He didn't stop scratching.
"For someone who claims not to like the dog," I said, adjusting the blanket over Mac, "you've let him annex your lap, your coat, and possibly your moral compass."
Gregor looked down at Fergus. Fergus snored. "He’s small."
"That's not an answer."
"Small things require more love."
My throat tightened before I could make a joke. He was looking at Mac when he said it.
I turned toward the window. Scotland unspooled beneath us in gray-green patches, fields and roads blurred by cloud. Down there somewhere was my flat, my café, the bed I'd slept in with one hand on my stomach and the other near my phone.
Now I was flying south in a private jet with my newborn, my dog, and a Russian who spoke if needed and who’d also caught my son in his bare hands and considered a Yorkie part of his security perimeter.
Strange life.
Not bad. Just strange.
We landed two hours later. The door opened and heat hit me, along with a scent.
Champagne. Storm-clouds. Caramel.
I felt them before I saw them. When they were altogether the scent was like it was one perfect note. I smelled Gregor In Edinburgh and loved it, but nothing smelled like my three alphas did when they were together.
My alphas.
Artem and Ivan stood at the bottom of the stairs. They looked wrecked. Their suits rumpled, eyes shadowed, the raw edge of alpha energy rolling off them in waves. Ivan was never still unless violence was imminent. Artem was still often, but this was different. This was a restraint pulled so tight you could hear it. Like an elastic band stretched to its limits.
They were looking at Mac like men who'd forgotten water existed and just spotted a lake.
The second my feet touched tarmac, they moved.
Artem reached me first. His hands shook. He pulled me against him and buried his face in my neck and inhaled like he was trying to memorize my lungs.
"Maeve."
His shoulders shuddered. Once. If I hadn't been pressed against him, I'd have missed it.
The future Pakhan of the Petrov Bratva, shaking on a private airstrip because I was alive. Inconvenient, that. Bad for my emotional defenses.
Ivan's hand touched Mac's head with the kind of reverence usually reserved for religious artefacts. He kissed my forehead and then his focus narrowed to the baby.
"Look at him," he breathed. "Look at our boy."
"Careful," I said as he reached.
Ivan froze. Both hands hovering. The man almost certainly had an Interpol notice and he looked genuinely terrified of holding a baby wrong.
"Support his head."
"I know that."
"Your hands are shaking."
"I’m experiencing a medical event."
"It's called feelings."
