“Me, too.”
He was everything my bear wanted. From the first moment she sat up in the glass box.
“Finish it,”she whispered inside me as we rode on each other’s pleasure, hearts filling up as the orgasm built inside both of us.
Then he downshifted his hips. And… and… hello, outer space.
Supernovas formed and atoms collided. We rocketed to his moon and gazed directly into the sea of sun-stars.
And then we jumped into the space between them and floated back down to our plane here on Earth.
“Core memory codified,”his black silk voice murmured inside my head.
It was amazing to know exactly what he meant as my body finally stopped emitting estrus. And my eyes fluttered closed to the image of the four of us at the table, telling our three progeny about how I became the first queen in all of Secret Kingdom history to become pregnant with three future rulers on her First Claim wedding night.
An Unexpected Visitor
Hamish
Faoiltiarn
“Senair?”Dorie, Hamish’s new granddaughter, asked as they were finishing up their morning ride on the horses, in that Canadian way of hers, where she just said his name without spitting out her question.
If Hamish didn’t like the sound of her calling him grandfather in Scottish Gaelic so much, he might have fussed at the twelve-year-old granddaughter he’d unexpectedly gotten for Christmas, with another pup on the way now that Alban had mated and married her mother.
As it was, he indulged little Dorie with a patient, “Yes, granddaughter mine?”
Her light-brown face tilted up to him, more somber than usual, especially when she was out riding. “Do you think we’ll ever see Aunt Naomi and the others again? I’m afraid to ask Maem because I know it makes her sad.”
Sweet child, always considering her mother. This was why it was impossible to fuss too much at her about her inefficient question-asking.
Still, Hamish had to be careful with his words. Alban—who Dorie had already taken to calling Da—had warned him over and over again to protect the girl’s feelings. She’d already been through so much with her abusive birth father.
“Well, what do you think?” he asked with a gruff-but-gentle tone. He’d been trying to soften his speaking voice as of late, now that there were she-wolves living in his and Alban’s house.
“Da says we’ll get them back, no matter what. But the boys at school say we never got the first stolen brides back, and it’s unlikely we’ll ever see these lost brides again, either.”
Dorie’s shoulders sank a bit.
“I saw Aunt Tara crying in Uncle Magnus’s arms the last time I went to the castle stables,” she said. “She didn’t see me coming around the corner. But she was telling him it was all her fault and she had no idea how to break the news to everybody back in Canada because she knew they’d flip.”
No doubt. Tara was lucky that the Wölfennite community she’d gotten to agree to the exchange didn’t believe in technology, or the gig would’ve already been up for their new queen.
Hamish had no idea how Tara would clever her way out of this jammy. But one thing was for certain...
“This is why it’s never a good idea to discount children,” he told his thoughtful granddaughter. “You often get the right of a situation without even having to grow up.”
“But what does that mean?” Dorie asked. “Which one of them is right?”
“Well, what do you think?” he asked her back.
“I think…” Dorie worked her jaw, her thoughts clearly churning. “I think... Da should stay here in Scotland. Not go to Ireland looking for them again. We’re happy, the four of us. And the Irish Wolves’ leader said they’d let any brides who want to come back return in the spring.”
Hamish nodded, agreeing with her conclusion. But...
“Knowing the male your Da is, do you think he can do that?”
“No,” Dorie answered, her voice miserable as they rounded the corner that led to the main road toward the Faoiltiarn gates. “But I have such a bad feeling about the February trip. I wish there was a way to—Do you smell that?”
