Page 88

I WOKE UP back in my teenage bedroom again, but this time, I felt like I’d been run over by a truck.

I didn’t usually feel this shitty after a heat, but then, I’d never been in heat that long. I’d never stayed in wolf form so long. I’d never run that long and that far, hunted with that kind of ferocity. My whole body felt sore. I was still bloody from the deer. And… shit, there was semen sliding out of my pussy.

Could I get pregnant from that? If he’d been in wolf form, could he knock me up? I was thinking he’d been banking on not, because Vincent had specifically said he didn’t want me pregnant from my heat, and I hoped he meant in general and not just with Damian, because he’d said he wanted me to choose him.

I didn’t know, but the internet would know. The internet was the sum of all knowledge, and I just needed to look this up.

Of course, my phone was not in my room.

I got up and pulled on a robe, stumbling out into the living room.

“Leo,” said my dad. “You’re awake! How are you, sweetie?”

“My phone,” I said, wincing. “Where’s my phone?”

“Probably in your car,” said my dad.

“The rental car,” I said. “The one that is late again. And—oh, my God—I need to call Casey. What day is it?”

“I’ll go get your phone,” said my dad. “You relax.” He started across the room towards the door. “Or, um, shower?”

I looked down at the blood on me, some of which Vincent had licked off. “Yeah, shower sounds good,” I groaned.

By the time I got out of the shower, I felt at least halfway human again. My phone had entirely run out of battery, so I had to sit next to the wall where it was plugged in and charging.

I googled.

Weirdly, the internet did not know about this, not definitively. It was not that people did not do this. In fact, I was pretty stunned about how often people did this, how many women out there kinked for this, in fact. There were women who specifically tried to date werewolves just to try to get them to do this to them, actually, and that sort of stunned me.

I couldn’t find anyone who’d gotten pregnant from an encounter like that, and I knew that having sex in wolf form tended to mean it was much tougher to get pregnant. The shifting back and forth tended to dislodge things, shake things up, make it all more difficult. The two reproductive systems—the wolf and the human—were similar but not identical. The sheer fact that I experienced heat at all was a sign of that, of the way that there was me and there was my wolf, and we were one but not one.

It seemed unlikely, anyway.

“What are you looking up?” said my dad.

“Nothing,” I said, turning my phone over, feeling my face heat up.

“Something happened with Vincent,” said my dad. “He comes back, carrying you, and you’re asleep in his arms, and you two scent like—”

“He broke my heat,” I said.

My dad nodded. “Okay.” He squared his shoulders. “Well, Leo, I think what’s going to happen now is that I’m going to take you back to the city myself. Don’t worry about this rental car. I’ll take it back myself. I’ll pay the extra on whatever you owe—”

“Dad, I don’t need you to pay for the rental car.”

“Yeah, but I want to. I want you to go home, get back to your routine, and I want you to, uh…” He sighed. “Stay away from this place, Leo. I don’t think it’s good for you here.”

I bit down on my lip. “But what if I… what if Vincent—”

“Sweetheart, that can’t happen,” said my dad. “You know this. You cannot be with the brother of your scent match. You cannot have a relationship with one brother and then have a relationship with another brother.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “I feel like it happens in fiction a lot.”

My dad laughed. “Yeah, well, I think in real life, it’s too painful. They don’t have family besides each other. You can’t get between them.”

I thought about that. There was a lot of baggage there, of course, all of the business with Opal, everything else, and… yeah. Maybe it was impossible. But Vincent was different than Damian had ever been. Vincent wanted me in a way that was unselfish, where he cared about me first and thought of his own desires second, and I had never been with a man who was like that, and I wanted… well, we hadn’t even kissed.

“Besides,” said my dad, “you know that your scent match with Damian would interfere.”