Page 26 of Wrong Turn, Right Bear
I didn’t want to but I couldn’t go around and around, avoiding what had to be said.
“You might be pregnant.”
His lips parted and he giggled, then guffawed. “Is this a joke?” He checked his watch. “We had sex all through the night. You’re little swimmers are still… I don’t know. Swimming, I guess.”
“Ummm you being human and me a shifter that’s alittle different from two humans or two shifters having sex.”
“What are you saying? That Errol and Chuck might be right? That we’ve made a baby since last night?”
“It’s possible.”
My beast looked around saying he couldn’t see anyone else inside me but I explained if our mate was pregnant, the baby would be smaller than a sesame seed.
How big is that?
Tiny.
I squeezed onto the log beside Theo. “An omega’s scent changes when they get pregnant. Both Errol and Chuck picked up on it.”
“And you didn’t?” He didn’t wait for an answer and got up, picking a dead leaf off the ground and let the wind carry it away. “Is this real?” He pinched his arm. “Feels like a dream. Or one of those reality TV programs.” He peeked under a bush. “Is someone going to leap out and tell me I’m a sucker and I’ve been conned?”
I let him talk because I didn’t have words to make sense of it all.
“We should find out for sure. Do tests from the pharmacy detect a human shifter pregnancy?”
“As far as I know.”
“Let’s go.”
THIRTEEN
THEO
One minute I was a regular guy going on vacation. The next I was swept into a whirlwind of fantasy and paranormal and discovered the existence of shifters. I got the hots for one shifter, left even though he said I was his happy ever after, missed him so much I came back, we had sex, mated and then wham, I was pregnant.
All in the space of about a week. It wasn’t real I told myself each day when I woke up, but seconds later when my head cleared, it was. I couldn’t call it the new normal because nothing about my life now was “normal” whatever that was.
We confirmed I was pregnant but I had to fly home the following day. Instead of hours of uninterrupted sex, we lay in bed, swaddled in blankets going through a list of questions. We lived in different states andwhile I could live with my mate and probably work from home, not being in an office wouldn’t be my first choice. I needed to be around people.
We called one another each night but Ash was usually in bed, his eyes in danger of closing when I finished work. I was exhausted and he was a hero, listening to me talk about my day as his head nodded forward and he jerked himself back, mumbling, “Sorry.”
Other than being more tired than usual, I wasn’t experiencing any symptoms of pregnancy. I was still trying to get my head around having a baby growing inside me. And I couldn’t tell anyone at work. I hadn’t been pregnant when I left. How could I tell them now? Unless I fibbed and said I’d been pregnant for a couple of months and had left it a secret. But I already had a huge secret that I was keeping from friends and colleagues. Two or three.
Shifters existed.
I was mated to one.
And the pregnancy.
Previously, I’d relished the late nights at the office and the weekends where I had to work, sometimes all night if I had a presentation or a project deadline. But as the days passed I hit the snooze button three or four times before getting up instead of leaping up ready tostart the day. I was one of the last ones to reach the office in the morning and I checked my watch countless times during the day, counting the hours til I got home.
Ash put it down to the baby draining my energy, but when I was in bed by myself, tired, but unable to sleep, I stretched out my hand, wishing he was here. We’d only shared two nights together but I rubbed my mating mark and recalled how my hand tingled when he grabbed it at our first meeting.
The solution was easy: resign my job and live with Ash. But even with a baby, I didn’t see myself as a SAHD, a stay at home dad.
One evening when I escaped from work early saying I wasn’t well, I was chatting to my mate while he shuffled papers and his attention was on his website more than listening to me.
“You need help with the business.”
