“Hunter Black, MD. How can I help you?”
“Hi, Hunter, it’s Laurel.” Lord, I sounded shaky.
“Hello, Laurel. Everything okay?”
“Not really. I wouldn’t be bugging you at work if it were, right?” I let out a nervous chuckle.
“What’s going on? Are you unwell?”
I rubbed my swollen stomach and adjusted my cock in my sweats. “I’m not sick. But I have symptoms.”
“What kind of symptoms?”
“Like heat, but not in heat.”
Hunter paused, the silence ominous. “I think you have to be more specific.”
“My hole is leaking, and I’ve been hard for almost an hour now, but I’m not feeling aroused. My underbelly is bloated.”
“When was your last heat?”
I scrunched up my face, redoing the math in my head. Yes, I remembered it correctly. “Nine months ago.”
“Are you in pain? Lower back? Lower stomach? Cramps?”
“Just a faint ache. But I feel empty and itchy. My nipples are sensitive.”
“Look, I can’t say for sure it’s an approaching heat unless I take a blood or slick sample.” He paused and sighed. “But it’s the most plausible explanation.”
“It’s too early,” I piped up, grasping at straws.
“Yes. Very.”
He knew I knew how this worked. I was in the bear-shifter capital of this state, and I was going into a sudden heat. It didn’t take a medical degree to figure out what was happening. Someone’s pheromones set me off, and my body decided to pop kids for a shifter.
Or shifters, plural.
I couldn’t even start unwrapping the implications. It was too much, too sudden… The timing, dammit!
“Can there be any other explanation?” My voice came out pleading.
“Early onset heat can be caused by hormonal imbalance, but it’s rare, and usually, you’d experience symptoms earlier in life. A lot of false alarms between heats, interspersed with periods of lowered libido. Any of that ring a bell?”
I blew out a breath. “I’ve always been on the clock with my heats, and all my checkups showed normal values.”
In the silence that followed, I could hear my own heartbeat.
“Laurel, have you been spending more time with someone?”
I rubbed my forehead, two faces flashing in front of my eyes, two cocks as I held them in my hands, two mouths on my nipples…
My magnificent alphas.
Fuck. This was a mess.
“Please, Hunter, don’t tell anyone about this.”
“I won’t. Do you need my help? A ride, perhaps? Or I can find him for you and talk to him, but it would probably be better if you told him yourself. I assure you that whoever he is, he’ll be happy.”
