Page 51

When I’d told him we were having a baby, he’d grinned.

“I thought so.”

“How?”

“Your scent.” He’d nestled closer to me.

One of the mysterious things about being mated and married to a wolf shifter. His senses went beyond any level I could comprehend, especially his keen sense of smell.

I’d swatted his arm. “And you didn’t tell me?”

He bent his forehead down to touch mine. “And take away the joy of you discovering it yourself?”

Joy was almost too small a word to contain how excited I’d been, about something I hadn’t even considered before marrying him.

Starting a family together.

A pair of crows cawed in the quince outside the window as the sunlight rose. I eased out from under his arm.

It was a beautiful summer morning and I stepped outside to watch the sun rise over our land. The gold ring on my finger caught the early light. Nearly four years married, and I still admired it every morning.

Behind me, our own chimney sent up its usual crooked thread of smoke. Conan must be up.

On the rise above the water, the cairns caught the first light. Every week, I visited the ones I’d put there, especially Sara Corrin. I’d apologized to her and promised I’d look over her granddaughter, named after her. When I went there, I told her anything new in the pack. That I wished that Sara and my children would grow up together, building a new future without all the hate and violence from the past.

I’d tell her what a good father Gage was. We weren’t friends, but we were now pack. And I’d learned that the pack take care of their own.

Unlike the Crimson Order.

It hadn’t survived through spring without my grandmother. It had cracked the way she always said a flawed blade would crack. Handlers resigned. Operatives went home to families they hadn’t seen in years. The training house in the capital closed its doors by midsummer, and no one ever sent a six-year-old girl through them again. Mervyn had retired quietly to an estate in the south.

Somewhere in the trees, birds sang. I closed my eyes and listened.

The door creaked behind me. Conan came with his hair wild from sleep and handed me a mug of tea.

“How did you sleep?” He smiled and sat beside me.

“Fine.” I placed my hand on my belly. “Until this little one must have woken me up.”

He gazed at me. I still couldn’t believe anyone looked at me like that. With a hint of admiration and pure and absolute love.

We drank our morning tea while the sun climbed over the ridge and young pups bounded out of cabins, eager to experience the new day.

“What do you want to do today, Ruby?”

For eighteen years, no one had asked me that. Someone would tell me where to stand, what to carry, who to kill. But now, this incredible man asked me, and it undid me a little every time.

“It’s a market day,” I said. “I’d like to walk into town.”

Later that morning, he took my hand in his, and we walked there together. Down the path, along the river, and up the slope.

“Once upon a time,” I murmured, “you’d said you’d like a quiet morning in a cabin. Walking together, unafraid.”

He squeezed my hand. “I did indeed.”

“A woman and a wolf.”

He glanced over at me and smiled. His eyes were bright beneath the sunlight. He lifted my hand to his lips and said, “Together.”