121
Holden
It was like we were joined at the hip. Emory and I spent every spare moment together when we weren’t working. We even went grocery shopping together like an old married couple. She almost refused to help me with my shopping at first, bringing up the comment I’d made about having a woman to do it for me. Which was why she made me come with her every single time. It wasn’t like she wasn’t shopping for herself, though. Even funnier was the fact that she already knew what I liked and disliked, down to the brand of beer, and would keep bottles at her place for me. I was still working to get her to ride on the back of the Harley, but it was a work in progress. After she’d eventually confessed to me that her mom and uncle had died in a motorcycle accident, it had all made sense.
Still… she was fucking perfect, and after a few weeks of spending every waking moment together it seemed like, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like I was going to find out some hideous secret she’d been hiding from me and it would all end. Admittedly, I hadn’t been in very many relationships, but I definitely knew, judging by my friends’ stories and all the damn dramatic stories I’d heard from other inmates while in prison, was that relationships were never perfect. Ever. Except the more I got to know Emory better, the more perfect she became. She didn’t nag me. She always asked me where I wanted to eat when we went out. What movie I wanted to see. She stocked her fridge with my favorite beer. She kept herself in shape and worked hard. She was always clean and presentable. And she sucked and fucked me like I was a king and she was my queen.
Queen. That was what she was. And I was fucking terrified.
There had to be something wrong with this girl. God knew there was definitely plenty wrong with me.
No, I hadn’t told her I was a shifter. I’d hinted at all things supernatural with her. Watching vampire and werewolf movies, ghost hunter-type shows, baiting her to see if she believed in such things. But she always just laughed when I’d suggest it. This was going to be so hard, and after nearly two months of being exclusive with her, I had no idea how I was going to break the news. What I did know was that the longer I waited, the worse it was going to be.
I had thought—maybe I didn’t need to tell her… ever. I mean, yeah, I needed to shift. It was part of my DNA. It was easy enough to sneak off on an afternoon when she was working and run free in the park or the woods for a few hours and get it out of my system. That wasn’t the issue. The problem was—I was the sap who was thinking long-term. What if we got married? Had children? Those children would be shifters.
Shifter genes were strong. Strong as hell. It didn’t matter who—or what—we mated with. The child was always a shifter. We’d had conversations about the future, and I knew for a fact that she wanted kids. Hell, I wanted them too! I was 31… and wasn’t getting any younger. She was 29 and had joked about her biological clock on more than one occasion.
So how the hell was I gonna break the news to her? I thought about asking Six, but his woman was also a shifter and he didn’t know. Same with Drake. He had recently started dating a shifter chick who’d landed the waitressing job at the club, and was happy as hell.
What had I been thinking, falling for a human?
As the wind whipped through my hair and my bike rumbled down the highway, I was literally driving myself insane with this internal war going on inside my head. There had to be a way to ease her into the truth about me. The longer we spent together, the more she would see the signs. We didn’t get sick. We healed quickly. We weren’t susceptible to cancers and other diseases. But we did age, and we did grow old, and we did eventually die.
Cancer… I sighed heavily as I steered my bike off the highway and onto the onramp that would take me to the jewelry store. My mother had been human, which obviously meant my father had been a shifter. But why had the cocksucker abandoned us? Sean and I had had this conversation too many times, even talking about doing that online DNA testing thing, hoping maybe our father had done it too, but then deciding that our DNA might be fucked up and weird being a shifter and not wanting to risk exposing our kind. Besides, even if there was a match, and I found my biological father, what was I gonna say to the bastard after 31 years? I might just fucking kill him for abandoning us instead.
I pushed those thoughts away, glad my brother had found himself a fellow shifter to marry and have kids with. Even if he still held a grudge that he’d had to bury our mother by himself. It was… and wasn’t… my fault I hadn’t been there.
Stop dwelling on the past, you asshole, I chided myself.
I pulled up to the biggest jewelry store in town and parked my bike in front.
As I wandered inside, a nice older woman approached me. “Well, hello. Can I help you find something?”
“Engagement ring,” I grunted.
She smiled wide. “Oh, nice! Congratulations. Follow me.”
She led me to a case of sparkling diamond rings, and I was immediately overwhelmed. There were so many. I had no idea rings came in that many styles. I just wanted
