Page 49 of Destined Predator
“You fit here,” Rhett said, like it was a fact of the land. “I guess that’s why your destined mates are humans.”
Casey’s creased brow said he was pondering this, and Rhett let him see that what he felt about being mated to a shifter was more than acceptance. There was…love. Willing.Curiosity.“And before you go on again about me getting injured, getting a scar, do I have to point out some of the other ones I’ve collected, going about my life so far?” Rhett pressed.
He pulled Casey to him. “So, think you got it now? That giving over control to you in the bedroom’s one thing, but in life, we’re a partnership? As in, your-name-on-the ranch-deed-too-type partnership? Because that’s the only way it’s gonna work. This between us has been fast and crazy. And backward—normally folks meet, get to know each other then decide if they’re the one, right? Us, well, we found out we were mates first!”
“And have to work out a relationship, yeah.”
“And, Casey, I was a coward, like you said, about giving myself to you. But I do know I didn’t go through all that facing my fears and weaknesses just for you to brush me off to cut and run.”
“You ain’t got a monopoly on cowardice,” Casey muttered.
Rhett grinned. “So, pard’ner? All we can do is try. And I love you and I know you love me.”
“I do,” Casey said, fast, like pulling a trigger. Casey laughed. “Feel you should be saying that with a gee-tar. But yes. It’s true.’Course it is.” He snaked an arm around Rhett to kiss him, and Rhett returned it. Just when things were getting heated, Casey sat straight. “Rhett, there’s one more thing. I know…you wanted kids.”
Ah.“I did but… You mean Olivia.”He heard?
“That she’s pregnant?”
It sounded loud in the night, a smaller explosion after the first detonation of the news. Rhett had hardly taken it in yet.
“I scented it when she turned up. And it’s yours, Rhett. So where does that leave us?”
“About that…” Rhett told him everything Olivia had come to tell him. To ask him.
“My Lord.” Casey stood, almost stumbling backward.
Rhett joined him. “I’m still in shock, too. Oh, and seems we’re gettin’ a dog, as well. Duke Orlando Carrington of Etherbridge the Third. No, I think he’d be the Fourth. Never mind.” He waved a hand.
“You’re not naming a cow dog that,” Casey said, finally snorting. “We’ll call him Duke.”
Rhett chuckled.
“Well.” Casey blew his lock of hair from his eye. “What now? We ride off into the sunset?”
Rhett tsked. “It’s sunrise first. How do you not know that? And no, I’m not staying here all night when we got a big, comfortable bed at home. Let’s get back. We got a lot to do…”
Chapter Twenty-One
Six months later
“It’s funny,” Ben remarked over his shoulder to Jack, straightening Rhett’s bowtie for him. “You’d think it’d beusgetting hitched first. With us meeting first…mating first…”
“We’reolder.” Rhett leaned around from the middle of the four-person—two Tuckers and two Akers, two bridegrooms and two best men—row.
“And wiser,” Casey added, from next to Rhett.
Neither of them had wanted to walk down the aisle. Orhavean aisle. The ceremony was small and simple, mainly just family, on the ranch.
“When you meet the one, you don’t let him get away,” Casey said, his face pious.
“If you like it, then you should put a ring on it?” Jack asked, as innocent-seeming as he ever could be.
“Sure it’s not just making an honest man of each other because of the baby?” Ben whispered.
The wedding party was small but Olivia, “as round as an olive,” as she said, was a guest of honor. In addition to dividing the ranch house into two for the two couples, they’d had two small houses built on the property—one for Lacey and Ann to share, and one for Robin and Emil—and created a nursery for the baby Olivia and Rhett had conceived, and that she wanted Rhett and Casey to raise.
There was a lot to work out, like how much of a presence she’d be in the baby’s life when she got her associate degree, then her bachelor’s, and tried to establish herself in her field, but they could do it. Theyweredoing it.
