Page 183 of Pack Baby for the Silver Foxes

“No,” Mac said with disgust. “We’re waiting but Mary is taking too long. And then you came and stopped it again.”

“Sorry buddy,” Damien said, then looked at me and then his dads. “I wanted to say sorry before leaving because I think it’s safe to say I’m going back to Boston.”

“Good choice,” I said.

He smiled, and for the first time since he arrived in England, he didn’t look like a boy trying to win a war no one else had declared.

The night became easier after that. Not perfect, because perfect would have been suspicious.

Damien avoided looking at my rings for too long. Hudson watched him with the tenderness of a father trying not to crowd a wounded son. Lincoln relaxed by degrees, his hand coming back to my shoulder whenever conversation moved too close to old pain.

But Damien laughed when Mac explained Duchess’s legal name change. He apologized to Lincoln with his eyes when Presley made a joke about men needing emotional subtitles. He asked Hudson if he could still come by tomorrow before his flight.

Hudson said yes, and I breathed.

Later that night, back at the penthouse, I stood in the private lift between my two alphas with two rings on my finger and absolutely no idea what my face was doing.

“You look halfway between happy and suspicious,” Lincoln said.

I grinned. “That’s because happiness has been behaving strangely.”

Hudson took my hand and kissed the rings. “We have one more thing.”

“No.”

“You don’t know what it is.”

“That’s never stopped me from objecting before.”

Lincoln smiled. “Come upstairs.”

“We are upstairs.”

“More upstairs.”

I looked between them. “This penthouse has more upstairs?”

“It has an upper floor,” Hudson said.

“Of course it does. How gauche of me to assume the sky was enough.”

They took me up a private staircase behind a locked door. At the top was a short hall with soft lights set low in the walls.

Hudson opened the door at the end.

A room opened in front of me, enormous in a way that didn’t feel empty. It felt made for me.

A massive nest filled one side, built low and wide beneath a skylight where the London night looked close enough to touch. Blankets in deep green, storm gray, violet, and cream were layered with pillows, throws, and pieces of fabric I recognized by scent before sight. Lincoln’s shirts. Hudson’s T-shirts. My own soft things from the room downstairs.

Beside the nest stood two white wooden cribs, simple and waiting.

On the shelf above them, positioned with obvious care and no shame whatsoever, stood the cursed giraffe.

My hand went to my mouth.

On the other side of the room, near the windows, stood an easel. Not just an easel, but a proper one, beautiful, heavy, and adjustable. Beside it were shelves of paints, brushes, canvases, charcoals, inks, paper, jars, cloths, all arranged with Hudson-level precision and Lincoln-level abundance. The window beyond looked over London, the river cutting through the city in moon-lit silver and black curves.

The perfect London landscape. Not Surrey, where I’d learned to paint because I had nowhere else to put my feelings. This was home.