“Want food?”
“Very much,” she answers.
I roll her to her back, kiss her beautiful mate mark, and back away slowly, inking this image into my brain. The bed is a wreck, sheets half off, pillows and red petals all over the floor.
I love the look on her face as she watches me pull up my sweatpants and stretch, rolling my neck.
“Right back,” I tell her.
When I come back up, she’s sitting upright, her phone in her hand, her glasses on but down by the tip of her nose. She’s rubbing her eyes.
She puts it down when I come in and set the containers of food on the bed.
“Someone call?”
“A bunch of congratulations texts including some in the Creed family group chat. Gwen added me earlier today.”
“You answer?”
“I just put a heart emoji on everyone’s messages. Did you hear all of them outside, cheering for us? That was…” Tears well up in her eyes. “… amazing.”
I lean in and press my mouth to her forehead. “Yeah. That was pretty cool.” I kiss her lips, loving the expression on her face.
“What have we got?” she asks, taking her glasses off and rubbing her eyes some more.
“Smells like steak dinners. You’re not much for steak though.”
“Not usually, but it smells really good and I’m famished, so hopefully one of them is well done. I’ll give it a look. If it’s too bloody, I’ll eat the side dishes. Roxy’s loaded potatoes are in there too and they’re big enough to be a meal on their own.” She puts her glasses back on. “My glasses are making me dizzy,” she mutters and takes them off.
“Weird,” she whispers, looking around. “It’s like I don’t need them. Feels like my contact lenses are in.”
“You’re not squinting at me. I’ll go get the wine.”
While I’m jogging down the stairs it dawns that I haven’t purred. An alpha generally purrs after he claims his mate. I claimed mine repeatedly over the past few hours, but it hasn’t happened yet.
As I’m climbing the stairs with the two wine glasses I took from the basket Mase’s mom sent over and the ice bucket of chilled Quinn mead, I hear a high-pitched noise that throws me.
My nostrils flare but I smell no one new.
“Arf!”
What the fuck.
“Rrrr. Arf!”
I rush the rest of the way upstairs and just about trip when I see the bed.
There’s a wolf pup, a young female, staring down at the striploin steak on the rug.
This pup smells like Bailey. And me.
“The fuck?”
The pup yips at me and licks blood from the take-out container. The steak on the floor is chewed on one end.
My wolf is sand colored with a creamy tipped tail. This little she-wolf pup is cream-colored with a sand-dipped tail tip.
“Bailey?” I ask, but I already know the answer.