Page 114 of The Florist and Her Alphas

“Oh Lia,” he shouts as he explodes inside of me. His hips jerk up off the chair. His arms lock me down on him. His face buries against my throat. He pulses inside me in long, slow waves and I feel his release, hot and deep.

I’m collapsed against his chest.

He’s still inside me. His cock begins to knot and swell gently. His breathing is ragged in my hair. His arms are wrapped around me. The velvet armchair holds us both.

After a while, he slides one hand between us. Rests it on the curve of my belly. Rubs slow circles into my skin through my blouse.

He kisses the side of my head. Tilts my face up and kisses my mouth gently.

“My pregnant soon-to-wife,” he says, looking down at my pregnant belly once we’ve both calmed down.

“I need to go to the doctor soon,” I say quietly. “For an ultrasound. I want to know what we’re having.”

August looks up at me. His blue eyes are soft behind his fogged glasses.

“Ezra already made the appointment,” he says. “Tomorrow at ten in the morning. The pack is going as a family. All of us. He didn’t want to tell you until you were ready to ask. Didn’t want to push you after the garden visit today.”

My throat tightens as I press my forehead against his.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “I love you.”

He smiles. That boyish, open smile that still does something to my heart no matter how many times I see it.

“I love you too,” he whispers back.

Thirty-One

LIANA

One Month Later

“Hold still,” Mira says through her teeth, somewhere behind my left shoulder blade as she works at the zipper on my wedding dress. “Hold still, Liana, I swear to god.”

“I am holding still.”

“You’re breathing.”

“Oh my god, Mira.”

The little metal tab is jammed, and at seven months pregnant I can’t exactly suck my stomach in. In the mirror, Mira’s chopstick bun is coming apart at the crown, dark waves slipping loose around her temples, and there’s a fine gray film of dust along the hem of her cream wrap dress from all the stairs she’s run today.

“This is not happening,” she says, mostly to the zipper. “Your dress is not going to be the reason sixty people sit in that garden for an extra twenty minutes.”

“Mira.”

“You are in a five-thousand-dollar dress,” she says, working the tab in tiny, furious increments. “I told you to go to the place in the city with the good machines instead of the sweet little grandma with a hand-crank sewing machine in her basement, and now we are going to get married in a half-zipped dress.”

I laugh. I can’t help it. It comes out of my chest before I can stop it, and Mira glares up at me in the mirror, eyes narrowed, a single loose curl stuck to her damp forehead.

“This isn’t funny.”

“You’re the most competent person I have ever met in my life,” I tell her. “I know you’ll eventually find a way to fix this.”

She huffs. But something in her shoulders loosens, just slightly, and she goes back to it. Smaller pulls now, careful, working the fabric with her thumb before easing the tab, and I watch her in the mirror instead of watching myself.

“Thank you,” I say, quiet now. “For all of it. The dress, the flowers, today. You’re my best friend, Mira. I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

Her hands go still against my spine.