Page 43 of Magnum, Volume 2

“You’re huge,” she said. “I was expecting, like…” She held her hands up and made the shape of maybe an eight-inch-long turtle.

“Natural snapping turtles, as opposed to the shifter variety, do get as big as me if they live long enough, but most people never see them.”

“You saw the snake because of the pattern thing?”

I nodded. “Movement, but yeah. It broke the pattern.”

I’d worn swim trunks down, and I stepped into them.

“Yeah,” she said, her gaze on the shorts, then my face. “We should go back in. Nickie said to make sure you eat after a change.”

“The ol’ladies here can answer your questions, too,” I told her.

“I’ll talk to them this weekend, and I’m sure I’ll have tons of questions, but Nickie is human, and I’m guessing most of them aren’t.”

She was right, but the women would have to tell her what they are.

- - - ❖ - - -

Storm

Walking the little fairy-like trail up to the house, my mind was all over the place. Were fairies real? Had he been to wherever they were from, if they were?

I shook my head and tried to focus. Nickie had coached me, explaining at length how to keep my scent from showing him how I’m really feeling.

So while I was completely shocked and a little… not grossed out, but definitely shaken up and a little horrified, I’d managed to focus on remembering how much I love him, so those feelings didn’t make it to the part of my brain that changes my scent based on my emotions.

Because I thought I’d been ready, but it turns out, there’s no way to fully prepare to watch the man you love strip naked and morph into a massive, prehistoric-looking creature. Seeing his human frame vanish, replaced by thick, ancient-looking armor, dark leathery skin, and those beady reptile eyes… it was a visceral jolt.

And the business end of his… mouth? Beak? The snapping part, whatever it’s called, you could tell meant business — razor-sharp and scary strong. And he was so fucking big. With normal-sized snapping turtles, you worry about them taking part of your finger off, but this turtle could easily take my arm off. I’d researched snapping turtles and knew they eat fish, frogs, snakes, birds, and pretty much anything they can kill and fit into their mouth. But my research hadn’t shown me how fucking big they can get. Damn.

And I was feeling guilty as fuck, because I don’t think I’d have reacted that way for a wolf or an eagle — sexy animals, right? But the man I love is a stubborn-headed turtle with walls thicker than his shell, and an attitude that one-thousand-percent matches a snapping turtle. I wouldn’t change a thing. Not a single fucking bullheaded, unmovable, tenacious, vigilant, meticulous thing.

“Should I be making, like, duck or goose dishes for you?” I asked him.

“Not opposed to either of those,” he said. “The turtle loves catfish, but it isn’t my favorite in human form. His body is made for consuming bottom feeders, but I don’t think this one is, really.”

- - - ❖ - - -

Magnum

While I ate a stack of venison steaks, she focused her questions back on vampires. I wished I could tell her there are three species of vampires, but Brooke had only given me the okay to tell Storm about the Strigorii.

Friday afternoon, I asked her if she was going to need more time, and she shook her head and thanked me for opening up to her, for giving her time to get to know all of me again — and then told me she was looking forward to how much she was going to hate me putting the waist cincher on her in a few hours.

And somehow, we went right back into the schedule. I heard her asking a million questions of the ol’ladies over the weekend, and she asked me how many criminal attorneys are mongoose shifters, which made me laugh, but I told her, “I only know the one.”

The rest of the winter went by entirely too fast. She got caught up in a story in fucking Denver and was there for nearly five weeks, but I flew out to be with her for… not quite half of it, but not far from it. I couldn’t let my girl go that long without feeling me deep in her cunt with every step of every day, could I?

She quickly became comfortable at the clubhouse on the weekends, but I wasn’t sure how she’d feel about a prop vest. She doesn’t dress like a biker’s ol’lady, and that’s fine, but she hadn’t gone on any of our long trips, and that bugged me.

I knew she’d been in the middle of investigations and hadn’t been able to just take off for days at a time, but it still made me feel like she didn’t want to be seen with us in public. I mean, sure, she’d managed to fly into Daytona for two days of bike week, so she was clearly making the attempt.

And how could I bring it up to her? I didn’t want to accuse her of being a snob if that wasn’t the case, but if it was… well, if it was, then it would break my heart. She said she’d accepted all of me, but there was still this one thing I wasn’t sure of.

So I just kept not doing anything about it until Kitty pulled me aside at the clubhouse one night and said, “You ever going to properly claim her?”

“You think she’d actually wear a vest proclaiming her to be my property?”