Page 26 of Alpha Dragon's Wings of Love

“Yes, Daddy.” She ran and grabbed the other kids from their bedrooms.

One of the many wonderful things about living here was that they could go outside and play without the fear of running into the road to fetch a ball. I could see them playing from the wall of windows we’d included in this cabin. The design allowed me to do housework or make breakfast or whatever was needed while they safely played in my view.

I usually spent a ton of time with them outside. They loved running with my beagle, who I could control with ease ever since I laid my clutch. Dr. Wolf assumed it had something to do with hormones. I didn’t care about the why. I loved having control for the first time in my life.

But today, they would have to wait for me. I had to finish putting all of the icing and decorations on the birthday cupcakes.

It was not my skill set. The YouTube videos made it look easy enough. And maybe it was if you were born a master baker or something. But I wasn’t, and they were looking lopsided at best.

“Need any help?” Nolan came up behind me, watching over my shoulder.

“Yes.” There was no way I was going to turn help down.

“What do you need me to grab?” Poor dragon assumed he was getting me something from the other room and was going to learn quickly that I meant something much more involved.

I turned around and handed him the piping bag.

“You don’t need to grab anything. Just finish these.” I kissed his cheek. “You’re the best. I owe you.”

“Wait… I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah, I don’t either. They’ll be fine.” The kids would eat them no matter what. I would too. I might not be good at the decorating, but my cake was delicious.

“You say that, but my brother owns a traveling food truck.” The implication being that he would judge us. I’d known him for a handful of years, and he 100 percent was not the type to judge people because they didn’t know how to decorate a cupcake.

“Which means, he understands how hard they are to do.”

Reluctantly, he began piping the frosting as I followed behind, adding the rest of the decorations, which were a variety of sprinkles and a white chocolate disc with the number five on it. One thing I learned this year was that sprinkles were more important than the cake or ice cream or the cookies. Pretty much, sprinkles ruled in our house. And we went through an over-the-top amount of them. I used to worry about it, but given they were great eaters who loved a good veggie, I let it go.

It was safe to say our kids were spoiled.

We had the cupcakes done only minutes before Raphael arrived with his mate and kids. They came in with far too many presents for our children. We’d told them they didn’t need everything, but Brock didn’t listen. He never did. It was probably time to give up trying to change the man already.

“The kids don’t need anything,” Nolan said, as if we hadn’t already told them a thousand times. He hadn’t reached the let-it-go phase of things yet.

“No, they probably don’t. You’re good dads and, if they did, you’d take care of it. But we wanted to, and we did. So, here they are.” There was no arguing with that.

We hugged our niblings and they ran out to play with their cousins.

“Need anything around here?” Brock held up his hands. “Both of these work really well.”

“No, we’re good. We’re gonna be joining the kids outside.”

The kids were playing a game of red light, green light but had weird rules for it, and instead of using traffic light colors, were using all of the colors in the rainbow. I didn’t pretend to understand the rules, but they all seemed to—and were having a blast.

Jonah, my parents, and Jonah’s mate and newborn arrived next. They had rented a large conversion van and said that one or more of them might sleep in there. That was ridiculous, given my parents were hardly spring chickens and Jonah was still nursing.

Instead of gifts for the kids, they came in with not one but three covered dishes.

“You’re my favorite.”

They smiled at my words.

“And, for the record, you can come any day of the week. Or, you know, every day of the work week, if you’re so inclined.”

Jonah rolled his eyes and laughed.

Raphael and his family joined us less than an hour later. We were all here…my family.

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