Page 144 of Conner's Luna

He meets my eyes. "I will love and support you no matter what, Bailey. I... I guess I have to stay here, in Colorado, with the pack. If you..." a bead of sweat breaks out on his upper lip, "ah... if you want to live somewhere else, I guess we can try long-distance." By the end of his offer, his voice has dropped to nothing.

"I don't need to leave for very long," I tell him matter-of-factly. "Trips to other labs, maybe. Universities and such. From what little I've seen I really like your family. This is a beautiful place to live. And you're rich. You can build me a superlab here."

Relief breaks over his face like sunshine. He laughs, his chest vibrating so hard I would have fallen off if not for his arm locked around me. "Yeah, baby. I'll buy you the fucking world, but I'll take you anywhere you want to go, too. If you need some sort of PhD from Nerds R' Us, then we'll work it out."

I roll my eyes. He's a nerd, too. His muscles can't hide his brain. "Why do we have to wait? If we're both sure?" I ask him.

"You're too smart," he taps my nose with a soft smile, taking the sting out of his comment. "We have a council, which has representatives of eight packs throughout the region. A MateLess couple, which we both technically are, can't Mark each other until we are both twenty-five, without permission from the council."

"Do mates have to wait?"

"No," he says quietly.

"So Trey and Lydia were breaking the law?"

"Yeah. For the health of the baby," he mumbles, looking uncomfortable.

I hum, thinking more deeply about the Claiming stuff. "What does sex do, exactly?" I ask him.

"Ah... it changes your scent. It's a little like a calling card for other wolves. The more sex you have, or the longer you are intimate with someone, the deeper the scent will be."

"Won't a shower reduce the scent? Or certain chemicals?"

"Normally, yes, but it would have to be repetitive and thorough. It’s hard to fool a wolf. I think it's why my wolf wasn't sold on Lydia," he muses quietly. "We could scent Trey all over her, even after we... you know."

"I do," I slap his chest lightly, just because I can and I'm jealous.

He grabs my hand and kisses my fingertips. "You actually smelled a little like Braxton the first time I met you."

"I did?" my nose wrinkles as I try to remember. "How?"

"Just close proximity from sharing the lab table in class, I guess."

"Wow, your nose is that sensitive?"

"My wolf," he corrects, "and it's not quite like the scent that you're thinking of."

I stare at his nose. "What sort of olfactory glands do you have?" I ask in a near-whisper. I get a little closer, staring at him as if I have x-ray vision.

"Good ones," he whispers, bumping my nose gently with his.

"But it's your wolf who smells more keenly, even though you share the same body? That's something different, something psychological instead of physiological. Maybe," I say, sitting up excitedly, "it's even a metaphysical perception. You're literally smelling particles of scent that may no longer exist." I gasp, nearly tumbling off of Conner's chest.

"Whoa, baby. Easy there, cowgirl." He catches me around the waist, hauling me back from the edge of the bed. "You have years, the rest of our lives, to dissect my olfactory glands and figure this out, yeah?"

"True" I murmur. "Although, I'd like to have my first baby at twenty-six, ideally. That will put a crimp in any research I'm conducting."

He chokes a little, but I see his eyes start to glow. "That... babies? Yeah, yeah. I don't want to rush you," he croaks.

"Mom had me later in life," I tell him sadly. "Ironically, an earlier pregnancy may have significantly lowered her probability of having cancer."

"When I Mark you, you'll be much less likely to get any sort of terminal illness, babygirl," he says soothingly when my eyes pinch a little as I think about Mom. "We tend to not have major life-threatening illnesses. No need to rush. I want pups with you whenever you're ready." He swallows, "but, yeah, I'd like pups with you."

I smile and lean up to kiss him, but he jerks backward. "Muzzle," he rasps.

Huffily, I roll off of him. "I just want to know what the odds of possible chromosomal mutations in our babies may be, Conner."

He throws his head back, laughing. "Other girls would doodle my name in their notebooks. You'll be making Punnett squares of our future children's traits. Fuck, I love you."

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