AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 15
January
“You’re a bastard. You knew this would happen and you didn’t tell me. You didn’t tell me about your crazy shifter super sperm.” She was ranting to herself in the car. It was probably best to get it all out before she got to Greenacre. She only had another hour to go. She’d passed through Seattle five minutes before, leaving the city behind her with some small fraction of guilt that she hadn’t even told June that she was coming.
Her parents were absolutely mystified when she asked them to watch her apartment again. She couldn’t tell them the truth, so she’d made up an excuse about having to travel for work, which they probably didn’t even believe. She said she had an interview in New York. She couldn’t relent and tell them the truth. Not yet. She had to see Tavish first. Talk to him. She needed him to tell her that all of this was going to be okay.
She’d tell them that she didn’t get the job. That she’d been thinking about making a change, but it wasn’t for her once she saw it. New York was too expensive. That’s what she’d say. She couldn’t imagine leaving Phoenix.
“But I can imagine leaving. I don’t have a choice.”
She’d reached the age where she expected to spend the rest of her life childless. Hadn’t she told Tavish that having a baby wasn’t in the cards for her? She’d said that pretty much exactly. She’d given up on that years ago when it didn’t happen for her and Jotham, they’d had some tests—his sperm count was normal, she had been ovulating, it just wasn’t happening for them. IVF had been discussed, but Jotham had lost interest in having a child and they had started growing apart. She was older now. Past forty. It didn’t matter that everyone said forty was the new twenty. She didn’t believe it. Not that she felt old, and things definitely were still working as they had been when shewastwenty, but she’d grown used to the idea of never being a mom or anyone’s wife again.
And then she met Tavish.
We might be mates.
Wherever you are, we’ll always be connected.
“Yeah. We’re freaking connected now. We’ll always be connected because he tricked me into getting a baby inside me.” She thumped the wheel as she drove. Putting on angry music wouldn’t help her mood and the soothing stuff would just piss her off the same way someone telling her to calm down would only spike her ire when she was already fuming, so she didn’t play anything at all.
Her thoughts were all over the place. Some of them were peaceful and rational and some of them were screaming loud and not so rational at all. She knew he hadn’t tricked her into anything. She’d made the first move—it was her damn hormones that got her into this mess. Maybe she should have insisted he used a condom, that’s what any sensible woman would have done when jumping on a near-stranger. Because forget unplanned pregnancies, there was all manner of diseases out there.
The pill was ninety-nine percent effective, that one time with Tavish had hit the one percent jackpot. Maybe it was time to start playing the lottery?
She knew what she’d just said wasn’t what Tavish had done. He hadn’t tried to trap her. She’d learned from Lily just how much all shifters loved their young, but would Tavish be happy he was going to be a father?
She’d seen those two pink lines four days ago. She’d been shocked and outraged at first. In denial that it was real. It had taken her a few hours to process the fact that her life was going to change drastically. That it already had. All the things she thought weren’t for her were suddenly for her in the most wildlyfor herof ways.
On the second day of knowing, she’d started to work on a plan by running through all the facts. She was pregnant. Her baby was a shifter baby, and she had no idea what was going to happen to her. She couldn’t raise someone who was half bear on her own. She knew from what Lily said, that shifter kids didn’t start shifting until they were around ten and that brought a whole new level of teenage awkwardness—there was no way she could raise a shifter kid in Phoenix. She had an obligation to tell Tavish, even if she didn’t know if she wanted to be with him. But would not being with him mean she’d have to leave her child behind at Greenacre?
That was an option she refused to consider. Even if she lived in Seattle until the baby was ten and started shifting for the first time, she’d be willing to do that. Because unplanned or not, she loved her baby already.
Which was why she’d lied to her parents and had booked a plane ticket to Seattle as soon as she could manage. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t sit on that information by herself. She wanted to have a healthy pregnancy and a healthy baby. She wanted her little one to be safe his or her entire life, and that started now, as he or she grew inside of her. She might have been pregnant for all of three weeks, but she wanted answers to her questions, and she needed the support.
Josephine and Lily. Both women knew all about raising shifter kids—and Josephine was a doctor who probably knew everything there was to know about pregnancy both with regular babies and with shifters. January might have met them both only once, but she ached for the company of other women right now. She ached to be reassured.
She didn’t want to admit it, but it felt good to be back here.
She’d been home in Phoenix for just under three weeks and it didn’t feel as right as she thought it would. Ashomeas it once had. She’d been so certain about so many things, and then there were doubts, even before those two pink lines on that test changed everything.
January kept struggling with her thoughts all the way to Greenacre, but when she turned into the community and drove down that gravel road that eventually led to the main street, she felt an immediate sense of calm.
This might not be her home and it might not be where she belonged, but it was where she was going to find answers, and that was cathartic.
She didn’t head to Tavish’s house first.
Instead, she took the turn to the clinic that she remembered so well. This day was like that one. Cold, windy, a slate grey sky threatening rain that would mist down in fine droplets until a person was drenched to the skin without even realizing when they’d first started to get wet—Scotch mist, Tavish had called it.
She didn’t want to tell anyone about the pregnancy before she told Tavish, but she had some kind of internal pull, the way people trusted their gut feeling, that he was at the clinic. It was like the pull she’d felt previously, and she found her mind drifting back to the concept of fated mates. It was crazy to think that this pull was anything preternatural. Then again, considering what she now knew she shared the earth with, she wasn’t sure she could be certain of anything.
If Tavish was at the clinic then she could talk to him there, and hopefully she could also see Josephine or book an appointment to see her soon afterwards.
Calling ahead probably would have been a good idea, but it was too late for hindsight as she pushed through the clinic door.
Unlike that first day she was there, the place wasn’t empty. There were two huge men, men with dark hair and dark eyes like Tavish, with burly frames. One held a bloodstained towel over his right hand tightly with his left, and the other looked unnaturally pale. They were sitting far enough part that she didn’t think they’d come in together. One was clearly bleeding and the other looked sick as heck.
She stood in the doorway, the bell above the entrance having just jingled to signal her entrance. She inhaled deeply and got one more step inside the place when Kier walked into the waiting room. He stopped dead when he saw her and if he’d had to mime being shocked, he wouldn’t have done a better job of it. His whole face contorted, and his mouth dropped open. He turned and immediately walked out without saying a word.
