Page 32 of Broken Bonds

He doesn’t meet my gaze, which is weird. “If we have a pup. Means an end to spontaneous play like this.”

My delicious warm fuzzies vanish, replaced by a growing mental chill. I sit up and face him. “You don’t want a pup?”

His brow furrows. “You’re awfully thinky right now.”

“Yeah, well, this is a serious conversation, Jax. Kind of blew me out of my headspace.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I thought we agreed we wanted a baby?”

He doesn’t answer.

Which, of course, in itself is an answer.

“Jax?”

“We’ve just got a lot going on right now with the pack.”

A chill fills my heart. “You don’t want a baby?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“But you’re thinking it. Right?” I stare at him. He’s not letting me sense his thoughts as his glance skitters to me and then away again.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for one,” he admits. “I’m scared I’ll fuck up a kid.”

“How? Your dads didn’t fuck you up. Or your siblings.”

I feel something…strange washing off him. “Do you realize who that pup’s father is?” Jax asks.

“Yeah. Rudolph Sterling. Asshole extraordinaire of the Atlanta Pack.” Never met the man but I’ve heard enough about him to know he’s not a man I ever want to meet.

“Asshole extraordinaire who is also suspected of being behind the attack on the Savannah fae colony a few months back,” Jax quietly says.

“I…” My mouth snaps shut. “What?”

“Yeah.” He sighs, weighty and leaden. “And behind the murders of those witches in Tennessee.”

“None of those made the news,” I say. “You never told me anything about that.” I mean, I’d heard second-hand info about the incidents but not that Sterling’s Atlanta pack might be in the middle of it. As far as I knew, I thought it was humans who’d done it.

“Because it’s not common knowledge and I didn’t want you stressing over it,” Jax says. “And there was never concrete proof of his involvement, just a lot of suspicion and a fuckton of circumstantial evidence.”

“And now…?” I’m already following his train of thought.

I damned sure don’t like the station it’s about to pull into.

“I don’t want our pack forced into a cross-species battle, or draw a bull’s-eye on our pack with the Atlanta Pack,” Jax says.

It’s what he doesn’t say that I’m listening to, filling in the gaps between his words. “You’re worried it might quickly get too dangerous to risk us having a baby.”

Another heavy, weighted sigh. “Aren’t you?”

“When will it ever be a ‘good’ time to have a baby then, Jax? I keep letting you put it off and put it off because this is a joint decision, but will you keep pushing it off until fifty or sixty years from now when I’m too old?”

“I would never forgive myself if something happened to you or our baby.”

I stand and head to the edge of the hot tub. “Hard to worry about a baby we’re apparently never having,” I shoot back.