his jaw, the way he walked shoulders first like a lot of the shifters she knew.
“You’re looking at me,” he said without glancing at her, and she blushed a little.
“I’m a fan of good-looking people, so sue me.”
“You must have hard time pulling yourself away from the mirror in the morning,” he said, so blandly that it took her a moment. There was nothing besides sincerity in his voice, and, before she could think of a rejoinder, Maisey whickered an excited greeting, demanding all of her attention now and not later, please.
“I’ve never spent much time with animals,” she murmured, scratching Maisey behind the ears. “I could get used to this. Is it all unicorns all the time with you?”
“Nah, mostly I’m on the run from one end of the country to the other, helping out with whatever mass herd vaccination or population count needs me. I’m a little weird in that I’ve never picked a specialty in the cryptid conservation community.”
Ilona watched with a complicated knot in her throat as Turner reached over to stroke Maisey's neck, making her arch with pleasure. There was something in his voice that made Ilona look more closely.
“But you think that might be changing.”
He jumped a little. “Gotta admit, that’s a little spooky, Ilona.”
“Is it?”
“I’ve mentioned it to a few people, mostly pie-in-the-sky sorta stuff. But that thing I told you earlier about reestablishing unicorns in the United States? Things have changed. There are more laws protecting forests, more chances for a small unicorn population to fly under the radar and return to some of their old stomping grounds. This really could be the start to it. There’s territory in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin that would work well for a family group or two. We’d have to start very small. Like with a single mare that can’t resist coming south and her foal.”
“And you’d be the one keeping an eye on her and the new baby?”
“It’d be a lifetime occupation. Given the lifespan of unicorns, if all went well, maybe I would get to see Maisey's grand-kid before I died. But yeah. Unicorns reintroduced to my home, where they should have been all along? That’s worth making it my life.”
Turner spoke quietly, but there was enough conviction in his voice that it made Ilona’s chest ache. She couldn’t make it go away even when Turner took her into the barn to see the accommodations for Maisey's foaling. Maisey, with free rein between the corral and the barn, ambled up to Ilona as soon as she could. Ilona ended up seated on a hay bale with Maisey resting her chin on her shoulder as Turner rechecked the supplies, the catheters, syringes, and gloves. He showed her the bags of thick, white liquid in the fridge in the back, colostrum in the event that the foal wasn’t able to nurse.
“The big hope is that I need none of this,” he explained. “Ideally, she delivers all on her own without a problem like a lot of mares do, but it’s her first, and I would rather have acquired all this gear for no reason.”
