Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 61468 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 61468 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 307(@200wpm)___ 246(@250wpm)___ 205(@300wpm)
This baby didn’t ask to be conceived—he or she is innocent and helpless and vulnerable. Which is kind of how I feel myself.
“You want to keep it, don’t you?” Logan asks softly.
Mutely, I nod.
“Then you’ll keep it.” He puts one big, warm hand on mine protectively. “I’ll help you through this, Poppy. I’ll take care of you both.”
This time I can’t stop the tears from falling.
“Why…why…” I can barely get my words out. “Why are you so nice to me?” I ask at last. “You barely even know me! And this baby isn’t yours.”
“It is now,” he says firmly. “I don’t want you to worry about a thing, kitten. I’m going to keep you safe. Both of you.”
No one has ever spoken like this to me before. Not even my Grandpa, when he was still alive and certainly not Dirk. Yet this man who barely knows me is volunteering to take me and my unborn baby on. His kindness makes me weep even harder.
“Hey, now. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be all right.” He stands up and puts his arms around me. I press my face to his chest and breathe him in—why does his leather and spice and fur scent make me feel so safe? I also like it when he calls me “kitten” and “sweetheart.” Dirk always just called me “babe” which is such a casual nickname and not really very sweet at all when you think about it.
While Logan is comforting me, the Doctor walks back in. He explains that it can be dangerous to X-ray pregnant women. He’s fairly certain my head is okay—the X-ray was just hospital protocol.
“You don’t seem to have a concussion—your pupils are dilating and contracting normally. I think you’ll be all right. As for the dizziness, it was probably caused by the pregnancy. Have you had a lot of morning sickness? Difficulty keeping things down?” he asks me.
I nod hesitantly. I hope Logan won’t be mad—I’ve been hiding how often I puke in the mornings from him. But he only takes my hand and squeezes it gently. He’s still pretending to be my husband instead of my brother-in-law but I’m not about to complain. He makes me feel a lot safer than my real husband ever did.
“You need to find an OB-GYN and start on prenatal vitamins and have an ultrasound,” the Doctor says. “Early nutrition and prenatal care is important for a healthy pregnancy.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. We’ll make an appointment as soon as we leave here and I’ll make sure they get her in as soon as possible,” Logan answers for me.
I shoot him a surprised look—does he already have a doctor in mind? Maybe he does. He sounds so confident, which is nice because I have no idea what I’m doing. I just now figured out I want to keep this baby. Everything else feels up in the air.
We agree not to do the X-rays and Logan is instructed to keep a close eye on his “wife,” which he agrees to. Then, in a relatively short amount of time, I get released and Logan says to me,
“Come on, sweetheart—let’s go home.”
6
LOGAN
Poppy is quiet on the way home. I think she’s still in shock, poor little kitten. I have to admit, I’m kind of shocked myself. A baby—she’s going to have a baby!
I should have known. I thought her smell had changed since the wedding—she smells fertile. It’s an attractive scent for any male Were—especially an Alpha like me. But I put the scent change down to her being emotional after Dirk left her. Emotions and hormones can change a female’s scent wildly from day to day and sometimes from hour to hour.
The knowledge that she’s pregnant makes me feel even more protective of her. In the Were world, a pregnant female is a considered a precious and delicate person—someone worthy of fighting or dying for. That’s because Were females don’t get pregnant as easily as human females. Some even say our race is slowly dying out because we don’t have enough children.
So I’m glad she wants to keep the pup—whether it’s a boy or a girl, it’s going to be mostly Were. Poppy herself is at least half Were—I can smell that on her—but I get the sense she was raised in the human world. I wonder how much Dirk told her about Were society.
Surely he Shifted for her and showed her his Wolf. That’s a normal and expected part of courtship in the Were world—you don’t ask a woman to be your mate without showing her your Wolf. Being a Beta, his is an unimpressive brown Wolf barely bigger than a large dog, so it shouldn’t have been too frightening for Poppy to see.
At any rate, since she’s half Were herself and carrying a Were baby or “pup” as we call unborn children, she needs to be seen by a Were doctor. The human hospital we went to in order to get her head checked out just won’t cut it. Were babies need special prenatal care and women who are pregnant with Were pups have special needs as well.