Page 15

CHAPTER 15

It wasn't until the next morning that Lola said—or even thought —"This is bonkers."

She was comfortably nestled in Sam's big bed, buried under fluffy comforters and quilts: warm, content, sleepily amused as it struck her that this was—well—bonkers. "All my stuff is in Detroit!"

"Detroit?" Sam lifted his head, white hair sticking up every which way. "You live in Detroit?"

"I did until yesterday!"

Sam rolled over, propping his head on his hand and smiling down at her. "Do you want to live in Detroit? I'll move to Detroit if you want to live there."

"You would hate Detroit." Lola rocked her head back and forth. "Well, maybe not hate it, but it's certainly not as quiet as Virtue, and it would be much riskier for you to be a fox there. No, I just hadn't thought about the logistics of all this. I got swept up in the moment." She smiled up at him. "I intend to stay swept up in the moment for the rest of my life."

He grinned. "With the occasional touch-down in reality to realize this is bonkers."

"Only long enough to figure out how to get my things packed and moved back to Virtue," she promised. Then she sighed and scooted closer. Sam dropped onto his back and slid his arm around her shoulders, warm and comforting. Very quietly, she said, "It's not really possible, is it? That Chase…?"

Her husband took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. "I have what I thought was his original birth certificate. His name is Charles Richard Smith on it, which is only one right name out of three…"

"What's the birth date?"

"February seventeenth. The year is right," Sam said softly.

Lola pressed her mouth against his shoulder. "Our Samuel was born on the fifteenth, but…if the name was changed, changing the birth date…no wonder I couldn't find him, Sam. If your Chase really is our Samuel, if they changed all of that, no wonder I couldn't find him. Why would they do that?"

She shook her head even as she asked: the answer was obvious. It was so she couldn't find him. A single mother with no job or prospects and no idea her child was a shifter? Even she could see how a shifter working for the system might think it was safer to change the baby's information so he couldn't be found. "But you said he didn't come to you until he was almost seven?"

"Just a little past seven." Sam tightened his arm around her shoulders. "He'd bounced around the system before then, not out of anybody's maliciousness. It's just how it worked. Works, often, even now. And I didn't start fostering until that year. My parents died the year before, and like I said, I was a little directionless until I was approached about fostering shifter kids. Then I had to spend a while getting set up for it, legally, emotionally, physically with the house… I knew I would be getting Chase a few weeks before he arrived, but there wasn't any information about his birth family, except that his mother had had to give him up."

Lola growled deep in her throat, and Sam kissed her hair. "I know. If he's really our son…I'm sorry, Lola."

"How are we supposed to approach this with him?" she asked as the growl faded away. "I assume there's not a safe database for shifters to test DNA with, and he didn't have a convenient fox-shaped birthmark to identify him by."

Sam sat up again, dislodging her as he blinked with astonishment. Lola sat up, too, blinking at him in turn. "What? What are you thinking?"

"That I might actually know someone who could provide that safe DNA test. Except dammit, they were leaving town yesterday! Where's my phone!" Sam hopped out of bed, snagging a pair of shorts and pulling them on as he marched out of the bedroom calling, "Chase? Chase, do you have the number for those investors yesterday? Garius and Conri?"

Lola flopped back into the soft bed, snickering, and said, "This is bonkers," to the ceiling. Imagining her future with Sam a lifetime ago had never included live-in staff, or a secretary who kept track of things like peoples' phone numbers. Still amused, she got out of bed, found a dressing gown, and followed Sam through the house.

Chase appeared, fully dressed in a button-down shirt and slacks, carrying a phone and looking embarrassed at running into Lola in her dressing gown, although Sam and his shorts didn't seem to bother the younger man at all. "Here you go, Mr Todd."

Sam said, "For heaven's sake," a bit absently, and Chase ducked a grin toward the floor, giving Lola the sense that he called Sam 'Mr Todd' for just that reaction. Sam also said, "Thank you," and Chase looked up again with a nod and a smile.

"Of course. Is everything all right?"

"It's fine," Lola assured him, then cast a glance at Sam, who lifted a finger, asking her to hold off. Instead of bringing up the awkward topic of Chase's possible parentage, she asked, "Is everyone else still here?"

"Ellen had a deposition this morning, so she had to fly back late last night, but Tony and Steph are here, and your daughter was going to stay at Chef Charlee's last night, I think. She thinks you're crazy."

Lola's eyebrows flew up. "Jennifer or Charlee? Oh, well, Jenny's always thought I was a bit mad. She had some reason, honestly. I didn't like talking about my youth and I think she built it up as this big mysterious story in her head, and…well, I've sort of proved her right, haven't I."

Chase crooked a smile at her. "Don't take this wrong, but yes, you have. By the way, breakfast will be on the table in half an hour. If you want to eat, I'd recommend getting there promptly. Tony still takes the lion's share, even though he's forty and no longer growing."

"…is that because he's a lion?" Lola asked cautiously. "Or is it rude to ask?"

"Hah! It's a little rude to ask, but you're actually family now, so it's fine. He's a tiger, actually, which earned him no end of grief when we were kids."

"I—oh, no." Lola clapped a hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh out loud. "I don't suppose he's especially fond of a particular kind of sweetened breakfast cereal?"

"Tragically for him, he loves it. I'm amazed he didn't insist we call him Anthony, though."

"I hate being called Anthony even more than I hate being Tony the Tiger," Tony said, coming through a door from the east wing and toweling his sandy red hair. He was blue-eyed, taller than Chase, and looked as if he'd spent a lot of time working on a sunburn over his lifetime: he had that ruddy, never-quite-tan color that redheads sometimes got, and a sprinkling of gold scruff along his jaw. "I didn't really get to meet you yesterday, Lola. I'm Tony. I hope you and Dad live happily ever after."

"Thank you. So do I, and it's nice to meet you properly, too. This has all been very sudden, I know."

"Well, fated mates." Tony waved a hand through the air. "Why waste time, when you know? Especially when you're old."

"Tony!"

" What ? They are old! That can't be news to them!" Tony made an aggrieved face at his older brother, who sighed as if he'd given up hope of teaching Tony any manners.

"I had noticed age was creeping up on me," Lola said, amused. "Is your partner here, Tony? Chase said you had one."

"No, she stayed in Pittsburgh with the kids. I got Steph in Buffalo and we have to drive back after breakfast because if I'm not home for Sammy's choir performance tonight, I'll be Tony the Tortured For The Rest Of My Life."

"Sammy?" Lola's heart lifted at the name, and she found herself smiling at the younger Todd brother.

"Our daughter. She's seven and the gravitational center of my universe. Named after Dad, obviously."

"That's wonderful. I hope I get to meet her someday."

"Probably this summer. We usually come out here for a few weeks. Did I hear you say something about breakfast, Chase?" Tony looked hopeful.

"Not for half an hour!"

"Uh-huh. Maybe I'll just go down to the kitchen…" Tony sidled by and followed the admittedly-tantalizing scent of bacon coming from the back of the house.

"Stephanie," Chase told Lola, "won't be at the breakfast table until thirty seconds before the plates get cleared, because she eats like a—" He broke off, looking pained, then, dryly, said, "Bird. And yes, she is one."

"There are bird shifters?" Lola's eyes widened. "Somehow I'd sort of decided you must all be mammals."

"That would make sense, wouldn't it? But no. Steph's a kestrel. She turns this big," he said, making a space of about ten vertical inches between his hands, "and is furious about it."

Lola blinked in the general direction of the bedrooms. "She's quite tall, though, isn't she? How does she shift that small?" Stephanie was tall, closer to six feet than not, and model-slender from what Lola had seen of her.

Chase shrugged. "Magic. She can get bigger, too, but her natural shift size is small and it annoys her endlessly."

"But I thought Sam said shifters tended to be bigger than their true animal counterparts?"

"They tend to," Chase agreed. "But Stephanie's small for a female kestrel. You'll probably see, eventually." He grinned suddenly. "She and Tony used to chase each other all over the house when we were kids. They wrecked everything ."

"It sounds like a really wonderful family," Lola murmured. "I'm so happy for all of you."

"Garius can help." Sam returned in triumph, waving his phone. "He'd said something about his line of shifters, which made me think he knew more about the lines than he was letting on, and he'll send someone over to do a private DNA test."

Chase's eyebrows shot up. "Why do you need a DNA test? You two aren't going to have kids, are you? You're seventy years old, for God's sake!"

Sam looked as though he thought he should have watched his mouth, or at least the company he was in, and cast Lola a guilty glance before trying for a reassuring smile at Chase. "No, we're not. But it's, ah." He glanced at Lola again, and at her small nod, tried again. "It's possible we already did. Or. I mean. It's. Um."

"We did have a child," Lola interrupted gently. "Fifty years ago, give or take. We think that the hospital I was at had a nurse who was a shifter, and when it was clear I didn't know that my son's father was a shifter…we think they may have taken the child for what they believed was probably his own safety."

"Holy shit." Chase took a few steps backward and sat hard on a couch, staring up at Sam. "You mean we might have another…brother? Out there? A biological one? I mean, to you?"

"Not out there," Sam said cautiously. "There aren't that many fox shifters, Chase."

"Oh my God. You don't think he's dead ?" Sheer horror wrote itself large over Chase's features before collapsing into wide-eyed understanding. "Oh. What. No. No way? You don't think he's— me ? What would the odds be?"

"There were only half a dozen people who fostered shifter kids on the whole East coast when I started," Sam said carefully. "You were—well, Lola's son was—born in Chicago. It's a long way, but we know you worked your way east through your first few years. And you were born in Aurora."

"Aurora's not Chicago," Chase said feebly. "When…what?" His hazel gaze went to Lola, who sat across from him, heart in her throat.

"My son was born on February fifteenth in a small Chicago charity hospital run by nuns. His name was Samuel Charles Johnson. Sam says your birth certificate says you were born in Aurora two days later, and that you're Charles Richard Smith." She felt her smile falter. "I chose Johnson as my new last name back then because it was so common, and Smith is even more common, so it…it almost adds up. And you are a fox shifter."

"And Noah Brannigan thought I looked like you," Chase said to Sam, blankly.

"You also look something like Lola's daughter Jennifer," Sam said, as cautiously as Lola had spoken. "It's a lot, Chase, I know. It might be impossible. We might be chasing a dream. But…Garius Beren's foundation can offer a DNA test that won't be exposed to true human laboratories, so if you wanted to find out…"

"I—yes. I mean, yes, but—but Dad, if I am, I don't want that to kill the others. None of us ever wanted anything more than to really be your kids?—"

"You are my kids," Sam said fiercely.

Chase made a choked sound, stood up, and hugged Sam hard. Lola wiped her first tears away, then didn't bother with the rest; there were too many to catch, anyway. Finally, Chase mumbled, "But you know what I mean," into Sam's shoulder, and the older man nodded.

"We can't not tell them, though."

"Oh, God, no," Chase croaked. "I'm just going to get a ration of shit about 'we always knew you were his favorite' and things like that."

Sam, indignant enough to make Lola laugh through her tears, said, "You were not!"

Chase put Sam back a bit, grinning at him a little wetly. "No, I know. You always liked Stephanie best."

"I did not!" Sam paused. "I liked Ellen best. She always made my coffee right."

Chase managed another wet coughing laugh and hugged Sam again. "No, you didn't. Although yes, she did. She still makes a mean cup of coffee."

"No, I didn't," Sam agreed, muffled in his son's shoulder. "I love all of you kids with all of my heart. I would have wasted away to nothing without you."

"And then there wouldn't be a happily ever after with Lola," Chase said hoarsely. He stepped back, wiping his eyes and smiling lopsidedly at Lola. "Sorry. I'm a little overwhelmed."

"Sam and I have been welling up constantly the past few days," she assured him. "You're more than entitled to a few tears of your own."

"God." Chase wiped his eyes again. "So when is this DNA technician coming over?"

Sam shrugged. "I don't expect them to be here this afternoon, although who knows? Garius said he'd send someone as soon as he could."

"Great. Okay, good. Enough time for me to pull myself together." Chase glanced toward the dining room. "And tell the others. Dad, is it all right if I go talk to them myself? I feel like this is a sibling thing."

"Yes, of course. Lola and I will get dressed and meet you in the dining room in a while."

Chase nodded, gave Lola another crooked smile, and maneuvered around the couches as he headed toward the back of the house, although he stopped as he reached the huge fireplace that made up the great room's back 'wall.' "You know it wouldn't really change anything?" he asked carefully.

"Of course," Lola said gently. "You're already a family, Chase. That's obvious. I'll still be a new person in your life. But it would do my heart so much good to know that my baby found his way to a family that loved him as much as your father and siblings love you."

Chase said, "Thank you," with a smile that made him look about half his age, and disappeared toward the kitchen.

Sam came to sit next to Lola on the couch, arm around her shoulders so he could kiss her hair. "That was very brave. I told you, you're the bravest person I've ever known."

"It was what he needed to hear," Lola whispered. "And it was true. All of it. I want our baby to have found a family who loved him. If that family happens to have a biological connection nobody expected, that's wonderful. But what really matters is that he grew up safe and happy and loved. I want that more than anything else, Sam. I really do."

"I know." He kissed her hair again, and despite his promise to Chase, instead of leading her upstairs, he sank back into the couch with her and held on. "It's all going to turn out okay."