Squeezing Mr. Nibbles to my chest, I laid on the bed in my special room and looked at the paintings and photographs covering the walls.
Wyatt changed them out for me every couple of weeks, and I found them much more interesting to look at than anything on television. Yesterday, he hung up an enlarged print right across from where I lay so I could stare at it all I wanted.
It was one of my favorite photos from my luna ceremony. Ash sat on a fallen log with me on his lap and his hands clasped at my waist. Mason sat on his left and Cole on his right, and they each held one of my hands. Wyatt and Jayden stood behind us and each rested a hand on my shoulder.
What I loved so much about it was that we were all smiling - even Mason, who didn't do that very often back then - and looked like the happiest people on Earth.
Because we were.
And we still are,I thought with a smile.
And now we about to be even happier!Lark chirped as she wiggled around.Can't wait to be mother!
That's right. It was finally our turn to add to all the new little ones in the pack.
Like Mom and Dad. As Wyatt predicted, their final pup, Walker, was as much of a heathen as William and Winnie - sorry,Winston, as he now preferred at the ripe old age of nine - had been and sometimes still were. However, there was one person for whom he behaved like a saint, and that was his best friend, Rosalie Price.
Yep! Mama and Papa surprised us all and had a pup a year after Walker was born. Everyone adored little Rosie, and watching my mates with her was adorable and heartwarming. They treated her like she was made of spun glass, which was quite the contrast to how they played with Walker. I caught Ash holding the poor kid upside down by his ankle once!
All of my family had children now, except my two cousins in the Royal Pack. Eden met her mate, Maya, three years ago, and the two were just now deciding if they wanted to adopt or use a donor so one of them could carry the baby. As for my cousin Evan, he found his mate, a lovely boy named Connal, only six months ago, and they were too busy getting to know each other to think of children yet.
In the pack, all of my betas and gammas and friends had children, even Reuben and Bram and Emerson and Angelo!
Reuben and Bram used a surrogate, and I hadn't understood what that meant until Mason explained it to me. After that, I was super curious as to which of them had made the necessary 'donation.' They hadn't said, and it wasn't like I could ask them, but when their twins were born three months ago, it was quite clear that Reuben was Quinn and Quill's biological father.
Emerson and Angelo went a different route and adopted an orphan, Josslyn, who was only five weeks old and utterly precious. When they brought her over to introduce her to us, I couldn't get enough of holding her, knowing it was highly unlikely that my ultra-dominant alpha mates would ever give me a daughter.
Definitely not this time!Lark snickered.
That's for sure!I grinned, thinking of the three boys sleeping under my heart.
Yes, my mates had filled me up with triplets.
Which had shocked me when I found out because I wasn't even sure I'd be able togetpregnant. After all, we'd tried last year and it hadn't happened. I'd been so disappointed. The boys, too, although they'd tried to hide it from me.
We went to Bora Bora over Thanksgiving to get our minds off of it and returned recommitted to our relationship - with or without pups - and more in love than ever.
When we came home, I went to the pack clinic to get some answers. Dr. Myers was just as calm and laid-back as his sons Crew and Grey, which I greatly appreciated. He ran tests and scans and talked with Lark, and everything checked out, so I was still in the dark. It was almost unheard of for a she-wolf to mate without protection during heat and not get pregnant, and yet I had.
Then Mason suggested maybe it was because I hadn't mated withallof them.
"Cole and Jayden went to deal with that emergency at Hollow Hills, remember," he'd pointed out.
Although they did everything possible to get back in time, my two mates had arrived a few hours too late. It wasn't their fault; my heat always came in August, but never on the same dates, which was common for she-wolves.
"You're thinking it's like everything else for us?" Jayden had asked him. "All or nothing?"
"We're a unique set of mates in the shifter world, so there's no way to know, but it makes sense." Mason had shrugged. "From now on, we'll block off the whole month and try again next year."
So when my heat came around last summer, the six of us went to Pippi's Place and locked ourselves in, and I hoped and prayed he was right.
By the time we got home, my mates were convinced I was pregnant. Although they said my scent grew richer and richer each day, I wasn't sure I could handle the disappointment if they were wrong. Finally, I gathered up my courage, forced myself to pee on the stick, and handed it to Jayden, too anxious to even look at it.
And when those two pink lines showed up, he cried, which mademecry. Cole got so lightheaded that he had to sit down and put his head between his knees. Ash and Wyatt immediately started arguing over whose "juice" had done the trick, and Mason scooped me up and hugged me as if his life depended on it.
I knew the boys would love our pups no matter whose "juice" had made the babies, but something was telling me the moon magic was going to work differently for us. I was curious, though, so I arranged for Dr. Myers to do a DNA test as soon as the pups were born and swore him to secrecy until I decided what to do with the information he discovered.
When Mom and Dad asked us which of the alphas' last names would be carried on, my mates brought me to tears as they said they wanted our pups to have my last name. Half-expecting a terrible fight over it, I was so touched by that. Besides, as Jayden pointed out, the only other solution would have been to hyphenate all five of their last names, and that would have been ridiculous.