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SAM
I stared down at the beautiful, tiny woman in my arms. My mate. And yet, Ihad no idea what to do with her. I certainly didn’t want to put her down.
“You can lay her on our spare bed, if you want?” Nevaeh suggested, gesturing to the fourth bedroom in their house.
I shook my head, feeling stubborn. “Ah, no, I’d rather hold her for a minute.”
Nevaeh smiled gently. “Sure, but how ‘bout you guys sit down at least. I’ll put some breakfast on.”
Brad laughed and patted Nevaeh on the back. “She means, I’ll put some breakfast on. The woman burns toast on a daily basis.”
Nevaeh shrugged good-naturedly. “Told you when we mated that I couldn’t cook.”
Aaron, Nevaeh’s other mate, stepped up and kissed her lips possessively, then pulled away with a grin. “Yep. We don’t love you for your cooking.”
Nevaeh blushed prettily and I began to relax.
She was right. We needed food and time to wait for our mate to wake up.
I found my way to an armchair and sat, pulling Celeste closer into my body and arranging her head on my chest.
I loved the sensations that ran through me, while I held her. While her scent rose up and tickled my nostrils. While tendrils of her hair fell across my bare arms.
“So, ah, what do we do about this, then?” I asked, and everyone else in the room laughed.
Everyone except Dane, that is.
He had his gaze firmly fixed on Celeste, and he pulled up a chair next to me, obviously not wanting to be too far away from the diminutive female.
Aaron and Nevaeh jumped onto the couch together and Brad went to the kitchen to make whatever he was going to make.
None of us liked to cook in our individual pack, so I was hopeful our mate had a little more skill than Nevaeh seemed to have in the kitchen.
But if she didn’t—who cared, really? We’d managed okay so far, and take-out existed for a reason.
“No, like seriously. I have questions,” I said, repeating my earlier query. “What do we do now? And how do we know if she’s just Tayte’s mate, or ours as well?”
I brushed her long blonde hair off her face and stared down at her. Even though her eyes were closed, she was beautiful. But she seemed very young.
“And how old is she?”
She barely looked legal. But surely Tayte wouldn’t be stupid enough to have taken her if she were underage?
My stomach tightened at the thought.
Tayte had already had her. Been inside her.
My wolf growled and I tightened my hold on her.
“Relax,” Aaron said from the couch. “I know you’re feeling all sorts of weird, possessive, jealous crap, but it’ll pass. Just, you know, focus on something else.”
I glared at the other Beta. “You mean I should forget that my Alpha’s already had her?”
Aaron nodded. “Yeah, definitely. Because when she wakes, you’ll all have her, and she’ll love all of you. Have faith in the system, my friend.”
I grunted, not able to find the words to tell him to get fucked in an eloquent manner.
The anger in me began to rise. Soon it would reach boiling point.
I had to get a grip on myself. I took a few slow breaths, but it didn’t help much.
Didn’t they understand how frustrating this was?
“You might want to put her down now,” Aaron said, and this time I heard the demand in his tone.
I forced myself to breathe deepeer, to think.
Aaron was right. I was only getting worse the longer I sat here with her draped across my lap.
Brad called from the kitchen. “Through that door, Sam. The bed’s good to go.”
I followed his directions and placed her down on the large bed in their spare room.
Dane was right behind me, staring down at her. “She looks like an angel.”
I nodded. “Yeah, she does.”
Her golden hair spread over the duvet and encircled her face like a halo.
I turned and walked away, unsettled by the way she made me feel. Angry, possessive, and worried.
When I got back to my seat, my wolf finally began to relax, to settle. I could breathe again. Though tension still held me in its grip, the anger dissipated.
“Told you,” Aaron grunted and I nodded at him. Yeah, he’d been right.
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said. “Don’t forget, we’ve been where you are, man.”
Brad stepped into the room then, and placed food in front of us on the low coffee table.
Pancakes. Sliced fruit. Cream.
“Wow.” The Omega had said he could cook. He clearly wasn’t kidding.
“Eat as much as you want,” Brad said as he put down a bunch of plates. We all served ourselves, the distraction of food helping with the strange mood that had gripped me.
I piled my plate up as Brad went back to the kitchen to make more.
I looked at Nevaeh, the one who’d brought us our mate.
“What happened tonight at the hospital?”
She picked up a strawberry, dipped it in the cream then ate it before she answered.
“It was a bit crazy, actually. I was just finishing my night shift and one of the nurses came in to say that there was a woman in the ER. She had stumbled in dressed only in her underwear, freezing cold and asking for Claire.”
She had been... what?
I stared at Nevaeh. “What do you mean? She was running around town, in the middle of the night, in her underwear?”
Had Fate sent us some sort of cuckoo?
Nevaeh shrugged. “I went straight to her and she was already in the shower, scrubbing herself clean. That behavior, combined with the fact that she said she used to live with a pack of bear shifters, made me think she probably took off her clothes to knock them off the scent. She’s young and pretty timid, but there’s no doubting she’s smart.”
Pride blossomed in my heart at the same time as panic whistled through me.
“She was living with the bears? How is that possible?”
Nevaeh shrugged, seemingly unworried by this turn of events.
“I didn’t ask her. But seeing as Trevor deliberately dated me, then stalked me for years to keep me from finding you guys, maybe they did the same thing with her? Maybe they smelled the wolf mate scent on her, the same way Trevor smelled it on me.”
Dane gasped beside me. “And she somehow escaped them? A whole bear pack? And went straight for Claire. Pretty amazing for anyone to achieve that, let alone someone young and timid, like you say.”
Nevaeh began picking at her pancake, eating small pieces of it with her fingers.
“I agree. Though, given she was drinking in the pub the night she met Tayte, its likely she’d be at least twenty-one, I think.”
Well, that’s comforting.
Dane sat forward on his chair. “And how do we know if she’s our mate, too?”
Aaron answered that one. “Did she smell super-sweet to both of you? Like, intoxicating?”
I looked at Dane. “Yeah,” we both answered in unison.
“She shook and gasped when you guys touched her, even after she’d touched the Alpha,” Nevaeh said.
“Yeah. So?” I said.
Nevaeh grinned. “That’s another sign she’s your intended mate. It looks like you guys are very much designed to have one mate for your triad. Like us.”
Stark relief, unlike anything I’d ever felt, raced through me. Tayte wouldn’t leave us for Celeste, and she wouldn’t leave us for him. Dane and I wouldn’t be left alone, without an Alpha or a mate. “That’s... great.”
The front door banged open and I looked up.
The sky outside was decorated with red and orange hues now.
A perfect sunrise.
Grayson and Tayte paced back into the room, still in wolf form.
Grayson shook his pelt and stood up, rising from his silver wolf into his massive human form.
He grabbed his clothes from where he’d left them and pulled them back on.
I glanced across to Nevaeh and watched her devour him with her eyes.
Hopefully my mate would look at me like that someday.
When Grayson was dressed, he stared down at Tayte, who hadn’t yet turned back.
“What’s wrong?”
Tayte looked toward Nevaeh, then his clothes, which had been shredded by the force of his abrupt change.
“Oh, right. Yeah, hang on.”
Grayson trotted up the stairs and came back a few minutes later with a pair of jeans and a sweater.
I almost laughed. Tayte was embarrassed to be naked in the room with Nevaeh, but earlier he’d shredded his clothes like a teenager, changing without even thinking about afterward.
“Here.” Grayson laid the clothes on the back of the couch and Tayte raced over to the other Alpha, let go of his wolf, and stood up.
He was naked once again in the room.
I tried to distract Nevaeh as Gray’s expression hardened and the tension in the room increased.
Alphas were territorial and this situation was uncomfortable for everyone.
“Um... anything else you want to tell us, Nevaeh? About our mate?”
Nevaeh grabbed another strawberry and bit into it.
“She’s tough. I can tell you that. I saw a few scars on her, no doubt from injuries she’s sustained over the years. Trevor is violent, and I’m guessing many of the other bears in that pack are, too. She may look fragile and innocent, but she’ll have some strength to her.”
Tayte, now dressed, walked over to where Dane and I sat, and stood behind us.
“That’s good to hear,” he said. “I hoped Fate wouldn’t send us a mate who couldn’t cope with our world.”
“Oh, she can cope, all right. Those bears are rugged creatures.” Nevaeh shuddered. “If she lived with them her whole life, as a human, then she’s tougher than any of us realize.”
I could feel that Nevaeh was leaving something out.
I stared at her, narrowing my eyes, and she glanced around the room as though avoiding my gaze.
“There’s something else, isn’t there, Nevaeh? Something you’re not telling us.”
She looked at Tayte and back to me and Dane, before nodding. “There is something else. But I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
She smiled gently. “Because Celeste will tell you.”
There was movement behind Grayson, where he sat on the couch.
It was her... it was Celeste. She was up again!
Dane and I jumped to our feet, and Tayte released a low rumble and crossed his arms over his chest. It seemed that none of us could still when Celeste was in the room.
She walked out into the lounge, her beautiful blue eyes shining at us with a mixture of fear and hope.
She didn’t seem afraid of us, though. Whatever she was fearful of, it wasn’t a bunch of wolf shifter possible mates.
She just came straight over to us, looking from Tayte, to me to Dane and back again.
“Did I pass out?” she asked, in a voice that sent ripples of awareness over my skin.
She was so beautiful, I couldn’t believe it. Soft skin, shiny hair, big, blue eyes.
“Yes. Though your recovery was pretty quick compared to Nevaeh,” Grayson answered.
Celeste put her hands into her pockets and glanced back at the other pack’s Alpha.
“That’s probably because I’d met Tayte before.”
“God, you’re beautiful,” I said without thinking, and she turned her head and smiled brightly up at me.
“What’s Nevaeh talking about, Celeste? Is there something we need to know?” Tayte asked.
She nodded. “There’s lots of things. Like my background, the bears, everything. But I think...” She turned around to look at Nevaeh, “I think she meant one specific thing. It’s the main reason I’m here.”
We waited, the air around us completely still with expectation.
You would have heard the proverbial pin drop.
“And that is?” I prompted, dying of the suspense.
She lifted her gaze to meet Tayte’s. “I’m pregnant.”