by Jessie Lane
That was why he’d gone a little crazy when he’d scented the heat his Babushka had told him about. So, in a weak lapse of judgment, he’d decided to make her surrender as his mate also irrevocable. She could never leave him if he got her pregnant. It might not have been his best plan, however a desperate man was prone to do desperate things. Now he worried more than ever that his plan had backfired.
“Are you listening to me, you giant fur ball?”
His head snapped up in Chloe’s direction. “What?”
She rolled her eyes. “How typical of a man not to listen. Like I was saying, just as she was assuring me that everything was all right between the two of you, she turned around to go back to bed and found Alec in his tiger form licking his balls. It weirded her out, okay? So there’s no need for you to get all mad about it. I’m sure I would have said a lot more if I’d walked in and seen one of you guys licking your furry cat balls.”
Gage couldn’t believe his ears. Glancing over at his brother, who was still sitting on the couch, he noticed Alec was blushing. He didn’t need to ask if his brother had been caught by Elena grooming himself. Jesus, no wonder his mate had called them freaks.
His head dropped down in relief. He didn’t know whether to punch his brother for inadvertently causing him grief or start hysterically laughing at the whole situation. This whole mating thing was some stressful shit.
“Are you done with your hissy fit now? Because, if you are, I’d really like to get back to this plural baby thing,” Chloe demanded.
At the mention of his newly conceived cubs, Gage smiled. He couldn’t help it. The thought of two or three little rascals crawling around and snarling at their mom, making her crazy, was enough to brighten his whole day. However these cat references from Elena and her family were starting to get old. He hadn’t missed the jab by her wordage of “hissy”.
“I don’t know, are you and your sisters ever going to stop abusing me with the feline innuendos?” Lifting his head to look at her, he watched as Chloe tapped her pointer finger to her lips with her eyes rolled up at the ceiling like she was thinking.
She finally shrugged her shoulders and said, “Nope, so you should cough up what I want to know anyways.”
It was Gage’s turn to roll his eyes. “I never realized Amazons could be so ridiculously single minded. No, we cannot detect how many cubs are gestating. We can scent a pregnancy, but nothing else.”
“So why would Alec hint that there’s probably more than one baby?” Chloe asked.
Alec snapped, “Nature. Genetics. Think about it, but don’t overtax those slow moving brain cells of yours.”
Chloe’s eyes narrowed on his brother and Gage almost cringed. It looked like Alec hadn’t appreciated the whole ball licking story and was out for blood. He was wrong on his assessment of Chloe, however. Gage could see how most people would take one look at her high maintenance persona, sarcastic attitude, and flaky tendencies and see nothing except a good time girl. He’d already figured the oldest Demos sister out, though. It was all an act. The woman was a highly intelligent, shrewd strategist. Perhaps you wouldn’t put her in front of an Army and tell her to win the war with your soldiers, yet if you gave her a scenario to manipulate… Yeah. The outer packaging said ‘man eater’; the inner soul that everyone seemed to overlook was something entirely different. He really couldn’t wait until Elena’s older sister met a man who didn’t fall for her bullshit because, frankly, any man who tamed that little schemer deserved a good shot of bourbon for fortitude and a pat on the back.
Chloe retorted sharply, “I don’t know anything about shifter genetics, you lack wit. We only found out we were a tad bit more than human ourselves a few months ago. Did you expect us to become genetic experts overnight?”
Inserting himself back into the conversation to head off the impending fight, Gage answered Chloe, “To expand on what Alec said, we assume Elena will be pregnant with more than one cub for a couple of reasons. On the human genetics side, I’m one in a set of triplets.”
Chloe interrupted him, “I get that, but from what I understood, the chances were higher if it was a woman who had a family history of multiple babies, not a man. For instance, your sister, Lulu.”
Gage nodded his head in consent. “That’s true. The chances are much higher if it’s the female from the side of the family with a history of multiples. However, you and I both know that we’re not just facing human DNA here. That brings me to reason number two. Our preternatural Other DNA. In the case of shifters, some animal tendencies are more dominant than our human ones. If you look at your average reproducing tiger in the wild, they usually give birth to multiple cubs. So although Elena is in essence huma—”
“What you’re trying to say is that you have super swimmers.”
Gage choked on his words and Alec snorted.
Suddenly, Gage’s French doors crashed open and Elena ran inside from the backyard, past their stunned little group, and down the hall to Gage’s bedroom. She reemerged less than a minute later holding the flamethrower she’d used on the mission in Germany.
Chloe stared at her sister, dumbfounded, not understanding what she was doing. Alec gave a small roar in alarm and held his hands up in the air in surrender. Gage watched the insane woman he loved ignore all three of them and try to storm past him and back out the door.
As she went to past him, he snapped his arm out around her waist and stopped her. “What in the hell are you doing with that?”
Elena finally looked at him and he saw that her left eye was twitching, which was never a good thing. Gage liked to think of that twitching eye as her sanity meter. The more it twitched, the more you had to worry about her doing something seriously stupid and catastrophic. At the rate her eye was twitching now, he considered evacuating the entire neighborhood as a precaution to whatever she was trying to do.
In a fervent whisper she told him, “He’s back. I swear that he’s fucking stalking me. The little shit is so fast I can’t goddamn kill him and he won’t fucking go away, and if he doesn’t leave me the fuck alone, I will burn the entire WORLD down in the pursuit of killing the little fucker!”
Maybe he should evacuate the state and not just the neighborhood.
Trying to grab and pull the nozzle of the flamethrower’s gun away from her, they got into a small tug-o-war. Gage attempted not to use his superior strength to just rip it out of her hands because he didn’t want to startle her into pulling both of the triggers while she held onto the weapon. He had no idea if she’d already turned the valve of the pack on or not.
“What is this crazy talk, woman? Who in the hell do you think is stalking you and why are you trying to kill him?”
They were still playing tug-o-war with the gun when she shouted, “It’s that furry, little bug-eyed fucker! No matter how many times I try to kill him, he just keeps coming back! Let go! I have to roast him out of existence!”
Was there another shifter on his property? Was that what his irrational mate was talking about?
Gage looked out of the many windows he had and the French doors for a threat. Some sign of a wolf, feline or bear shifter on his property. When he didn’t see anything, he looked back to Elena. “I don’t see anyone. What are you talking about?”
Snatching the nozzle out of Gage’s lax hands, she ran for the doors. “Follow me! I’ll show you before I incinerate his disgusting little ass!”
Little? What small shifter would possibly scare her? Gage ran out the back of his house after his seemingly unstable mate with his brother and her sister right behind him. He watched as Elena stopped in front of a tree a hundred feet away from his house and pointed with the nozzle of the gun up to a branch.
“SEE!” she cried hysterically. “Do you see the little freak? I’m going to get him this time and kill him for good!”
Gage ran up behind her and grabbed the nozzle of the gun again just after she’d turned the valve on the tank. All she had to do now was pull the two different triggers in the
correct order and she’d light up his old oak tree like it was a log covered in gasoline on a bonfire.
“There’s nothing up there, you deranged woman. Give me the M2 Flamethrower before you hurt yourself. Think of our cubs!” Gage yelled at her.
If there was ever a moment that he wanted to wrap his mate in industrial strength bubble wrap, secure it with duct tape and then secure her somewhere she couldn’t hurt herself, this was it.
“Just look!” she wailed. “Look at the branch! He’s there, I tell ya!”
Refusing to let go of the nozzle of the gun, Gage looked at the branch. At first he was sure there was nothing and then a very small movement in the middle of the branch caught his attention. Focusing his eyes on the spot, he stared until he realized what he was looking at.
A spider.
His mate was trying to set a tree on fire because there was spider on it.
Could pregnancy cause a woman to go absolutely strait-jacket-needed, break-out-the-drool-inducing-meds nuts? Because that’s what he was worried he would need at this point, and he hated the idea that the pregnancy was the thing that had pushed her over the edge.
Heaving a sigh of worry, Gage murmured, “Give me the weapon, baby, and let’s go inside.”
“If you love me, you’ll let me roast him. He’s taunting me, sitting up there on that branch like that! I swear to you, he’s taunting me.”
Gage felt Alec and Chloe step up to stand on either side of him as he finally pried the gun to the flamethrower out of Elena’s hands. Handing it over to one of them without really looking to see which one it was, he unbuckled the weapon’s strap from around her waist.
“I do love you, mate. More than you can possibly comprehend since you don’t understand the true ramifications of me tying myself to your unstable, little ass for the rest of our lives. But you can’t go around shooting weapons at teeny, tiny, little spiders. He’s probably not the same spider you’ve seen before. And really, he’s just a harmless, little bug. What harm could he cause you?”
“He’s not a harmless little bug. He’s an agent of evil. We have to kill him, I tell you, or he’s going to try and get us in our sleep!”
Pulling the straps off her shoulders, he tugged the weapon’s pack off her back and then handed it over to the person that he’d handed the gun section to a second before. He heard the heavy tank hit the ground next to his foot, yet he didn’t pay attention to it since all of his focus was on Elena in front of him.
Using his hands on her shoulders, he turned her body around until she faced him. Smoothing his hands up her arms until they ran over her shoulders, up her neck and cupped her face, he talked clearly and slowly as if speaking to a small child. “He won’t ‘get’ us or bother us in any way, okay? I promise. Now, come with me into the house and you can yell at me for knocking you up. Won’t that make you feel better? To yell at me and call me names? Then I can tell you how sorry I am and how much I love you. While you’re yelling at me, I’ll make you a snack. You have to start eating more now that you’re carrying our cubs.”
“Our cubs?” she asked, a little shell-shocked. “You mean there’s going to be more than one baby?”
Oops. He’d forgotten that she’d stormed off and missed that part of the conversation he’d just had with Alec and Chloe.
Hesitantly, he answered, “More than likely, yes.”
Her eyes seemed to glaze over a bit and then she looked from him to Alec on the side of him closest to the house and then her sister on the other side of him, who was holding the flamethrower and standing closest to the tree. When she looked back to Gage, he still couldn’t tell what she was thinking and it made him nervous. How one strong, intelligent, fierce woman who’d come from a long line of Amazons could be so incredibly afraid of spiders, he would never understand.
“How sure are you that there will be more than one baby?”
“About ninety percent sure,” he answered honestly. Why lie? She might as well start to get used to the idea of more than one baby since it was going to be a reality.
“Aunt Thea told me that shifters don’t grow claws or fangs until they’re in their teens, so the babies won’t be able to shift to protect themselves until then.”
Gage shook his head. “No shifting until puberty.”
Faster than he could have ever imagined a human could move, Elena lunged for the flamethrower’s gun, grabbed it from her sister, and had both triggers pulled and a line of fire aimed at the tree branch.
Gage shouted in surprise, grabbed the gun from her, causing her fingers to come off the triggers and the weapon to stop spewing its flames. He threw it to the ground away from them both.
“Are you completely fucking INSANE?”
She looked back at him as calm and collected as could be, as though the last five minutes hadn’t happened at all. “Nope. My mind is definitely not lost. As a matter of fact, it’s right where I left it, in my head.”
Pointing to the burning branch, he snarled back, “Yeah? Then explain that!”
Elena shrugged. “I keep trying to tell you that’s the same spider and it’s out to get me. I would have walked away from it like you wanted me to, but then you had to go and tell me that our poor kids wouldn’t be able to protect themselves from it until they were older. I’m just a mother looking out for her children.”
Gage didn’t know whether to celebrate her burgeoning maternal instincts or go inside and buy a strait jacket off the internet. Either way, he knew that he couldn’t love her anymore than he already did, even if he was convinced their cubs were going to be psychotic.
Between his fears of her trying to leave him because of her humanity, their fight, and then this, he didn’t know what to say to her. He also didn’t want to open his mouth and voice something stupid because he was pissed off, stressed out and she’d just scared the shit out of him with a fucking flamethrower. So instead of saying something that he’d more than likely regret later, he walked away… and he was headed straight for his favorite bottle of whisky.
CHAPTER-THIRTY
Elena
Elena watched the man who loved her enough to resign himself to a death sentence walk away towards his house without saying another word to her. Sure, she got that he thought she was being totally irrational, but dammit, she just knew that damn spider was watching her! If he’d only fucking believe her. Hopefully, she’d killed that little bugger this time and Gage would just get over it.
Chloe clapped her hands excitedly, startling Alec who had been watching his brother stomp off. “I’m going to be an aunt! YAY! I have to go tell Delta and our aunts now that you’re going to get as big as a blimp while carrying your lover’s furry spawn. Don’t play with any more dangerous weapons; you have to think of the children. Talk to you later. Toodles!”
Elena’s lip curled up in disgust at the word ‘blimp’. She wouldn’t get that big carrying around a baby or two, would she? The thought of her having children once again gave her a headache. What the hell did she know about kids? Any adult in their right mind wouldn’t leave her alone with a juvenile, and yet, for some odd reason, Gage had deemed it okay to impregnate her. Did he have any idea what she was probably going to be like as a mother? Any child of hers would probably be learning to count with bullets instead of fingers. She sure as hell hoped Gage was ready for this whole parenting thing.
Alec shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and his movement reminded her that he was still standing there. “You know, ever since I met your brother, my life has been turned upside down and flipped inside out.” Elena gave a rueful laugh. “Which is saying something, you know? It’s not exactly like I was living this quiet, peaceful existence, but when I met him, something told me that, if I got wrapped up in him, it would really be taking a walk on the wild side of life,” Elena mused.
“Fuck walking on the wild side, woman, that’s boring. And lonely. Look at me. I’m practically the fucking poster child for living the untamed lifestyle, and if you repeat to anyone
I said this, I’ll deny it until I’m blue in the face, but I’m so damn tired of it. I feel like my life has become a regular freakin’ washing machine. Wash, rinse, repeat. I’d give up all of my freedoms—all of my vices—to have a woman who wanted me for me, and not just because I’m pretty or fuck like a sex god.”
Elena snorted. “Confident much?”
Alec shrugged nonchalantly. “Just telling the truth. I’m not the only Ivanov that feels this way, either. Look at Lulu. She’s so tired of being lonely that she let herself get charmed by some cock sucking asshat who led her on and broke her heart. You and Gage have what Lulu and I want—a companion. Someone to take this insane ride called life, push the gas petal to the floorboard, and enjoy it.
“Now that you have Gage, you can live your life going zero to sixty every second of it. You have a man who will protect you and your cubs until his dying breath, love you with every fiber of his being, and most importantly, keep your crazy ass in check so you don’t end up in jail. So, yeah, walking on the wild side is tame to what life with Gage will be for you. What you’ll have is something so much better. You’re going to have this epic, fucking journey, and in a hundred years—”
She cut him off, “I don’t have a hundred years, Alec. I’ll be lucky to have sixty with him before I die.”
Alec shook his head. “This was why I came over here today. Babushka told me that she knows a witch who owes her a favor. Apparently, this witch has some experience with a spell that can give you immortality, but there’s a catch.”
Elena’s breath hitched in her chest. There was a chance she could stay alive and be with Gage… but what would it cost them?
