Page 21 of The Dragon’s Stormwoven Bond (Dragon Flight Academy #2)

Valen

It felt like in the week since we had laid the eggs, that we had not left the nest. And for the most part we hadn’t. My mate wouldn’t be able to for a while, his paternal instincts paired with hormones wouldn’t allow it. And for me, there wasn’t any place I’d rather be than with my family.

My team came to the house, along with my flight trainer, and we talked about strategy as I sat in the nest with my mate.

There were many alphas who’d have been embarrassed to be so clingy to their eggs.

I wasn’t one of them. This clutch and my mate were my pride and joy.

If I needed to have every meeting from this exact spot until they hatched right here, I’d have done so.

And my team were happy to comply with my request to meet at our house. They watched our eggs with wonder. For a couple of them, it was the first time they’d seen an actual clutch.

From there, they practiced their formations and sent me the footage. It was working well for us. Ideal? Absolutely not, but we were going to be prepared for competition and that had been my biggest worry jobwise.

Pep would bring his laptop into the nest and use the desk I made him to do his work. He’d organized his schedule to not have too much on his plate, and that terrified me. Because if this was a light load, what had he been carrying during a typical workday?

The day finally came that I did need to leave the house. I hated it, but we’d both agreed it was for the best. I’d just come out of the bathroom, ready to start my day, when a look of terror filled Pep’s face.

“What is it?” I said. “Is something wrong with the eggs?”

“We have to get a bigger house.” It wasn’t the first time one of us mentioned it, but he was so forceful in a way I hadn’t heard before.

This wasn’t a whimsical notion of a future happening. He meant we needed it now. At least that was what it sounded like.

My brow furrowed. “What do you mean, exactly?”

“We have one bathroom, one bedroom, the kitchen barely fits the two of us. This is—” he gestured around, “—this is not big enough.”

I wanted to laugh. But also, I liked being mated, so I refrained. “Pep, is this the first time you really realized that we definitely need a bigger house?”

“Yes... no… yes… sort of. I knew and assumed this cabin was temporary. I didn’t—I love it here and was hoping once the eggs came, I’d feel differently. But look around. We can’t make this work.”

I grinned and pulled him into my arms, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “I also love it here. This has been a fantastic first house for us, but that’s all it is—a first house. Even if we had only had one egg in our clutch, we couldn’t stay here.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Well, we can build or we can start looking. Personally, I really like your family’s neighborhood.” Now that things were on the mend with my friend, it would be great to be close to him for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one being that it would make my mate happy.

His face turned thoughtful. “That’s a nice area. Plenty of other dragons around, and the commute to work wouldn’t be so bad. Do you think there’s anything available in there?”

I grinned. “Indeed,” I said. “I can guarantee that there is.”

“You’ve already started looking?” he asked, not really needing the answer, already knowing it.

“Only a little bit. I didn’t want to find too many things, but I had a feeling that you would appreciate some of the pre-research.

” It had given me something to do when the exhaustion of his pregnancy was the worst. At the time it was something to do, his father and I still not exactly on speaking terms and the idea of expanding this place to allow our children to grow up near the school the strongest idea I had at the time.

But now that the eggs were here and after the scare where we needed his family by our side, the short distance between us nearly too much, that perspective had changed. At least for me it had.

“Yes, I do appreciate it, a lot. The thought of looking for a house sounds daunting. Like, I don’t care about stuff. I just need a place with a lot of bedrooms and a playset and a very big office where you can set up five hundred different monitors.”

My eyes went wide. The two of us had very different ideals about “stuff. If I was understanding him correctly, he wanted a room that was out of a sci-fi movie. “Is that an option? Like your own control room?”

He nodded, his face beaming. “Yep. That would be amazing, right?”

I gripped his hand and pulled it to my lips, kissing it. “We’ll see what we can do. I don’t have any plans on Saturday. If you’d like to start looking around, we can make appointments, and I can send you the links of the homes that are available.”

“That sounds wonderful, mate. Thank you. I don’t know how I didn’t think of this before.”

I brushed a kiss over his lips. “You have been busy tending to our abnormally large clutch.”

He groaned. “Don’t remind me. Do you have any idea what my brother and I were like as children? We were awful. And we’re going to have twins, Valen. Twins. There’s going to be two.”

I had a feeling his idea of awful and mine were very different things. The years I took off my parents’ lives were countless. The way Eryx described his twins, they were mischievous, but close. That I could handle. Some mini-mes? Goddess, I hoped not.

“Sweetheart, there’s going to be five.” Which wasn’t any better, but somehow, that was my argument.

“Twins are different. Twins are evil. I say that—I am a twin.” He was dead serious.

“We’ll be fine, I promise.” And as much as I said that, I wasn’t sure that I believed it—but Pep needed to hear it, and I was in fake-it-till-you-make-it mode. It wasn’t like we could turn back now, not that I wanted to.

This was exactly where I wanted to be.

The alarm on my phone went off in my pocket, letting me know that it was time to leave. I didn’t want to, even five more minutes would’ve been appreciated, but I was already cutting it close. My team was counting on me, and honestly, Pep probably could use a break from my hovering.

I grabbed my lunch from the counter, kissed my mate goodbye, promising him I’d be back as soon as I could, and walked to work on the familiar path—only this time it felt so much longer. Each step I took was a step away from our young and away from my mate.

The team was surprised to see me, despite me letting them know that I planned to be there.

They had bets on whether I’d show and how late I would be.

Not a single one of them won when I walked in on time.

It amused me… a lot, and made my transition into my first day back a lot easier than it could’ve been.

The first part of practice was a bit rough, despite that. Not them—they did amazing—but my ability to focus on what they were doing wasn’t exactly stellar. At least they weren’t dicks about it. Yay team.

The second time they went through the formation, it got a little easier, and by the third, I was doing my job the way they had expected me to when I was hired and we began to make some amazing progress.

My team worked harder than I’d ever seen them before.

They were ready for competition, ready to take on all of the teams, including those from their school.

I wasn’t sure what the rest of the competition would look like this year, but I was proud of them for coming together so beautifully and having a routine that was top notch.

They went from having a brand-new team flight leader to losing that leader and having to do it basically on their own. And now we were back together, at least until the eggs hatched.

By lunchtime, I was done. I’d spent as much time away from my mate as I could, and instead of joining them to eat, I excused myself and told them I’d see them tomorrow. They were understanding and told me they’d see me in the morning.

So much for going back to work. Half a day was more than I figured I would make when I first woke up, so at least that was a good thing. Tomorrow, I was going to make it all day... probably. But today? Today my dragon needed to be near my mate, and so did I.