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True to his words, I am all sore by the time he fills me with his seed for the second time.
I whine about the knot and make a fuss but then he rolls onto his back and, still knotted, tucks my head against his chest and commands me,“Rest.”
With my legs spread wide around his thick waist and my pussy stretched wide around his knot, I drift into contented sleep.
ChapterThree
Jasmine
Two weeks after the forest knotting incident, I sense the familiar awareness of imminent change. While it’s too soon to know for sure, I have missed my monthly for the first time in my adult life, and every day without a sign of blood cements the notion in my mind.
I am pregnant. A child grows in my womb. A little piece of Doug and me that we might one day meet.
I have yet to tell anyone beyond Doug, who is now torn between holding my pussy and holding my belly while we sleep.
For now, it is our secret, one I’m not yet ready to share.
There is always something to be done within the pack, and my days are busy and full. Doug has been out patrolling but is due back soon. It’s late and, while the higher pack members get to relax in the central cavern, I sit with the lower shifters on the edges, far from the warmth of the fire.
We are all still at work, which takes me back to the night Ashe met us as we fled Tulwin’s camp, and he told us not to expect a welcome. A year on, I am fully acquainted with the reality of those words as we find ourselves living in relative peace within a flawed and fractured pack.
It is not the happily ever after I had hoped for, and we are outsiders here, not only Doug and I but the lesser shifters and the few humans who came with us.
But we are also free, and I take that as a blessing.
I don’t mind my duties, nor the current sewing I’m working on. It is no hardship to craft a beautiful quilt for the pack leader’s mate. What I mind is her coming to inspect it with a sneer of distaste. She has her two favorites with her tonight, younger shifter bitches whom she is grooming in her stead and who copy her disdain like perfect little replicas.
“I don’t like this color,” Ava announces in her imperious tone. “Remove this section and start over again, but in shades of blue.”
Her two companions smirk.
I bite my tongue lest I say something I will regret. The section with lilac-colored squares makes up more than half the quilt, and now I must unpick it and start again.
To add insult to injury, they were originally blue, and she told me to swap them out for lilac!
I tell myself it doesn’t matter how I spend my time, except I’m no longer a bondservant, and it does. One of the lesser pack women is expecting a baby imminently, and I was hoping to make a smaller version of the quilt ready for the arrival. I might be able to reuse the lilac squares, but unpicking them will not be easy, given they form the shape of a crescent moon and the feature in the quilt.
When I merely nod, reach for my sewing pick, and begin removing stitches, Ava moves on to complain about something else.
Deba sits to my right, a kindly older woman who lost her shifter mate several years ago. Her twin sons are part of Tavion’s patrol, which ought to offer her some status. In the Oberon Pack, it does not. Not that she seems to mind. She appears to prefer to keep to the company of the other humans and lesser shifters.
“Ava is particularly ill-tempered tonight,” Deba observes. “I ought to feel more sorry for her, given her mate’s many affairs, but it’s no excuse.”
My eyes go to the throne where Travis sits, surveying his domain. I thought the orcs to be barbarous, but wolves are barbaric in their own way. Two female shifters are at Travis’s feet—his current favorites who Ava is sure to punish the moment they fall from her mate’s grace.
“I don’t know how I would feel if my mate kept rutting other women,” I say, trying to summon charity toward Ava.
“I would cut off his balls,” Deba says, startling a chuckle from me. She has such a kindly disposition that it always shocks me when she speaks plainly and with fire. “My mate was dedicated to me in the way Doug is dedicated to you. Pack leader or not, it is a slow death to remain with a mate out of obligation or because you are enamored with status.”
I cannot disagree with her. Despite the strange circumstances that led to Doug and I bonding, I cherish the love that continues to grow between us. “It won’t be long before your sons take mates,” I say, smiling.
She rolls her eyes, going back to the mending she is working on. “They are young and full of adventure still. They care nothing of their aging mama having grand-pups to spoil.”
The woman sitting on Deba’s other side chuckles. “Deba, you are not so old yet!”
Our conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Tavion and his patrol. I do not speak to him often, but both Deba and Doug speak highly of him. Deba’s sons are half-breed shifters, Deba being human, yet Tavion includes them in his patrol, showing he does not disdain lesser pack members as his father might.
I have often wondered how Tavion came to have such admirable qualities when his mother and father are weak-minded and bigoted.
