Page 54 of Breeding Clinic

“The baby was hungry,” she says, shrugging. Kat holds the apple out to me. “Want to try it?”

“I do want a taste.” I tug her closer and bend down, capturing her lips. Her lip gloss is strawberry flavored and her mouth tastes like sweet, juicy apples.

Underneath that, the warm autumn day has made her sweat. Her pheromones perfume the air. Sweet, dirty cookies. The sort covered in colorful sugar crystals. Her thick, fertile scent tempts me to drizzle her cookies in my icing. I grind against her, enjoying the way she squishes under my grabbing hands.

“There are families here,” Gabriel reminds us.

We separate and she swipes a thumb over my mouth with a giggle. She wipes off the smear of lip gloss that transferred from her mouth to mine. “Be good,” she warns.

“Oh, I can be very good,” I promise, my voice low. “Exceptional, really.”

“How many of this kind do you want?” Matthew asks.

“Three or four,” she answers, helping them pick out the best ones. “Let’s go find the baking apples next.”

We fill the bag until it’s nearly bursting at the seams. The tiny paper sack holds more apples than I thought it would. I’m glad we didn’t get the bushel. Once we have our apples andpumpkins and mums picked out, we take a break in their covered eating area.

Gabriel sips on his pumpkin ale while Matthew and I split the fried sampler. It’s bursting with fries, onion rings, loaded potato bites, and fried pickles, and I wash it all down with an ice cold cider. Kat gets cinnamon sugar crystals all over her face while she eats her apple cider donut.

When she sneaks a fried pickle, adding it to her next bite of donut, I can’t help but watch in amazement. Is this her first pregnancy craving? I hate that there’s so much of her life that we miss. That she’s not always with us. But whenever I gently bring up mattress shopping or offer to clear out a drawer for her, she gets cagey.

She’s not ready yet. Part of me worries she might never be. That she’s still not sure about us even though we’re nearly halfway through this pregnancy. I don’t mind taking things slow, but we are on a deadline. I want her to wear my mating bite and put our pack name on the birth certificate. More than that, I wanther. We all do. Because she’s perfect for us. In the depths of my soul, I recognize her as mine.

I turn the plate so the pickles are closer to her and pretend not to watch as she demolishes them. I’m glad her appetite is back. I didn’t like it when she couldn’t eat much. It made my instincts to protect and provide crazy whenever she turned down food.

The hayride slowly rolls back through its loop. “Want to take a hayride?” I ask everyone.

Kat licks the sugar crystals from her fingers and my cock strains my jeans. “Sure,” she says, wiping her face clean with a napkin.

Gabriel finishes his beer and tosses out our trash, and we get in line. Nobody will bother our stuff where I parked it in the shade. A wagon full of people bundle out, and then we allclimb up and get settled. Once the wagon’s full, the driver takes off.

We bump along, swaying from the dirt road full of rocks and pits. A gentle breeze cools the sweat on our skin. I put an arm around both her and Matthew, rubbing his back while I pull her closer into my side.

The farm is bigger than it looked from the gates. The visitor area is a fraction of their apple orchards. The other trees are cordoned off, a cherry picker left in between rows while farmhands take a break. On the other end of the you-pick visitor section, there’s the corn maze, a sunflower field, and a huge playground with a bounce house for kids.

“Look, they have something called apple cannons,” Matthew says, pointing.

“What’s an apple cannon?” Gabriel asks, craning his head to look.

A minute later, we have our answer. Compressed air makes a loudthunkas someone shoots an apple hundreds of feet away near the treeline. It explodes on impact, missing its target.

“I want to do that,” Matthew says.

“We’re doing that next,” Gabriel talks over them.

“Man, that’s so cool,” Kat agrees.

I let out a huff of laughter. Three against one. I’m outnumbered. “Fine.”

The man driving the tractor stops, letting people off. About half the wagonload departs, splitting off toward different activities. Others climb on, eager to be taken to the front of the orchard.

I follow my pack toward the apple cannons and pay the bored teenager for all four of their compressed air powered cannons. She gives each of us six bruised apples. Targets have been set up across the field. There’s an old car, a dilapidatedschool bus, bales of hay with a bullseye spray painted on them, and big steel barrels staggered about.

“Ready? Go!” the teenager yells.

I load an apple from my basket into the cannon, aim, and launch it. It misses my target, but hits the ground and explodes anyways. Matthew’s hits the school bus, bursting apart. Gabriel knocks a milk can off a hay bale and Kat’s apple shoots all the way toward the tree line where it disappears from view.

“Good shots,” I tell them both.

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