But he doesn’t just hold me. He takes my face in both hands like he’s about to ask me something, then kisses me instead, and it’s nothing like the kiss you give on your way out the door. It’s slow and deep, no hurry in it, like he means to spend the whole morning right here on my mouth. His hand slides off my cheek to the small of my back and pulls me into him, holding me up when my knees quit on me. He kisses me like he’s memorizing it. Like it’s the last thing he’ll ever get to taste.
When he finally lets me have air, I drag it in against his mouth, shaken. “Aaron.” It comes out rough. “Whew. Baby, what is going on with you?”
He doesn’t answer. He drops his face into my neck instead and breathes me in, then he’s kissing the skin there, under my ear, slow and open-mouthed, his hands moving over me like he’s taking inventory, like he’s filling himself up for some long road I don’t know about. When he pulls back at last, he tips his head toward the ceiling and groans, like he’s bracing himself. He gathers me in again and holds on.
“What is going on with you?” I ask it into his shirt, and again he gives me nothing.
The floor of our cabin drops out from under me. The world folds over on itself and sets me down on packed earth. The cabin’s gone. I pull back from him into sun-baked grass, crushedclover, the musk of my own people. We’re standing at the territory line of Solaris Pride.
“Aaron.” I look up at him. “When did you learn how to do that?”
He doesn’t answer. He just smiles down at me, soft and a little sad, and runs his thumb along my cheek. That’s twice now he’s dodged me, and I open my mouth to call him on it. But he’s looking at me like I’m the only thing he can see, and whatever I was about to say doesn’t stand a chance. So I go up on my toes, kiss him, and tell him the truth instead. “I love you.”
“I love you more,” he murmurs against my mouth.
That earns him a smirk. “When we get home,” I tell him, “I’m pouncing you. Fair warning.” My tail comes up, dragging slow across his back, and my lion stirs with it. She’s been restless all week, pacing under my skin. I keep blaming the baby. But right now she’s drunk on all of it, the boy cub we’re carrying, the home we’re building, this man. And for once, I don’t rein her in.
Aaron takes my hand and walks me toward the line. The two guards at the border should challenge us. They don’t. They won’t even lift their heads, just step out of our path, eyes down, tails tucked, giving my mate the kind of berth you give something dangerous. I’ve seen these men face down rogues without flinching. Now they can’t look at him.
“Hmm.” I drag the sound out, watching them shrink from him.
“Come on, baby.” Aaron tugs my hand, gentle, drawing me up the path. “They’re expecting us.”
“Expecting us?” I look up, but his eyes are already forward.
The farther we go, the worse it sits in me. My pride is wrong today. The cookfires sit cold. No cubs tumbling underfoot, no one out arguing over the day’s hunt. Every door is shut, and the whole place has gone too still. My lioness wakes with her hackles up, and she knows it before I do. Something’s coming for us.
I stop walking. My ears swivel forward and my tail goes rigid behind me. “Aaron.” I hear my own voice change. “What is going on?”
My father’s door opens and he comes out alone. He takes the porch slow, like every step is one he doesn’t want to take. He stops at the top of the steps and looks down at me. His eyes are the same amber as mine, wet, and he doesn’t blink it back. He hasn’t said a word. He doesn’t have to.
I round on Aaron. “What are you about to do?” The words come out hot. “Fight him again? Is that what this is?”
He says nothing, and the nothing is worse than anything he could say. I’ve been raw all week, every feeling sitting right under my skin, and his quiet pushes on it. I catch myself before I snap. I bring my voice down soft instead. “Baby. We’re building our own family now. But I need our son to know my father. To know my pride.”
Aaron turns to me, and his smile is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen cross his face. “I’ll never take that from you, baby,” he says. “You’re going to have all of it. I swear that to you.”
“Okay.” I draw it out, watching him. The words are right. The way he gives them to me is all wrong. I look back to the porch. My father comes off it. Behind him my brothers move out into the light, Dayo first, then Tunde. Neither of them will meet my eyes. They just stand at the rail, looking at me like they’re already grieving me.
“This is far enough,” Aaron says.
He turns me to him and cups my face in both hands. It’s so gentle. Too gentle. I gasp. “One day,” he says, and kisses me, light. I shove back against him, but he holds on. My lioness already knows, even if the rest of me won’t. He rests his forehead against mine. “One day you’re going to forgive me for this.”
“What is going on, Aaron?” My hands have started to shake against his chest. “That’s why. That’s why you’ve been masking your scent from me all week. So I couldn’t feel this coming.”
It all comes clear at once. “No.” I shake my head hard. “No, Aaron. We did this. We have our son. You can’t—you can’t do this to us.”
“You think I’d carry you into that Glen and let you lose everything?” The words come out of him low and torn. “Pull you out of your whole life—your classroom, your pride, every soul who loves you—and bury you in a dead realm at my side, away from all of it, because I’m too selfish to stand being without you? No, baby. I’ll never do that to you. That’s the one thing I won’t do.”
“Then we work it out.” The words climb over each other now, frantic. “A few days here in Wintermoon, with me. The rest of the week in the Glen, with them. Aaron, we can find a way, we can?—“
“It doesn’t work like that, baby.” He says it so softly it’s worse than any shout. “I’d give anything if it did. But it doesn’t.”
It comes up in me fast and ugly, rejection, raw and physical, my own mate setting me aside, and my body revolts against it. I’m sure I’ll be sick right here in the dirt. My father’s hand lands on my shoulder, heavy and warm. I knock it off without turning. “Don’t touch me.” It comes out a snarl. “Don’t you dare touch me right now.”
“Mara.” My father’s voice cracks on it. “Your mate is thinking of your future, little one. Of the cub’s. I was never that good a man to your mother, not in a choice like this one. I don’t know that I could do what he’s doing.”
I hiss at him, an ugly sound I can’t catch in time, and I turn back to the only one who can stop this. “No. Please.” I’m begging and I don’t care that I am. “Aaron, please. We built a life. Awhole life, out of nothing. You said you loved me. You said you chose me?—“
