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“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I asked.

“I was waiting for the right time,” he said, “until you weren’t in the middle of fighting for your life.”

I didn’t speak for long moments. Whatcould I say?

He shimmied up the bed, placing his head on the pillow beside me. “Emma?”

“What?” My voice sounded harsher than I meant it, but I didn’t know how to process the information I’d just been given. I sighed and willed my shoulders to relax. “I don’t know what that means.”

“It means he might be able to help you understand why you’re a shifter.”

“I’m a shifter because it’s in my genes,” I said. “Do I need to know anything else?”

“It’s up to you.” He wrapped his arms around my middle and pulled me closer to him, his cock already hard against my side.

“I don’t think I can deal with that right now, so I won’t.” I sighed, my thoughts returning to my mom. “I haven’t told my mom about any of this, and I’m not sure how she’s going to deal with it. She’s the only mother I have.”

No matter who gave birth to me, my mom had been there for everything, through everything.

“Learning who your parents are won’t take away from her importance in your life,” he said against the nape of my neck.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“Wanna get something to eat and then try out the shower?”

I shoved the news about my birth parents aside and raised an eyebrow. “Are you hungry?”

“No, of course not, but we need to drink some water and eat, so we can get back to fucking.”

I dragged my fingertips over the center of his chest. The pink had mostly disappeared, but sometimes I had nightmares about balefire taking out everyone I loved.

“Why is bonding like this?” I asked.

“To make sure we procreate. The more we mate, the more likely we are to make more shifters. It’s a holdover from the animal side of us.”

“Procreating is a little hard to do with condoms,” I said. “Though, we didn’t use them much.”

“Yeah, except the time when we completed the bonding, but you weren’t ovulating then.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, more than a little nervous about the times we’d had sex without a condom and the time we completed the bond. “There’s that. Wait. What? You knew whether I was ovulating?”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Sometimes your pheromones tell me what I need to know, and you weren’t, so we should be fine.”

“That’s a handy trick. Maybe you can just tell me when we need to wear one and when we don’t,” I said, pulling him into my arms and kissing his mouth.

“Will do,” he murmured.

No way I could ever get tired of this. Food could wait. We had a bond to consummate. For the twentieth time. For the hundredth time. It didn’t matter.

Drums began in the distance.

No, that was not what it was.

A pounding on Logan’s bedroom door filtered through the love-making haze, and I pulled away from Logan with a frown. “Do you hear that?”

Logan stopped, tilted his head, and listened.

More pounding echoed through his bedroom.