“You’re never this quiet for this long, you’re scaring me.” I finally break when he rests back on the edge of the bed away from me. My nerves and anxiety too much to bear anymore. I lift my foot and nudge him gently in the butt, pulling his attention back to me with a coy smile on my face that I hope tugs at his heart strings. Full on puppy dog eyes and pouty lips because he’s being so distant and quiet, and I don’t like it one bit.
He turns and looks at me for a moment, making me hold my breath and I tense wondering what’s to come next, but he sighs, and I find myself doing it with him. A sense of letting go in the air as his emotions finally merge with mine and some of that wall comes down a little, making me relax a touch. He pulls himself up and instantly crawls up the bed and lies down beside me, making the mattress dip so I roll towards him.
Stretching out to meet my position, he puts his palm on my abdomen gently. A calmness to his manner and I hold still and wait for him to make the moves, because I’m so unsure on how he’ll react. His eyes move to where he’s holding and yet his face is so hard to read, and he feels me looking at him and avoids my eye contact. He pushes his face towards me, ducking down so I can’t see him, nuzzling in against my shoulder as his breath plays softly over the skin on show from my light nightdress. His presence alone warms me to my core and calms some of my inner anxiety, sinking against him and exhaling heavily, even though I know he’s unwilling to fully uncurl.
“There’s a lot……. My heads a little fried. I’m also sort of shellshocked about this.” He gazes at my stomach and blinks back the instant damp sheen on his eyes and exhales heavily once more. My heart skipping a beat or two with the slightest worry that maybe babies are not something he’s happy about and that’s why he’s being evasive and strange. We have never really talked about it, and we were using precautions to avoid exactly this.
My heart flutters with the very real possibility that this isn’t just down to his guilt gnawing at his soul, but the fact he’s going to be a father and maybe it was never in the plan for him. I swallow heavily and try not to dwell on the slight chance he’s devastated about it.
“Talk to me.” I nudge him, needing something more than quiet, and nuzzle closer. Inner anxiety growing as my insecure self shows face. My heart rate increases, and my palms get clammy as I try and appear neutral emotionally. I don’t want to burden him with a spew of feelings when he’s having a hard enough time deciphering his own, but it’s hard.
The spell had fallout for sure and Leyanne did warn me that he may need an adjustment period to get his head straight when we got home. That mind control and being trapped somewhere in a state of timelessness would affect them on some level, even if it only lasted a week. I don’t know how much of that is this.
I smile impulsively when he lets go of my belly and wraps his arm around me instead, gesturing for me to lift my head so his other one can slide under it and gives me his bicep as a cushion. A familiar Colton move. One that soothes me a little and I try not to overthink this and instead focus on his touch. I snuggle in greedily, needing him more than air. His legs wrapping around mine until every inch of us touches intimately and he buries his mouth in my hair and tucks my head under his chin.
“Where to start…. You went to New Mexico, you found your brother, brought back a witch…… Lead our people into a crazy dangerous battle that might have ended all of us. Had a one-on-one fight with me where I tried to kill you, more than once. And that’s just to start….” He lets out a long, strained breath and squeezes me closer, his surge of chaotic emotions finally seeping through to me, and I can feel just how messy his brain is.
“I know.” I mumble guiltily in a low voice and stretch my arms around him as much as I can, clinging on needily.
“We’re also going back to the mountain to finally deal with that chaos now we have reason to believe the vampires are receding… and you’re pregnant…. we’re pregnant! I’m going to be a dad.” He breaths out heavily as though this fact is still taking its time to filter through and is obviously the major one for him that’s giving him a hard time. The woosh of words, the extra hard exhale as he got to the final point and yet I cannot read a single emotion accurately to tell if it’s a bad sigh or a shocked one.
“I know, I know… Carmen imprinting on Jasper… meeting a vampire, finding out my dad’s not my dad…. I know there’s a lot. I get it. I lived through it, and I still haven’t really absorbed any of it. I just hate when you clam up and I can’t tell what you’re thinking, while your emotions are not helping me any. I can tell you’re sort of shocked, but there’s a lingering something I can’t decipher. I can feel it, it’s making me nervy and uptight and yet I don’t know what it is.” It comes out in a ramble, my heart pounding as my feelings get the better of me and turn me into a jittering wreck. I want to so badly ask him if he hates the fact I’m pregnant, but I’m too scared to hear the answer. My heart is literally hanging by a thread, terrified of what pain he can cause with one simple rejection of what grows inside of me.
“Disbelief…. that’s what that is. It’s not one thing, it’s many… Like, are we really ending a war that’s plagued us our entire lives? Are we really going to be parents in the midst of all this? Is this all gone from never ending threat to nothing in the blink of an eye? And what about you? Your father is royalty among … God, our enemy, Lorey. You’re a freaking vampire Princess and that just blows my mind. I’m not trying to close you out, I’m just… overwhelmed.” Which I guess is exactly how he has me feeling. Overloaded, anxious, and weighed down with a thousand emotions all at once. Sometimes sharing that is too much and it’s hard for me to swallow even though I know he’s trying so hard to shield me from the worst of it.
“Leyanne thinks that me being alive will pull Varro back from attacking our people, so I guess, yes, the threat is going to end. We just haven’t had any word from Jasper or Darrius to confirm it, but the mountain had way less vampires than we both know were there before. So where did they go? And him….. once he knows I’m alive, what if he wants to see me?” I dodge the baby topic, sticking to something less traumatic to my soul.
It is something I’ve thought about, my father, and honestly, I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to face the reality that my dad, the one who raised me for ten years, the father I loved, was not even my blood at all. That some lord, some creature out there, that I’ve never met who waged wars because of me is who I belong to. I can’t absorb it. I can’t get my thoughts in order to really accept it.
“I did think it was half empty considering how many we’ve chased through that infernal forest for months. Or maybe there was always less of them, and we assumed more. Maybe they just spread out and used the same patrols over and over. God knows. We defeated them so fast, it’s like they weren’t even trying to hold us off.” Colton sighs and instinctively squeezes me again, inhaling me as though he’s glad to be home even though his reality meant he never left me. It’s odd. I guess him having my memories now means it’s messed up his timeline and he shouldn’t miss me because it was only today he left me, but his memories are making that confusing.
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