Page 14

Adrian

Five Years Later…

T oday is my five-year anniversary of returning home. Five years of Heat & Ink. Five years of life with my mate.

I can’t imagine life without Victoria. I don’t know how I did it for so long. Life without her truly seems like torture.

When I was letting my polar bear wander around the arctic wilderness, I used to think that was him at his happiest. I thought it couldn’t get any better for him than that.

I can’t help but laugh at that ridiculous thought. Boy was I fucking wrong.

This right here… This is my bear at his happiest.

“Hold on,” Victoria says as our four-year-old daughter, Arabella sits on my back, clinging to my white fur.

Pure joy is flowing through my bear as we slowly walk along the stream on our property—my baby cub sitting on my back and my pregnant baby girl walking alongside me.

“Faster, daddy bear,” Arabella says, kicking her legs against me. “Faster!”

My bear picks up the pace, trotting along as Arabella squeals in delight.

We spend the morning exploring the wilderness behind our new house—a gorgeous log cabin on a secluded plot of Montana land—and then we set up a picnic under a tree by the lake.

Arabella is chasing a butterfly in the field as I pull my polar bear back in to enjoy the picnic in my human form.

My beautiful mate is watching me as I stand up, naked as the day I was born. Her pregnant stomach is looking like it’s ready to burst with our next cub, a boy.

I can’t wait to meet him. We already have the perfect name picked out—Lucas.

I go to grab my clothes out of the bag, but it’s empty. That’s when I notice Victoria is holding my clothes behind her back.

“Are you going to let me have those?” I ask with a grin.

She doesn’t move. Well, besides her hungry eyes roaming up and down my naked body. “I will. Eventually.”

I grin as I walk up to her, undressing her with my eyes.

“You’re going to make me picnic in the nude again, aren’t you?”

Her eyes drift over to Arabella who is now chasing a grasshopper in the tall grass. “You’re lucky we’re not alone, or I would.”

I strut up to her, giving her that look that always gets her going. “I’ll make it up to you when we’re all alone tonight.”

She dumps the clothes into my hand with a huff of breath. “You better.”

I grin as I get dressed. My sexy girl doesn’t take her eyes off me for a second.

She’s an animal in the bedroom when she’s pregnant. Her sexual appetite is nearly unquenchable, but I’m always up for the challenge.

I spread out the blanket while Arabella returns with the grasshopper perched on her finger. “Look what I caught,” she says in her adorable voice that always gets me right in the feels. “A gasshopper.”

“Did you know that grasshoppers hear through their bellies?” Victoria says. “And they’ve been alive for over two hundred and fifty million years. Longer than dinosaurs even. Longer than grass.”

“Wow,” Arabella says as she looks at it with a new interest.

I love my mate. She’s always spitting out the most interesting, most useless facts. She’s amazing.

“Longer than grass?” I say, raising an eyebrow at her. “Then how did they get their name?”

Victoria shakes her head as she chuckles. “I don’t think they had names back then.”

Arabella lifts the grasshopper to her mouth to test its ear/stomach. “Hello,” she says in a deep voice.

The grasshopper decides he’s had enough of our picnic and leaps into the air, sailing away on the breeze.

My girls watch him go, but I’m only watching them.

I can’t believe this is my life.

Tattooing with my mate all day, our own home in the Montana wilderness, a gorgeous baby girl, a baby boy on the way…

Life can’t get any better.

We spread out the feast we packed and Victoria holds my hand as we watch Arabella dive into the watermelon, both of us laughing as we watch her spit out the seeds like a pro.

I’m so grateful for all of it.

Every beautiful second.

The End