Gator

The. Fuck?

Someone’s defaced my bike with hot pink curlicue letters. The fucker sentiment is clear, but what the hell is up with baby?

“Fang.” Pretty sure they hear my roar down in Texas, but it does the trick. Fang jogs over to my bike double-time. Fucker takes one look at my new decorations and starts laughing his ass off. He doesn’t seem the least bit concerned that he’s the brother in charge of the prospects who were on lot duty—and so it’s his ass on the line for the damage.

Nope. He’s too busy yukking it up at my expense.

I smack him upside the head to encourage him to trade laughing for explaining.

He just grins at me—I should have hit him harder. “Your girl’s pissed at you.”

I squint at my bike. “Not sure how you’re getting that.”

My paint job’s goddamned ruined. I run my hand over the pink letters and the shit promptly sticks to my skin, too. Fang starts cackling again, so I solved my problem by wiping my hands on his jeans. Asshole’s just lucky it’s not his club vest, or he’d be answering to Jace.

“She call you baby?” Fang adds all sorts of unnecessary emphasis to that last word. We’re starting to attract attention from the prospects.

“No.” I frown at the words scrawled over my bike. “What makes you think this is a message from Poppy?”

Fang shrugs. “She came by to see you a few minutes ago.”

Huh. “I was talking business with Jace in the office.”

Now that I think about it, I was talking Poppy’s business with Jace. “You let her in the clubhouse?”

Fang starts picking at the pink streaks decorating his thighs. “She may have gone in.”

Fuck. I give up worrying about the cryptic messaging. Jace and I were running down the whole Poppy situation, and I was giving him the 4-1-1 on the quiet death of her wolf research. And, of course, if she overheard any part of that conversation, I’ve got my explanation for what happened to my bike. I’m lucky it’s not going up in flames or halfway up my ass.

I yank out my phone and fire off a text to her.

 

Need 2 talk 2 u.

 

Fang crowds closer, trying to read my screen. “You say something to piss her off?”

“None of your goddamned business,” I growl, staring at the screen and willing her to respond. It’s not like I expect her to sit by the phone, waiting for me to text, but I’m grasping at straws.

“You should ask me for advice,” Fang says virtuously. “I’m a fucking expert at pissing women off.”

“I’ve already pissed her off.” I glare at the silent screen. “Now I need to fix this shit.”

Fang laughs. “If she jacked your bike up, she’s really mad. What’d you do?”

“What Jace asked me to do.” Not that I expect my president’s orders will carry any weight with Poppy.

“Seriously, bro?” Fang’s laughing so hard now that he’s bent double, his nose practically brushing the seat of my bike.

Which is when he freezes.

And his hand shoots out.

Automatically, I slap his fingers away. He doesn’t touch my bike.

“You’ve got something—” He makes some kind of bizarre gesture and points at the seat.

There’s something stuck to the leather. I’m tired, I’ve just fucked shit up with my girl, and there’s something plastic taped to the seat of my bike. Given Poppy’s paint job, I can’t imagine it’s a love note. Probably more likely to explode, although it smells like plastic and… pee?

Fang motions toward the little plastic stick. “Death sentence, bro.”

“You know what that is?” Because I’ve got no clue.

To my surprise, he nods. Vigorously. And then he tiptoes ostentatiously closer and looks down at it. “Congratulations.”

As if there’s anything awesome about this afternoon. I fold my arms over my chest, because it’s that or lay into Fang. “Explain.”

“You’re gonna be a daddy.”

And that brings us back to where we started. So that’s it. The story of how Beauty met the Beast, broke his heart, and kicked his sorry ass to the curb. It’s not as exciting as the movie version, and there’s no happy ending in store for me. I blame my movie counterpart—he got the girl and all the good stuff.

When I was a young wolf, I learned to hunt. My sire would drag my sorry ass out into the woods and dump me there with orders not to come back until I’d brought down a deer. And eventually I did it because if you didn’t bring down your prey, you went hungry. It was real fucking simple. You did or you died. So while this time I’m not hunting for a dinner and a Big Mac, it’s equally important. I need to find my Poppy and talk about what matters. Her. Me. My feelings for her. This unexpected baby bomb she’s just dropped.

I yank the plastic stick off my seat and shove it into my back pocket. Not sure what the fucking etiquette is here or if she wants the thing as a souvenir, so for now it’s a keeper.

“Where would she go?” I fist Fang’s vest, dragging his face close to mine. Jace hangs back, monitoring the situation.

Fang, of course, just grins at me like he’s not in mortal danger. “Away from you?”

“No shit, Sherlock. But she’s not just gonna drive around in circles, you feel me? This is Poppy. She’ll have a plan.”

It’s one of the things I love about her. Along with a million questions, she always has a plan. Admittedly, some of them are better than others. But if I know one thing about her, it’s that she’ll want to hunker down and think things through. The things in question might be how to cut off my balls and feed them to me, but she’ll want some quiet time to plan. And she’ll want a place to do it.

“Where are her favorite bolt holes?”

I’m more talking out loud, but there’s a chance Fang knows something I don’t. He and Poppy are friends of a sort ever since he fed her cat. Okay. The cat. Moo was out at our place this morning, and she wouldn’t skip town without him.

“Come with me?” I don’t recognize those words coming out of my mouth. Hell, Jace stares at me like I’ve grown a second head. Obviously, he’s surprised by what I’ve said, too.

I’m the lone wolf. I handle my shit by myself.

But…

Fuck if I know what I’m doing here, and Jace has a mate. Hell, even Fang still dates on a regular basis, so he must know something about placating pissed off females. I don’t want to be alone. I want someone to have my back and tell me it’s gonna be okay. Even if that’s a lie.

And they do it. They don’t ask questions. They don’t ask why. They just fall in behind me and wait for me to pick a direction.

I start with Poppy’s rental, but she’s not there. The next most logical place is my island in the bayou, but I come up empty handed there, too. I haul ass back to the dock, Jace and Fang close behind me. Think think think. Poppy’s ignored the million and one text messages I’ve sent, and she’s not picking up. But she has to be somewhere, and it can’t be too far away because I’ve still got her goddamned cat. But Poppy doesn’t like driving around aimlessly—she’d want to have a destination in mind.

“The blind,” I snap.

We haul ass out to the area where the blind is. And thank FUCK, there’s a rental speedboat tied up on the shoreline. I’m out of my boat and pounding inland as soon as I’ve killed the engine. Poppy’s wolf blind is about a half-mile offshore, surrounded by thick stands of cypress. The sooner I get there, the sooner I can fix what’s gone wrong between us.

I’m not running alone though, not this time. Jace and Fang dog my heels, stick to my back, and then Jace brings me down and we have that heart-to-heart I first told you about. The conversation where he asks me what bug I’ve got up my ass, and I admit that I’ve knocked Poppy up and I’m not sure how I feel about that. I don’t fucking do feelings. Ever. But there’s no denying that I’ve got a fuck ton of them coursing through me right now. Shame because she’s running scared and I’ve hurt her, when I swore I’d do nothing but love and protect. Excitement, too, because some primitive caveman part of me is thinking about her having my baby—and loving it. Worry about how she fits with the pack. And fear because she’s made it clear she doesn’t need or want anything from me… and that hurts. I can’t be her white knight, the guy on the noble steed, the dude packing protective armor and a mean lance. I can’t stand between her and the world’s shit because she neither needs nor wants me to do that.

But I can’t walk away, either. Not when everything I am demands I run toward her.

When I finally find her, the new civilized me knocks on the door of the blind instead of ripping it the fuck off. “Can I come in?”

When there’s no answer, I slowly pry the door open. Carefully. Not gonna cause any permanent damage, and I definitely don’t wanna give her a heart attack. Or the baby. Christ. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that I’m about to become a daddy.

Poppy’s inside, arms wrapped around her knees. She looks pale but thoughtful. I want to grab my phone and Google this shit. How should I know what’s normal for a pregnant woman?

“Poppy?”

She looks up.

“Can I come in?”

She mutters something but then she nods her head. Houston, we are cleared for take off. I climb in and realize I take up all the available space and then some. When I was still a pup, I ran all over the woods near the keep where I’d been born. Free-range parenting wouldn’t be invented for a couple more centuries, but my old man had it down. He threw us pups out into the wilderness and let us roam. What didn’t kill us made us stronger. I got caught out in a rainstorm once, the kind of downpour that feels like it’s trying to peel your skin straight off your back and you can’t see more than a handful of inches in front of your face. I’d climbed into an old fox den with one of my fellow pups, and we’d curled around each other and waited out the rain because neither of us felt like drowning.

There hadn’t been much room in that den. The fox that had built the thing hadn’t planned for wolf cubs, and so we’d been on top of each other the whole time we waited out the storm. But it had also felt safe. I hadn’t been alone—and with each breath I took, I’d known it. It was the perfect mix of warm and close. I haven’t felt like that in a long time.

I scoop Poppy up and settle her on my lap, wrapping my arms around her. So I’m not totally civilized. I’m more of a DIY project and we’ve just passed the demolition stage. Poppy has knocked down all the walls I’ve built around my heart.

Poppy

Gator’s like a boomerang. I shove him away but he comes back. Remember how I said I didn’t want to make the same mistakes I made with Nathan? This is how Gator’s different. Where Nathan made me run after him, Gator comes for me.

“So,” he rumbles eventually. “Pregnant?”

It’s hard not to be anxious, to not guess how he’s going to react to having his entire life disrupted. Or maybe it won’t be because he’ll just choose to stay uninvolved. I know there are options for ending the pregnancy, but I won’t. There’s a connection between me and Bean that I want.

“Yeah.”

There’s a long silence where I wonder what he’s thinking. I’m too worn out to even know where to start so I wait for him to begin.

Eventually he mutters something that sounds suspiciously like a curse. “I’m guessing you heard me and Jace talking?”

“Yeah.”

I’m the queen of the one-word answers.

“I shouldn’t have fucked with your research,” he says. “Got no good excuse for it. I didn’t want researchers and looky-loos coming through my bayou to see your wolves. Wasn’t my place to decide that. But the baby daddy news…” His sigh ruffles my hair. “Didn’t see that one coming.”

“We did have a broken condom,” I point out, tensing. Somehow the whole research thing doesn’t bother me as much as it should. Or maybe I’ve already got the whole pregnancy hormones thing going on, redirecting my energy to important stuff like looking out for Bean. The whole I-want-to-be-alone thing he’s got going on rings true—but only partially true. Given Jace and the club’s involvement with the shutdown, I suspect that a number of potential felonies are also involved. God knows what they actually want to cover up.

“Didn’t think I could have kids.”

“Really?” I mean, did he have the mumps? Or some kind of weird groin injury? A bizarre family history? Or maybe he’s tried before and failed and that’s how he knows?

He snorts. “I can practically hear your questions. You wanna pick one to start?”

“I want this baby,” I whisper. “I think I really do.”

I kind of expect him to tell me that I’m on my own then. That he’s out of here, and that he’ll send me a check now and then. Neither of us chose to become parents, and neither of us had planned on it. But thanks to a broken condom and some really hot sex (which we were definitely equally responsible for), here we are. Pregnant. And even if I’ve sort of come to terms with it, he’s only just found out and I don’t really expect him to be ecstatic.

“Me too,” he says gruffly. “I do, too. You’re not doing this alone, babe.”

“It takes a village,” I tell him.

He rests his chin on my head, his hands smoothing over my belly, my arms. “You got a particular one in mind or can I make suggestions?”

“You don’t like people,” I remind him, as if he could possibly forget something so integral to who he is. The man lives on a private island in the middle of nowhere. He’s got a natural moat around his house for crying out loud, and it’s not like he’s ever put out a welcome mat. He once offered to shoot me—or spank me—for trespassing, and I don’t think he was joking about it either.

“I like you,” he growls in my ear as if that explains everything. Maybe it does for him. “I’ll be by your side just as long as you let me, okay?”

I try and fail to imagine Gator picking up the baby bean from daycare or joining the PTA. And then before I know it, I’m laughing.

“What’s so funny?” His voice is all growly and rough, but there’s not a trace of mad in his voice. He just wants to understand me, I think. And that’s… nice.

“I’m not laughing at you.” I relax into his chest. He’s so strong. So safe. I run through my PTA fantasy and he snorts.

“Oui. Might not work, pulling up on the bike with a baby seat strapped to the back.”

He knows what a baby seat is?

“I’ll have to upgrade to a Hummer,” he says thoughtfully. “Maybe a tank because keeping our baby safe is gonna be my number one priority.”

He threads his fingers through mine, his thumbs massaging my palms. It feels so good. It doesn’t even seem to matter anymore that he killed my research grant or that he’s hardly Daddy of the Year material if what I suspect about his reasons are true. My baby will have a biker for a father, and several dozen badass uncles. It’s not that I don’t want to do this alone (although I don’t). It’s that I want to do this with Gator. Despite everything I’ve said, I think I could have feelings for him. Big, messy, complicated feelings that seem as unstoppable as they might be dumb.

“So are we together?” His arms tighten around me protectively, callused palms rubbing gently up and down my arms. I feel safe with him. I don’t need a white knight or someone to come charging to the rescue, but this isn’t about needing. It’s about choosing and holding onto something that just feels right. I’ve already made the choice to keep the Bean, and now I have a chance to keep Gator.

I take a deep breath, but it does nothing to clear my head or to jumpstart stuff happening in the personal revelation department. I just smell Gator, the fabulous, male, woodsy scent of him that I seem to wear on my skin and even deeper.

“Okay,” I say.

Gator

She said yes.

I think.

Some shit you need to be perfectly clear on. I look down at my mate. “Can we go back?”

“Yes,” she says.

Thank fuck for that.

I scoop her up and carry her back to the water’s edge. Think she might want to protest about me hauling her around like some kind of caveman, but she’s worn herself out and she puts up with me. Still, the look on her face is so goddamned cute. She thinks I’m being ridiculous when I want to wrap her up in something soft and just keep her safe forever.

Jace and Fang are waiting for us in the boat, trying and failing not to laugh their asses off at me.

“Gonna have to let her go at some point,” Jace smirks. Fucker’s enjoying my fall a little too much. Pretty sure I gave him shit when he went down for Keelie Sue, and he’s been saving up the payback with interest.

“Like when?” I step into the boat and drop down onto a seat, still holding my mate. They can play chauffeur, and I’ll hold onto her a little longer.

“Like when the baby comes out,” Fang says mock-helpfully.

Nope. Not thinking about that. I don’t want my Poppy hurting or afraid or anything going wrong. There has to be some way I can make it better, easier, safer—and I’ll find it. I’m gonna learn everything there is to know about childbirth in the next seven months. From the look on Fang’s face, he’s just as concerned. First time I’ve ever seen a serious look on his face—kinda want to take a picture. It’s a little weird knowing he’s got my back when it comes to my personal shit, but it doesn’t feel wrong. I hold Poppy closer.

This lone wolf isn’t alone anymore.