Page 28 of The Dragon's Emberlinked Mate
Being the commander meant that I wasn’t always approachable for the little things, not that they were little to the people they impacted. With Rhythe, no one worried about that, and he was a natural at setting people at ease. He was so approachable and kind. If only he could see himself the way I saw him.
“Ollie says the two of you are expecting a trio of eggs.”
“Indeed, with the possibility of twins.” Vexus was pretty sure it was twins, but until they were here, it was best not to make it sound like a done deal to anyone but the closest to us. If hatch day came and there were only three dragonets, we were going to be disappointed, and having our family there to support us was great. Needing to spread the news to others, not so much.
“Good luck with that,” Malric said. He himself had had two clutches before his third with Ollie. I doubted the Lord would have any more after this one, though I had been surprised when he and Ollie had one, so perhaps it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.
Malric clapped me on the back. “I’m really happy for you. Politics aside, it’s good to see my friends settled, and I’m sorryfor having pushed you into potentially seeking out someone who wasn’t your mate.”
“Water under the bridge,” I said. “All’s well that ends well.”
“And you managed to keep that special gift of yours a secret.”
I laughed at that. “Yes, the hospital staff kept that to themselves, although I did have a conversation with Rhythe’s parents about it. They had been a little shocked to learn what I could do.”
“Was that a joke?” Malric said.
I laughed loudly, and my mate turned to look at me. He smiled.
“It wasn’t a joke, but I suppose it works that way, doesn’t it?”
“Indeed. Like I said, it’s good to see you happy.”
“Thank you, Malric. I do owe it all to my mate. I never realized just how much of my life was missing.”
“Agreed. I never thought I would be blessed with a second mate, but I know that Chas is smiling down upon both of us.”
I remembered how broken he’d been when his mate passed. He’d been not much more than a shell of his former self. And now? Now he was the dragon I used to know.
“Indeed,” I said.
“Well, you ought to enjoy these games with your mate before he climbs out the window.”
I looked over at my mate, who was on his feet, whooping and hollering at the dragons in flight.
Chapter 16
Rhythe
“Okay, so what else should we ask about?” I sat cross-legged on the floor, three babies in front of me while I held one in my arms and juggled with a piece of paper and a pen, trying to write down all the ideas my brother was spewing out.
Was this what my future was going to look like? Constantly balancing multiple tasks and children at once? Probably, and I was looking forward to it.
“Age. Gender. Species,” he said. “This app of yours won’t just cater to dragons, right? There might be other species who use it or are mated to dragons?”
The project was a lot bigger than I originally thought it would be. But the more we worked on it, the more we saw needed to be done. Both of us agreed that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. There were enough half-assed agencies out there. No sense building the app equivalent of that.
“Yup. So species will have to be a multi-field so you can select more than one. Plenty of people are mated with different species, like Ollie and Lord Malric.”
“And Lord Malric’s son with his wolf, right?”
“Exactly.” We had begun building the app, tentatively named Operation Manny Dragon, though we were thinking it would end up being named ClutchCare. I’d said the name in a moment of silliness, but the more we thought about it, the better it sounded. It was much better than Operation Manny Dragon, that was for sure.
Already we had two sets of parents ready to beta-test for us, in addition to Pip and his mate who were looking for respite help so none of their caregivers got burned out. They didn’t particularly need any additional mannies since we had found theirs the old-fashioned way, but we added the feature of requesting one-time babysitters or an on-call manny.
“Clutch size, right? That’s important. Birth date and hatching date. Maybe eventually you could add a feature for getting nest sitters. Sometimes parents have to leave their nests for a little while, and it’s always nice to have someone come by and hang out with the nest. I know when I had the eggs, it was difficult to travel with all of them, so even if I wanted to, I couldn’t take five eggs just to go to the grocery store.”
My mother had never been able to leave any of her nests for more than a rare shower, but she wasn’t the norm. And sometimes parents didn’t want to leave their nest, but they needed to in order to conserve their sick days for when their parent leave came. Those were generally omegas who worked in the human sector, but you sometimes found that in exclusively dragon spaces.
