Page 36 of Stealing the Troll’s Heart

The war goes on and on. I find myself at the inn frequently since I have little else to do. The same bartender is there, but with spending so much time alone, I don’t mind his prying questions.

“So you made up,” he says with a chuckle while serving my beer.

I shrug. “Mates, you know?”

His eyes widen. “With a human?”

“When it happens, it happens.”

He doesn’t look as disgusted as I expected, more perplexed.

“Huh,” he says. “Never know what you’re going to find in this place.”

I spend a few days searching the coastline for emeralds, but I don’t see another like the one Telise carried in her pocket all that time. When I get back to Eyra Cove and the little leather shop, it looks like a hurricane has blown through.

“Raz?!” When I walk in the door, I’m almost bowled over by a small creature with her arms thrown around my neck. My Telise.

“You’re back,” I say. “I didn’t expect you yet.”

She’s angry, relieved, and enamored all at once. “I told you to wait!”

“I’m sorry.” She kisses me hard, and I return it just as fiercely. Then I pull a little rock out of my pocket. “I found this, though.”

I produce a tiny round object—a pearl. It’s no emerald, but it’s nothing to sneeze at, either. Telise takes it in her hand and holds it up to the light.

“Oh! It’s perfect. I know exactly where it should go.” She leads me to the back room, where she’s spread out all of her findings. There are beautiful hides of allsorts. She was busy. “Look at this.” She pulls out a beautiful lion hide, the fur as smooth as silk and the mane bushy and full. She mimics tying it around her throat, holding the pearl up in the front. “What do you think?”

I wrap my arms around her, and she catches the pearl in her hand just in time.

“It’s beautiful,” I say, pulling her close. She gets that mischievous look in her eye that she only gets when she’s about to tear off all my clothes. She’s been gone for almost three months, and I’m more than ready to reclaim her. But I’m going to take my time about it and show her just how much I missed her.

I take off her clothes one item at a time, until she’s standing naked in front of me. Something about her looks different, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I push her against the bed, then fall to my knees in front of her. I’m going to remind her what it means to be home with me again.

At first, I tease just the outside of her with my fingers, and then bring my tongue to the tiny bundle of nerves right above her tight little slit. How she still looks so fragile and small after the way I’ve taken her... It mystifies me.

Soon she’s moaning under my mouth, so I add one finger, and then two, until I’m licking her and pumping my fingers inside her, and she’s crying for mercy. Just before she falls off the edge, I stop, and she gasps with indignation.

I waggle a finger at her. “Not yet.” When I move up her body, though, I see something new. Her belly is less flat than I remember, and there are spiderwebs of pink lines sweeping up across it. “Hmm,” I say, kissing her there. “What’s this? Ate too many blueberries while you were out hunting lions?”

She doesn’t laugh at my joke. Okay, sure, it wasn’t a very good one, but—

“I think you can guess what it is,” she says quietly. And when I look up at her serious face, it strikes me like a bolt of lightning.

“It can’t be.” I take a step back, soaking in the sight of her. Her belly is most definitely more swollen than it was when she left. Her breasts look a little bigger than I remember, and there’s a new roundness to her cheeks, too. They’re pink and shining.

At first, it feels like I’ve won some impossible prize. I’ve done it—we’ve done it. Now there’s one, maybe even two of my whelps growing inside her. I want to bury my face in her tits, and then sink my cock deep into her and take her over and over again until she can’t come around me even once more.

And then I take in the concern on her face, and I have to back up.

Wait. What does any of this mean?

“Is it mine?” I ask, suddenly feeling suspicious. She was gone for a long time. And that other human, whatever his name had been—I know how he felt about her.

Before I can finish the thought, Telise whacks me across the head. “Ow!” I clutch my ear. “That hurt.”

“Of course it’s yours, you moron.” But she’s cautiously smiling. “I just didn’t think it was possible.” There are so many unasked questions on her lips, ones that I have no idea how to answer. “How?”

---