Page 49

Three Days Later

M aybe it was morning. Maybe it was night again. Logan rested in my arms, his head tucked between my breasts. I had no idea how long we’d actually been in the bedroom, making love, dozing, and making love again.

I’d lost count. Sixteen times? Seventeen? Twenty? At some point, we probably needed to eat something, but my legs felt bowed at the thighs, and I wasn’t sure I could even walk.

And it made me happy.

I stroked Logan’s cheek, wondering at what point we would say “I love you” to each other.

The out-of-place thought made me smile. I loved him, and he loved me. Someday, saying it aloud would only be icing on the cake of months of behavior that already proved it .

The bond hummed with returning desire. That meant Logan was waking up and probably ready to have sex again.

He took a deep breath and half-sat up so he could see my face. “I have something to tell you,” he said, pressing kisses in circles around my right breast and then my left. When he’d finished, he added, “I’m not sure what it means.”

“What’s that?” I asked absently, wondering if his personal shower was large enough to fuck in. It had to be. He was the alpha, and it was the master bedroom suite.

“Hey,” he said. “Stop thinking about the sex in the shower. You’re distracting me.”

“Heard that, did ya?” I grinned and scrunched my nose. “What is it you want to tell me?”

“There’s no easy way to say it, so I’m just going to say it.” His seriousness was starting to frighten me.

“Okay.”

“Marcus knows who your birth parents are. He could tell you, if you wanted to know.”

I froze completely, holding my breath as I processed his words. There had been a time in my life when I would have given anything to know who my parents were, but that time had long gone.

“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. What could 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.

“Go the fuck away,” Logan roared. He stared down at me. “I’ll probably kill whoever dared interrupt us.”

“I might help you,” I said.

“Logan! You two need to eat,” Olivia answered. “It’s been three days.”

Logan jumped off the bed and charged toward the door. He threw it open. “Leave it there. We’ll get to it when we get to it. I want to fuck my mate.”

Olivia lifted a tray filled with food. “You know we have to watch you eat it. Then we’ll leave you to it again.”

Jasper’s head popped into view. “Aye, ye know we have to. The rest of Six-Mile and probably Red Tail would string us up by our toes if we don’t.”

“Motherfucking sons of bitch assholes,” Logan yelled, swiping a chicken biscuit from the tray and shoving it in his mouth. “Come on, Emma.”

I climbed from the bed and dutifully marched toward the door, reeling a little from the whiplash of his mood change and my own. Eating might’ve been necessary, but right then, nothing in that room appealed to me more than Logan’s ass.

“That’s not all,” Olivia said, handing me the other biscuit. She also offered me a glass of orange juice which I drained quickly.

“What is it?” I asked.

Her expression turned sad. “We’ve found something. ”

“Yeah?” Logan barked.

Jasper glanced at me before he said, “It’s Acheron.”

To Be Continued….