Page 96 of Reclaiming Home

Everything was falling into place, and I squeezed Kye to my side.

“What?” he asked, smiling.

I leaned in to kiss him, tasting him properly.

“Oh, that,” he exhaled the words when we separated.

The flush of his cheeks wasn’t only the cold, or the snow that started to fall around us.

Rian’s SUV rolled into the yard.

“I swear to god if you bought any more stuff, I’m gonna strangle you, Rian Flynn!” I called out to him as soon as he got out of the vehicle.

He cackled and grabbed a few shopping bags from the back seat, including a—

“Is that a litterbox?” Kye blinked at him.

“I knew you’d cave immediately and wanted her to be prepared.” He flounced inside, calling for Carys.

Kye groaned and pressed his forehead against my chin. “Is there a way to parent a two-hundred-year-old vampire?”

I chuckled. “If there was, I haven’t found it yet.”

“Great.”

When I curled up with him that night, and every night after, I felt contentment like I never had before.

The house I’d called home for years as a child and a teenager finallyfeltlike home. Notahome, but my home. The one where I could live happily with my pack and my mate.

Rian had to go back to Seattle for one event or another every now and then, but he came back as soon as he could.

He found a solid donor in town and a couple of potential backups as well.

Kye started to make plans for a greenhouse and how to make the rose garden flourish. He hoped that growing veggies, fruits, and berries on the property and getting chickens would bring down our running costs.

Rian smartly chose not to mention how he could pay everything for everyone forever and not see a dip in his bank balance.

I couldn’t wait to see what everyone I loved, my family, would choose to do with their lives.

Holden and Ben had jobs. Max and Carys wanted to study more. Rian did his philanthropic things from a laptop in the family room, and Kye wanted to better our property with the skills he’d learned at college and maybe even finish his degree one day.

Me? I kept building and renovating. Reclaiming every piece of my home, one at a time with my mate right beside me.

Epilogue

Kye

Thanksgiving was tomorrow. We might’ve already eaten two smaller turkeys—because who wanted a gigantic one anyway—and there were two more in the ovens.

The house was ready. It had a patched up roof that would handle the winter, new windows—including that nice bay window in the kitchen that was Carys’ favorite studying spot. The backside of the home would get worked on in the spring, and we’d decided to leave the garage slash chicken coop build for springtime, also.

Lina had become a fixture. Mr. Keller had told us to keep her—in a playful way that told us how much he loved his daughter and didn’t mind the budding romance between Lina and Carys whatsoever. He and his wife had even let her stay with us for Thanksgiving, because they and her brothers were going to visit some family that hadn’t been kind to Lina while she was in recovery from her accident. It hadn’t been a big deal, she’d told us, but enough that she didn’t want to spend a whole evening there.

I was outside with the girls, Max, and Rian. We’d gone for a walk in the woods just for fun. Ben and Holden were doing another grocery run for tomorrow, and Brodie was playing lumberjack by the back corner of the house, close to where he’d used the back porch for a firewood storage for the winter.

As we stepped back into the yard, we all stopped.

Brodie’s back was to us, he had taken off his jacket and was swinging his ax in only a tank top. Wolves didn’t get cold easily.

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