Page 20 of His Unicorn Alpha (Shifters Sanctuary #3)

“ D arling, come quick!”

At Brandt’s excited call from the couch in the living room, I just about dropped the glasses I had pulled from the dishwasher to put away in their proper place. Hastily placing the glasses on the counter, I rushed across the open-living-style space and practically skidded to a stop in front of him.

“What’s up?”

Without speaking, my mate reached for my hand and yanked it to his belly. I felt the movement —the gentle, almost bubbling tapping— beneath my palm almost instantly.

“Oh my god,” I exhaled, my gaze glued to my hand, as if I could see through it and Brandt’s skin and to the babies themselves. “Oh, wow .”

Brandt had been feeling them move around inside him for a few weeks, but this was the first time they had been detectable from the outside. I was thrilled that their timing meant I got to be the first person to experience it, and I was also…kind of terrified.

It was yet more proof that we were going to be parents. That I was going to be a parent. The weeks were speeding forward, time passing so fast that it felt like all I had to do was blink and our girls would be here.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t excited about them, because I was. I had zero regrets about bonding with Brandt and locking myself into the future he had tried to give me a free pass from. But as the reality of what was coming started to dawn on me, three babies felt like a scary undertaking.

We had set up their nursery in the spare room across the hall from the main bedroom, and as I had put the cribs together (while Brandt had grumped from the plush rocking chair because I had insisted that the manual labor be my domain), it had started to dawn on me how much work they would be.

Those three white cribs, in a room painted in pastel shades of the rainbow, were a symbol of the sleepless nights coming our way. Of countless diaper changes. Of crying, and spit-up…and all the other not-so-fun stuff Beck grizzled about.

Brandt and I were still probably going to hire help, because we were in the fortunate position that he was a dragon with hundreds of years of savings and investments behind him, but that didn’t mean we weren’t going to be hands-on dads.

It was just that, as their arrival loomed closer, I was starting to worry that I had no actual idea what I was doing.

Hanging out with Lena and Brandi’s newborn twins —boys they had named Peter and Benjamin, which the rest of the pack teased them about on account of being rabbit shifters— only made my insecurities about my abilities increase. It turned out that newborns were so much smaller than any other babies I had previously held. Their little bodies were solid, but tiny and squirmy and, oh Gods, what if I dropped one? And changing them? Yeah…I hadn’t been prepared for newborn diapers.

The movement beneath my palm faded away and I tried not to feel too disappointed, but Brandt grabbed my wrist and moved my hand to the other side of his belly. The tapping there felt a little stronger. I grinned and looked up at him. “Do you think they’re having a dance party in there?”

He chuckled and nodded. “Or perhaps fighting like Beck and Ollie’s children.”

I grimaced. “I hope they’re not as violent with each other. I love Beck’s kids, but they’re little demons unless you keep them separated.”

“Two little alphas.” Brandt said, adding, “Not that I truly believe there is a personality difference between alphas, betas, and omegas, just as I do not believe boys are inherently more rough and tumble than girls. It just amuses me that they are both such dominant little creatures.”

“No wonder Beck’s so afraid of having more kids,” I laughed. “Those two are going to turn him prematurely gray.”

“Hey,” Brandt pouted down at me, “what is wrong with turning gray?” He turned his head to the side and gestured at the silver streaks that never failed to make my stomach flip and my cock twitch.

“Absolutely nothing,” I replied, my tone low with lust.

Brandt snorted. “You are insatiable, aren’t you?”

Rubbing my hand in slow, sensual circles over his bump, I smirked. “Only with you, sugar.”

And, just like that, my trepidation for my impending fatherhood faded away, replaced with a surge of answering arousal through our bond.

“Micah…” Brandt purred, winding his fingers into my hair.

Despite his growing belly —and the growing list of complaints about his discomfort— over the weeks, Brandt’s second trimester hormones had continued to make him increasingly horny. I loved every second of it. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing, stopping everything to indulge his body’s demands was no hardship for me.

This moment was no exception. I pushed his shirt up, exposing the taut skin of his belly, and I pressed kisses all over it, murmuring, “Close your eyes and block your ears, kids.”

Brandt groaned and chuckled all at once. “You are ridiculous.”

“You love it,” I smirked into his skin.

“I love you .”

I froze for only a moment before I was pushing up from my crouched position and dropping onto the couch beside him. I yanked his mouth to mine in a bruising, possessive kiss, certain that he could feel the spike of elation and adoration I felt for him through both the bond and also the action itself.

“I love you,” I told him when we parted for air.

“Good,” he nodded, then arched his hips from the couch. “Now, I believe you were about to defile me?”

I laughed, pressed another quick kiss to his lips, then returned to my knees on the rug between his spread legs. His fingers wove into my hair again, and, with a bit of maneuvering, I managed to pull his sweatpants out from under him and off.

With my hands at his thighs, I spread his knees wider, exposing every inch of him for my viewing pleasure. His big cock was straining towards his belly, his balls already drawn up in anticipation, but it was his entrance, slick and furled, which had my full attention.

“ Micah …” he spoke my name as a plea, whispered and breathy, and it made me ache for him, but I left my own cock alone. Even after months of practice, I knew that I was probably going to come far too soon when the arousal bouncing between us via our connection was so intense.

I leaned in teasingly, so close that he could probably feel my breath tickling his hole, before I averted course and pressed a kiss to the inside of his thigh.

“ Nnngh, ” he complained, and I grinned, then nipped at the flesh under my mouth. “You are terrible .”

“Uh-uh,” I practically crooned, rubbing my nose over the spot I had just bitten, “be nice, or I won’t give you what you want.”

“Fuck,” his entire body rocked with the petulant way he threw his head back against the headrest. “Don’t tease me, alpha.”

Inside my shorts, my cock twitched. I bit at the inside of his thigh again, a bit harder than before. As he mewled, I reprimanded, “No playing dirty.”

The fingers in my hair tightened their grip and tugged. “Please,” he begged. “I need…”

“Need…?”

“Your mouth. Your fingers. Your cock. Everything .”

I loved the desperation I could hear in his voice, and even though we had been learning to shield our emotions from one another, I could feel hints of how intense his need was through the bond. Pulling back from his thigh, I found his previously slick hole actually dripping, and that alone shattered my resolve to draw out his begging.

Flattening my tongue, I licked the trickle of thick, sweet-ish liquid from where it was running down the underside of his perfect ass. Brandt cried out and arched into the contact, but I lapped slowly at my prize, savoring every burst on my tastebuds as I followed the lines of liquid to the source.

His grip on my hair was almost painful, and I relished it. I loved when he lost control, when he writhed under my ministrations. It was a heady feeling to see this powerful man brought to a whimpering, pleading, thrashing mess by my tongue alone.

“Please,” he murmured as I finally began to tease at his rim, “please, Micah. Alpha. Please.” He rocked his hips in short, sharp movements with every repeat of the word. “Please, please, please .”

When I finally speared him with my tongue and wriggled it inside, he almost sobbed. “Yes, darling. Yes . Just like that. More. More, please, more .”

I was going to come untouched if he kept going.

His heavy breathing, the musky scent of his skin, the sweet and salty taste of his slick…it was a feast of sensation.

Unable to stop myself, I reached up to stroke his neglected dick in time with the thrusts and curls of my tongue. “Fuck!” he yelled, no; damn near roared. “Oh, fuck, your mouth…Darling, your mouth…I— fuck !”

If I had thought it was a sensory overload before, it had nothing on feeling his orgasm slam through the bond we shared as warm wetness coated my hand and his channel clenched around my tongue, spilling more delicious slick into my waiting mouth. I licked and sucked and slurped and did everything in my power to keep my answering orgasm at bay, even as he fed the aftershocks of his bliss to me through our connection.

He whined when I drew back to breathe and calm myself, and I glanced up, wanting to see how debauched he looked. I was not disappointed. His hair was sweaty and messed, as though he had been thrashing against the back of the couch. His skin was flushed pink, and his dark eyes glazed over. His shirt was bunched up beneath his softening pecs, and the skin of his rounded belly was shiny with perspiration, too.

Even though I hadn’t come, I was beyond satisfied at seeing him so thoroughly wrecked.

“You good, sugar?” I asked him while I pushed to my feet, watching as his hooded, sleepy gaze focused in on my hand —the one covered in his cum— as I raised it to my mouth and proceeded to lick it clean.

“Jesus Christ,” he cursed breathily, his eyes darkening with lust even though he sounded, and looked, completely wrung-out. “That is hot.” His gaze traveled down the length of my body. When we locked eyes again, he beckoned me closer with a crooked finger. “Come here.”

I smirked at the double entendre and couldn’t let it go. “That’s my intention.”

He blinked at me, then groaned as I stepped in between his still-spread thighs, bringing my cock to his face level. “Really?”

“You should know better than to leave those opportunities open to me.”

“Gods help us, you will be the king of the dad jokes,” he bemoaned, but he was smiling as he popped the button above my fly and then lowered the zipper.

“One of us has to be the embarrassing dad.”

“Fuck,” he muttered and palmed his cock, “you have no idea how sexy that is.”

“Me being embarr— Jesus, Brandt…I’m warning you; I’m on a hair trigger right now.” I didn’t feel any shame in admitting it as he wrapped his big hand around my not-so-big dick and stroked. I was proud of myself for not coming the second his orgasm rocked through the bond. It had been a close call.

“Mmm,” his lips quirked, “ good . I have little patience, and I have missed your taste.”

And in retribution for my teasing him, he left me no time to respond before taking my aching, leaking cock into his mouth and sucking.

I lasted thirty seconds in the perfection of his mouth before I was curling over the top of his head and coming hard down the back of his throat. I started to pull away as I felt the tingling that signaled my knot inflating, but he grabbed my ass and sucked me in deeper, gagging as my cock grew to accommodate the knot.

“B-Brandt,” I tried to pull back, afraid of hurting him, or suffocating him, or getting stuck in this position, with his jaw unable to release my knot.

A wave of reassurance traveled through the bond and he hummed, which made me curse and spurt down his throat again. When he swallowed that, the stimulation to my cock head and my knot restarted the process.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck…” I hissed, hoping I wasn’t going to choke him, while simultaneously riding out the intense pleasure/pain of the multiple orgasms and knot stimulation. “If I have to call your brother because we get stuck like this…”

My mate snorted, which set the whole cycle off again.

Breathing heavily, I tried to think unsexy thoughts, attempting to encourage my knot to deflate. “You’re going to pay for — unghh — this.”

All I felt was a spike of amusement and arousal through our connection, which did not help in my bid to will the knot away.

Glaring down at him, I demanded, “Don’t. Move.”

He winked, then hummed his agreement.

My knees threatened to buckle.

As soon as my knot went down, I was going to kill him…well, if I hadn’t died from overstimulation already.

I assumed he felt my fatigue and the increase of pain in the pain-to-pleasure balance, because a few moments later I watched, mildly horrified, as he partially shifted, his jaw literally morphing as scales erupted all over his body and he grew in size. He was still humanoid, but bigger. Big enough, and reptile enough, that he was able to unhinge his jaw and release my knot.

While I stared at him and caught my breath, recovering from almost orgasming to death, Brandt shifted back to his usual form. He gave me a smug smile. “Did you forget that I can partially shift at will?”

“I didn’t know it went beyond the scales around your face thing.”

“Oh,” the smugness turned to sheepishness. “Then, surprise?”

I blinked at him for a moment before chuckling and carefully easing down onto the couch beside him, not wanting to set my knot off again. “You’re so lucky I love you.”

His expression softened out and he nodded. “Yes, I am.”

Time continued to pass. I picked up occasional jobs out of town, but nothing that would keep me from my mate for more than a night or two at most. As his due date loomed closer and closer, I found myself feeling increasingly more protective and possessive. Plus, his mobility was greatly impacted by the three babies throwing off his balance and putting strain on his back. I preferred being able to look after him, massaging his back and rubbing his feet.

Yeah, I was a sap. But he was my omega, and he was pregnant with my children, and it made me happy to look after him.

Eric continued to monitor him closely, which I was grateful for, even if Brandt and I both complained at having become Eric’s favorite new lab rats. But our third baby was still measuring on the small side, and watching her health was more important than anything else.

“Have you tried shifting recently?” Eric asked during one of our weekly appointments.

Brandt groaned and closed his eyes, splaying one of his large hands over his belly and wincing. I assumed one of our miniature cage fighters was attempting to box their way out of his abdomen, so I reached over to rub soothingly at the spot while Brandt answered, “I barely have the energy to put on my shoes of a morning. I can not imagine attempting to shift.”

“Well,” Eric cocked his head, “I think we should try it. It might give your little ones more room to grow.”

“Your logic is flawed,” my mate grumbled. “Every other pregnant shifter has mentioned feeling even more ungainly in their shifted form.”

Eric shrugged. “Yeah, well, none of them have been dragons, have they?”

“But—”

“Brandt, please. For our research. For science. ” Eric’s voice took on a placating lilt which reminded me of Beck trying to get his kids to eat vegetables. “You love science.”

I tuned them out as they bickered, focusing instead on the foot currently stretching my mate’s belly into a strange, lumpy shape. I was still kind of mystified every time I felt our kids roughhousing inside him. It somehow felt surreal and too real all at once.

Before I knew it, those babies would be out in the world, and I would be responsible for looking after them.

Maybe my mom was right: maybe it would be best if she and Dad came to visit for a while once the girls were born. Brandt and I were in the middle of interviewing shifters to be our live-in nanny, but I suddenly felt the desperate need to be with my family. My entire family. Mom, Dad, Brandt, our babies…I wanted them all in one place. I wanted them all in the pack I’d claimed as my home. My inner horse (and, yeah, I still called him a horse, even if he did have wings and a horn) blew out burse of air through his lips and stamped his hooves. He was getting anxious, too.

I came back to the conversation as my hand was dislodged from Brandt’s belly as he struggled to get to his feet. Helping him up, I supported his back as he explained that Eric had convinced him to try shifting.

“If nothing else, I can curl up in my dragon form and sleep for a short while,” he muttered as he waddled (I would never use that phrase within his earshot) down the clinic’s short hallway. “That should alleviate some of the pain in my back as well.”

“I’ll shift and cuddle with you,” I said. “We’re getting better at communicating through the bond, so maybe we can use it as a chance to practice in shifted form.”

After Beck and Ollie had told us that they had learned to send focused sensations and feelings to one another —and the pink slashes across my friend’s cheeks had told me exactly what they used that discovery for— Brandt had been determined to master the skill himself. It took a lot of concentration, and I still wished we could send each other actual thoughts instead of feelings or phantom touches, but it was still pretty cool that we could silently communicate at all.

“I want to hear about how that goes,” Eric chirped behind us. “You haven’t tried while shifted yet, have you?”

“Not yet,” I answered, guessing that my mate was close to turning around and snapping at his brother again. The further he progressed in his pregnancy, the more volatile his mood swings became. “And I’m interested to see if we can do it, and from how far a distance.”

Not that I had plans to be separated from Brandt at all. He was thirty-two weeks pregnant and, even though Eric hadn’t said anything, I was under the impression that he thought the babies could arrive at any time. My own research had confirmed my suspicions: on average, triplet pregnancies only really made it between thirty-two and thirty-five weeks.

I really needed to call my mom.

When we got to the fields behind the clinic, I helped Brandt out of his shirt and sweatpants. He toed off his slip-on shoes and Eric and I stepped back to watch him shift. Even his transition into his dragon form seemed to take longer than the last couple of times I had watched him, as if even the magic that thrummed through our veins was struggling to find the energy to complete its task.

The magnificent, hulking, dark red form of my mate finally materialized in front of us. Even in his state, his belly seemed swollen beyond belief.

“Fascinating,” Eric murmured, eyeing his brother before typing on the ever-present notes app on his phone.

“Do you think his body is struggling because the girls are unicorns, not dragons?” I asked.

“Doubtful,” Eric didn’t look up from his phone screen. “Considering our young don’t shift for the first time until they’re five or so.”

I scrunched my nose and thought back to when Lena was pregnant with her twins. She was a rabbit, which obviously couldn’t accommodate two human-sized fetuses in her shifted form. “So…the babies just grow —or shrink— proportionally to the shifter in question?” I looked back at my giant mate and his gravid belly and shuddered at the idea of a humanoid fetus the size of a small car. “Weird.”

“You know, I’ve never actually tried to use the ultrasound machine on a shifter before…” Eric mused.

Brandt let out a dragony growl.

I snorted. “I don’t think starting with Bran is a great idea.”

“No,” he replied sarcastically, “you don’t say.”

I couldn’t contain my amusement, and my inner horse nickered happily as well. It turned out, he felt like Eric met the family criteria as well. In many ways, I supposed that the dragon did.

He was my bonded mate’s brother, after all. That essentially made him my brother-in-law. And, with all the time Brandt and I had spent with Eric, I had actually come to see him as a pseudo sibling. Even Sage and I had started joking with each other, though I didn’t feel quite as close to him yet. I supposed that was because he was off scouring the world for more information about the old ways and the magic, so we hadn’t really gotten much of a chance to properly bond as in-laws.

Turning my back on Eric, I stripped and shifted, still not completely comfortable with my wings and horn. In the months since discovering the change to my shifted form, I had gone on a couple of runs with the pack, and that had gone a long way in helping me embrace the changes…but it was still weird.

No weirder than the knotting thing, though, I supposed. Or being able to communicate emotions and concepts through the magical bond I shared with Brandt.

I guessed I was just sad that it was one more thing to set me apart from the family I had grown up with, even though my parents seemed just as excited about my new form as they had been about my being an alpha.

Shaking the musings from my head, I trotted over to my large, grumpy mate and rubbed the side of my face along his muzzle. His jaws were large enough that, if he opened them wide, he could probably swallow me with one bite, but he let out a sound which I could only describe as a purr when I greeted him affectionately.

And that was the other issue I had with my updated form: I couldn’t nuzzle him the way I craved. Not without the weapon jutting out from the middle of my forehead gouging him, anyway.

Stupid horn , I thought irritably. Then I sighed.

In all likelihood, our daughters would be unicorns like me. I didn’t want them feeling self-conscious of their forms, so I knew I had to work on the issues I had with my own.

A warm puff of air ruffled my mane and I concentrated on trying to send feelings through the bond. It was harder when we were both shifted, especially when I was practicing sending an actual message instead of spikes of random, deeply felt emotions.

I focused on sending calm, vividly imagining Brandt curling up on the ground like an oversized, scale-covered cat, and then added the image of me curling up against him. I focused on how warm and safe that would feel, and a jolt of surprise came traveling through the connection we shared.

Immediately concerned, I took a few steps back, staring into his huge, dark eye. He huffed, sending up a cloud of dust and dirt from the ground. Then he closed his eyes and I wasn’t sure if it was just that he was tired, or—

Holy shit, I thought as I felt the warmth of his scales along my flank, despite not being pressed up against him. Okay, yeah, I get it now.

With enough concentration, we could send each other physical manifestations of what we were imagining.

No wonder Beck and Ollie use this for sex…

I wanted to experiment with that idea myself, but Brandt had been too uncomfortable and too exhausted, and I wasn’t the kind of alpha who would demand sex from his heavily pregnant mate just because he was horny.

Instead, I had been getting reacquainted with my hand and my toys, and had taught myself how to shield my orgasms from travelling through the bond when I got myself off in the shower or after Brandt had gone to bed at night.

Maybe that was why I was able to accidentally send him that mental image, or sensations, or whatever — I was getting better with my control over my end of the connection we shared.

By unspoken agreement, we practiced with it some more before Brandt’s large eyes began to droop. I felt his side of our bond dimming with his drift into sleep —a familiar sensation which no longer startled me— and I used the side of my face to nuzzle the end of his muzzle again, willing him to rest.

Once he drifted off, and the bond went dark (for lack of a better description), I made my way to his side and lay down on the grass by his side, folding my long, golden legs underneath me. The warmth emanating from his scaled belly was almost enough to lull me off to sleep as well…until something inside him moved, thumping at my side.

Our giant babies , I realized, snorting with amusement. I assumed his dragon form had thicker skin, plus the shield of scales, which meant our girls couldn’t stretch his shape out quite so easily. But I could feel at least one of them giving it a red-hot go.

Be good for Papa, girls, I thought, unable to voice the words I had spoken so many times by that stage. We’ll get to meet you soon.