Page 146 of Grin and Bear It

And don’t you forget it, he growled, as we all settled down on the bed to rest.

It tookdays for the heat to die down and I swear I was a full size smaller by the time I slowly pulled on some clothes for the first time. My body ached, but in that good way, that reminded you with every movement of all the pleasures you’d experienced.

Days later we were on a video call with the boys. They’d been flat out doing the theme park thing with their grandfather, having no time to miss us.

“So what’s your news?” Maddox asked, eyeing the lot of us curiously.

“Your aunty did us the honour of becoming our mate,” Nash replied, pulling my hair aside to reveal some of the bite marks they’d left.

“Pfft… finally,” Knox said, with a roll of his eyes. “So guess where we went the other day…”

Chapter72

A few months later

“Fuck… fuck… fuck…” I said, as I heard my alarm go off. Not my first alarm or my second one. Not even my third. The Imperial Death March was playing again and I was in the shit.

Thankfully we’d had a conversation with the twins, instructing them to avoid coming upstairs around specific times. Early morning was one of them, to avoid them seeing this. Me streaking naked from the bedroom I shared with my mates, as I made a beeline for the shower.

“Hey!” Lin said, soaped up and scrubbing his body under the shower. He took a step towards me with a grin, opening his arms to draw me closer, but I couldn’t let him suck me in.

“I’m late and you’re awake and you didn’t wake…” I stopped my hurried tirade to shove my toothbrush in my mouth, scrubbing frantically.

“No, you’re not,” he assured me.

“I am!” That came out way more garbled than I had intended, forcing me to remove the toothbrush, spit out the paste, and then hold up my phone. “I’m supposed to be on the road by now.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Can you stop being a smug bastard and just—”

“I changed your phone clock,” he told me.

“What?”

Time, space, the world on its axis, they all stopped right then.

“I worked it out. You won’t respond to the first, second or third alarm, so I changed your clock. You set it to the time you want to be up, but what you really need is another half an hour on top of that, so I fixed it.”

I saw the shrug, the smug smile and stormed into the shower, slapping my hands down on his shoulders.

“You did what?” His smile faltered then, as I glared at him with all of the intensity I could muster. “You insufferable, bloody, bastard of…”

“Oh shit…” he whispered.

“An amazing man.” I pressed my lips to his, feeling the sweet, sweet rush that came from kissing my mate, and realising I wasn’t late at all.

“Mm…” He groaned into my lips. “I like this. Now, you could show me just how appreciative you are. Up against the tiles—”

“No.” Cole appeared in the bathroom looking harried. “Absolutely no high fiving the vagina until later, tonight, maybe, after I’ve had a nervous fucking breakdown. What if no one turns up to the school?”

“What?” My eyebrows shot up. “I thought enrolments—”

“Enrolments are awesome,” Lin ground out, shooting Cole a look. “The school passed the building inspection and has got department certification. Everything’s good to go. We just need to get our star teacher there.”

Lin was right. We were all prepared to start the new school year. The building was created in record time, people from the bear shifter community all pulling together to ensure a state of the art facility was built. We’d even been inundated with requests for enrolment from non-shifter families, from those hearing good things about the school.

And me.

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