adults, had Tia fighting tears.
To have babies taken away…she covered her belly in a protective gesture. The pain for Millie must have been indescribable. Now that she carried her own babies under her heart, Tia felt as if she understood her stepmother better than ever. Thank goodness Ulrich and Millie had found each other.
Tinker glanced up from his chess game with Logan, caught her eye and grinned. “Is it time yet?”
Before Tia could answer, half a dozen voices shouted, “No!” and Jake threw a pillow that Tinker deftly caught.
Then he ducked his head and went back to the game. Laughter ebbed and flowed around her. There was a subtle, subliminal buzz that let Tia know a few in the room were mindtalking to carry on private conversations. Oliver gave a triumphant shout and Mei clapped her hands. Luc turned from his spot on the couch beside Baylor and Shannon and smiled at her.
I love you, he said. His thoughts drifted over her mind with the strength of a caress.
I love you, too. Then she felt it, a painful tightening that radiated from her back and across the lower part of her belly. The sense of pressure more than pain took her breath. It lasted close to half a minute, and when it was over, everyone in the room was staring at her.
“Is it time?” Tinker’s question didn’t make anyone laugh this time.
“I don’t know. But that was definitely different. Not quite like a Braxton-Hicks contraction.” She shook her head. They were still almost a week early. “Logan? How do I know when I’m really in labor?”
Logan stood up. “Let’s go take a look. I can tell if your cervix is beginning to thin out. You were dilated at two centimeters last time I checked.” He crooked his arm, held out an elbow. Tia slipped her hand around his arm and exited the room like a queen with her escort.
Luc was right there with them.
Jazzy Blue glanced up as her mate walked back into the great room with Tia and Luc. They’d all been anxiously waiting for news. Logan smiled at her and shook his head.
“It’s going to be a long night, folks. Tia’s only had one very light contraction, so her labor’s hardly even started.”
Shannon stood up and hugged Tia. “Poor baby. Aren’t there drugs you can take to get things going?”
Logan sat next to Jazzy and draped his arm around her shoulders. “There are, but it’s always better to let things happen naturally. Luc and Tia are going to do a few slow laps around the house, see if that gets things going, but she definitely appears to be in the early stages of labor. This is the easy part.”
Tia stuck out her tongue at Logan. “Easy for you to say, Doc.”
Luc helped Tia on with her coat and grabbed a jacket for himself. “We’ll be outside walking in circles if anyone needs us.”
Jake leaned around Shannon and gave Tia a kiss on the cheek. Then he grinned at Luc and said, “Maybe you should just get her a hot walker…you know, those machines they use to exercise horses? Put a bridle on her and turn it on…”
“Not funny.” Tia glared at him.
Luc laughed. “As usual, your timing sucks, Jake. I knew I should have left you on that mountain.” With that cryptic comment, Luc gently led Tia from the room.
Jake stared after them with a pensive look on his face.
Jazzy watched Jake and sensed something more than just a light quip. The guy could be such a contradiction—quiet one minute, then acting like a smart-ass and tossing in a crazy insult the next. She’d seen him get the entire room to laughing, but now he just looked sad. “What’d he mean by that, Jake?,” she asked. “Leave you on what mountain?”
Jake turned around and shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
Adam walked in from the kitchen and handed a cold beer to Jake. “It’s gonna be a long night.”
Jake gazed around the room as if judging everyone’s mood, or maybe he was just trying to build up the nerve to tell his tale. Jazzy wasn’t sure which, but she settled back against Logan and waited.
After a brief hesitation, Jake sat down on a footstool in front of Shannon. She rested her hand on his shoulder and he glanced back at her for a long, quiet moment. Then he looked around the silent room again, at everyone who watched him so intently, and sighed.
“Well, if you really want to know…”
Chapter 3
Jake
“There’s no doubt in my mind, if Luc had left me on the hill in question, I’d be dead.” Jake took a long swallow of his beer. Then he held the bottle in his right hand and stared at it for a few seconds as the memories washed over him. So much had happened since that chance meeting high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. His life hadn’t merely been saved.
It had been forever changed.
“Fourteen, maybe fifteen years ago, I was a paramedic, working in the North Bay, in Santa Rosa. My life sucked, to put it bluntly.”
He laughed, but he knew there was no humor in it. There hadn’t been much to laugh about in those days. “I’d reached a point where I was searching really hard for a solution to life’s many mysteries. Unfortunately, I conducted most of my search at the bottom of a bottle.”
He took a swallow of his beer. Shannon squeezed his shoulder and he glanced at her and smiled. She was the only reason he’d even consider telling his story, the only reason he’d ever choose to revisit that disturbing period of his life.
“I’d taken a few days off to go to the mountains. It seemed the only place I had a clear head anymore was deep in the forest, somewhere far away from people and accidents and crap in general. From death. The past week had been absolutely shitty. A little boy without a car seat in a bad accident. We couldn’t save him, but his drunk mother wasn’t even scratched. A toddler who wandered away from her nanny and drowned in a neighbor’s pool. Kids’ deaths were…well, my head was really fucked and I was desperate to get away.”
He raised his head and looked at Jazzy to get the nightmare images out of his mind. She was the one who’d asked, after all. “I’d planned to camp,” he said, “but I took enough whisky to open my own bar. The more I drank, the worse my future looked. I had some rope in my backpack and that stupid saying kept going through my head—give him just enough rope to hang himself. Well, I had enough rope.”
He reached up and touched Shannon’s fingers on his shoulder, desperate for a more powerful connection. She was the one who grounded him. The one who made him whole. She was also the only one who knew the whole story, even though he’d never actually told her. She’d been there, in those dark memories in his mind when they bonded. He had no secrets from Shannon, but he’d never actually told anyone. Never said the words. Not even to Luc. Especially not to Baylor. He’d kept his pathetic past hidden all this time.
As if it mattered. “It was late in the afternoon and I had one bottle of cheap whiskey left. I had it all worked out. I was going to walk as far as I could before it got dark, finish the bottle, climb a tree, and tie one end of the rope to a branch and the other around my neck. I was too big a chicken to jump, but I figured if I was drunk enough, I’d eventually fall off. Problem solved.
“I saw a big oak up ahead and it looked perfect. Branches were all arranged like a ladder. Had a great view of a pretty little valley. I figured it had Jacob Trent written all over it. I took a swallow of the whisky. I remember looking at the bottle and realizing I was running out of booze and I wasn’t drunk enough yet, and that bothered me.” He paused, remembering. “When I looked up, that’s when I saw it.”
Just thinking about that moment, that pivotal turning point in his life, caught him. He didn’t see Anton’s beautiful home or the people sitting around, watching him. He saw the wolf. The most beautiful creature he’d ever seen in his life,