Ash hesitated before responding, his gaze flicking toward me.“She smells like ours, and Cody is our sworn maul mate. I’ll support him no matter what. But…”
He sighed, his expression tightening on me.“I should let you know that raising a shifter cub alone would be hard. We can helpand guide you as much as we can from afar. But Cody especially wouldn’t be able to get within thirty kilometers of you after this first—and hopefully last—cycle without his bear suffering or losing control.”
“If you choose that option, I’m out,”Mak said coldly, his voice sharp.“I’m not going to watch Cody—orNoelle—put a cub through that.”
He said my name like it was something scraped off the bottom of his shoe, sharp and cutting, stripping it of the soft French Christmas warmth it was supposed to have. But for some reason, the thought of it only being two of the bears made my stomach ache.
“This is crazy. All of this is just… crazy, and I didn’t ask for this,”I whispered, my voice cracking as I looked at each of them.“I didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me. And yet, somehow, I’m supposed to make this huge choice that could change my life forever—or ruin your bond? Do you know how insane this is?”
Cody’s expression softened.
“We know this isn’t fair, Noelle. None of this is fair. If I could take back that bite, I… probably wouldn’t.”He let out a shaky breath, his amber eyes glinting with something between guilt and longing.“I wish I could tell you it was all instinct, that it wasn’t my choice. But the truth is… I wanted you. And now I want you to choose. To want me back. Us back.”
He shook his head, a wry smile tugging at his lips."You make it damn hard to be noble, cocoa bean. I will be, though."
His expression became resolute."If that's what you need from me, I'll do anything you want."
"But there's a ticking clock in play, I'm afraid,"Ash added."You staved off the first wave, but another one will be on you soon, and I'm sorry, but non-penetrative sex won't be enough to satisfy your bear for long."
My bear.Strangely, that sounded like the exact right label for this new presence and voice inside of me.
My stomach churned. The weight of everything—the estrus, the bond, the impossible decision—pressed down on me like I was being buried alive. How had my life come to this? How was this even a choice? That I, alone, had to make?
“What will it be, Noelle?”Mak asked, his deep voice rumbling like distant thunder.“Make a decision and put them out of their misery.”
The heat—estrus—thrummed through me like a bonfire that refused to burn out, flaring brighter and hotter with each passing second.
I couldn’t believe I was literally being asked to choose the bear—choose thebears.
But I opened my mouth to give them my decision.
noelle
. . .
“Um,well, I can’t agree to stay here with all of you forever.…”
I swallowed hard, forcing myself to raise my eyes to meet Cody’s.
“But I also can’t imagine going to Vancouver and doing something like this with anyone else. For some reason, I only want you—only you three. At least until this estrus business is done. Does that make me crazy?”
I shook my head, mostly at myself. Then I glanced over my shoulder to ask Ash, “Could this be a concussion or something like that?”
“It might be,” Ash admitted. “Our bears usually heal things like broken bones and external wounds outside of bond marks in a matter of hours. But brain stuff is still the last frontier of the body. Even for full humans.”
Which I wasn’t anymore.
I raised my hand to brush over the jagged ridges now etched into my once-smooth skin—a reminder that, beneath the surface,nothing about my body was the same anymore.Could it be that his bite...?
“Yeah,” Cody answered aloud, his voice tinged with guilt. “My bite’s probably influencing your decision, too.”
His apologetic grimace made him look impossibly sweet, even in this chaotic moment—while I was sitting on his erection, trying to make a life-altering decision that might end with me pregnant. By a bear shifter. A bear shifter I’d met what couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes ago.
Oh god.
My mind faltered, flailing to keep up as the strange lust simmered under my skin, hotter and hotter, like a tea kettle ready to whistle.
“In that case…” Struggling to access my nurse’s logic beneath the overwhelming heat, I nodded slowly. “I think the wisest thing to do would be to take you up on your offer—with no long-term strings attached. If we do this, it can’t be forever, and I don’t want any of you biting me again.”
