Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 81208 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81208 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 406(@200wpm)___ 325(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
I’ve told them how I feel about the rivalry. I don’t want a return to battles, injuries, or worse. My children need fathers, not graves to visit. I can’t deal with the thought of feeling like something is missing in my soul again. Now I’ve mated to my bears, losing one of them would kill me.
I keep hoping that they'll see the world differently when they hold their sons. Male pride cannot come before love. Not in the long term. No rivalry is worth a child losing their father over. They need to hold strong.
I run my hand over the warm velvet of my voluminous dress, feeling a foot kick beneath my palm. There are two boys inside me, sons of one of the men who claimed me as their mate. My babies will grow up with three fathers and will be luckier for it.
Two boys who'll be bears.
Strong and fierce.
Passionate and determined.
Filled with love and a desire to protect, just like their daddies.
Coran and Connell are the names we’ve chosen. Strong names from bears who’ve long passed, names that will live again.
I’ve had dreams about them, just like my mother did—dreams that I haven’t been able to share with their daddies. My bear boys run free through the forest, with thick, dark hair and dark eyes like their daddies. They run until they come face to face with a redheaded girl with gray eyes—a girl as pretty as a woodland fairy, with a voice that spills like magic over the world.
A girl who shifts into a wolf.
I tell myself I’m creating the dreams from my worry about a future confrontation. I try hard to convince myself that these dreams are nothing like the ones my momma used to tell me all those years ago, dreams that came true.
If I told Hunter, Evan, or Robert about the wolf girl and our sons, what would they do? They believe in destiny. They’d carry around the fear that our sons’ destiny is a match that can only end in a blighted future—twenty years or more of the guillotine hanging over all our necks. I can’t do it to them.
Rosie is worried about me giving birth at home, wanting me to go to the hospital like everyone else. I told her I’d turned into an earth mother since I came to live in the forest. It’s a risk we can’t take, though. Sometimes, the trauma of birth triggers the babies to shift for the first time. I can’t imagine hospital midwives dealing well with that.
I have someone coming to assist. Hallie is a midwife but also a wife to two of the clan bears, and she lives three towns to the north in a cottage like the one in my picture book of Goldilocks and the three bears. She’s been tracking my pregnancy, and I’m confident that things will be okay. She hasn’t lost a mother or bear-baby yet.
“Would you like a drink?” Evan sticks his head around the door, smiling when he sees me with my feet up.
“I’m good,” I say. “Robert bought me a mug of hot chocolate.”
Evan rolls his eyes. “That man always beats me to it with thoughtful gestures.”
I smile because he’s right. “He didn’t beat you to a foot rub, though.”
When Evan comes into the room and settles on the footstool before me, gathering my feet in his lap, I’m filled with love. His firm hands knead my tender, swollen feet with just the right pressure, and I close my eyes and relax.
My life before I came to this place seemed fine. I’d carved a tiny place for myself in the world. I’d taken my passion for locks and keys and confined myself to work with no hope of more. Now, I have a future filled with love and acceptance, and I can give back so much, too.
Sometimes, I have to pinch myself to ensure it’s all real.
That night, I sleep between Evan and Robert while Hunter prowls the perimeter of our property, ever watchful for danger. It’ll be Robert’s turn tomorrow, and Evan’s the night after. That’s the thing with having three men who are bears. There are three sets of shoulders for every burden—three apex predators to keep me safe.
“Hunter,” I whisper through our mental connection as Robert and Evan sleep beside me.
“Mate? You should be sleeping,” he replies.
“You should be here, my love.”
“Tomorrow,” he replies firmly. My babies kick inside me as though they’re listening to their father’s voice and trying to get involved.
“Stay safe, my heart,” I whisper. The image of him prowling in the darkness, the sky dappled with stars, and a moon that’s almost swollen to her full size, makes me anxious.
“I love you. I love you to the end of the earth. To the end of my life. To the end of time,” he replies, and I fall asleep with those words resting softly against my heart.