“Thank you.”
Parker smiled at Kelsey, pleased. “You’re very welcome, Kelsey. Please, don’t hesitate to ask if you need or want something. No matter what it is.”
Kelsey nodded, looking down at her hands. “You’re my brother’s… Ty’s… mate?”
Parker nodded, eyebrows raised in surprise. She hadn’t expected Kelsey to say more, and she wasn’t sure exactly what ‘mate’ meant, but if it meant her being Ty’s, then she absolutely was. “Yes, I am.”
Kelsey nodded, gesturing with one hand to Parker’s middle. “Congratulations. And thank you again.”
Parker watched as Kelsey turned away, apparently finished talking. Parker walked out of the room, shutting the door softly behind her, not in the least bit surprised to see Ty down the hall, leaning against the bannister of the stairs.
“She all settled in?”
Parker nodded, walking toward him. “Yeah, she’s all good.”
“Good. Are you hungry?” Ty asked, taking her hands in his.
“No, I’m fine for now. You?”
Ty shook his head, lacing the fingers of one hand with hers and tugging her to their bedroom. Once inside, he shut the door and then pushed her up against it, taking her mouth in a scorching kiss. When he finally pulled back, they were both breathing heavily and his erection was pushing into her stomach.
“No more of that,” he said, leading her to sit on the bed. “Talking first. Loving later.”
Parker laughed as she sat. “And you think putting us together on a bed is going to accomplish that?”
“Good point,” Ty said wryly. “But I want answers first. Such as how long you’ve known I’m a wolf shifter?”
“Is that what you call it? Shifting. It fits,” she mused. “I’ve known since I was fifteen.”
Ty looked at her, incredulous. “Since you were fifteen? Seriously?”
“Yeah. I saw you shift one day.” Parker proceeded to fill him in on what led her to the clearing that day, seeing him shift and fleeing right after. She got up and rummaged through her underwear drawer, coming back with the scrap of shirt she’d kept all these years. She handed it to him as she sat back down. “It was windy that day, and that blew over to me. I picked it up before I ran home. I knew I’d kept it, but I didn’t realize I had it with me until I moved my stuff in here. I found it in a pocket of my suitcase.”
Ty sat quietly for a moment, fingering the old scrap of his shirt. “I think I remember that day. I was pissed at my dad again, and then Jared came over, full of his plans to tell Cassie what he was and ask her to be his mate. I told him I was going to fight for her, and we argued. After he left, I ran to the river and then went wolf. I stayed that way for almost three days before I changed back.” He looked at her. “So all this time, you’ve known? Why didn’t you say anything?”
Parker sighed. “Because it wasn’t my secret to tell. I wanted you to come to me, to trust me with it. I didn’t want to force it from you.”
Ty rubbed his head wearily before scooting closer to her and taking her hand in his. “I wanted to tell you. More than anything, but I was scared. I didn’t know how you would react, and I couldn’t bear it if you ran. I need you.” He dropped a hand to her belly. “I need him. I need you both, and I didn’t want to see you run.”
Parker laced her fingers with his. “You didn’t trust me enough to know I wouldn’t do that? Don’t you know me well enough to know I wouldn’t run?” Parker asked, unable to keep the hurt out of her tone.
“Parker, no, I trust you. Please believe that. I do. It’s me I don’t trust.” He looked up and sighed when he saw the confusion on her face. “I didn’t trust that I was good enough. That I would be enough to make you stay, even in the face of something like that. This is what I didn’t tell you about Cassie. She hated what Jared is. She called him unnatural.
“Jared didn’t tell her what I was. He only told her about himself. I guess I just spilled his secret, since you probably didn’t know about them,” he said ruefully. “The Montgomerys are grizzly shifters. When Cassie turned eighteen, Jared told her what he was and explained to her about shifters. He told her that she was his mate, and that he wanted to claim her. She freaked out and disappeared for a few days. When she came back, she told him she loved him and would be with him, but only if he never talked about being a shifter in front of her again. She said he was a freak of nature. And if Cassie, his best friend since he was five, who he’d been with for years, could react that way… how would you react? You and I connected five months ago, but it was brief. We only started really getting to know each other a couple of weeks ago. I just… I couldn’t trust that I would be enough to keep you, when Jared barely held onto Cassie, even after all that time.”
Parker tightened her fingers around his and lifted her other hand to his cheek. “Oh, Ty.”
“There’s more,” he said, interrupting her when she would have said more. “They managed to be mostly happy for a few years while Jared hid his true nature, but then she got pregnant. She freaked out again. She was carrying a bear shifter. A cub. And she wanted nothing to do with it; she didn’t want it. She thought shifters were abominations. She was taking stupid risks, doing things pregnant women shouldn’t do. Jared thinks she was doing it on purpose, hoping to lose the baby. She was out horseback riding one day, when she was almost as far along as you are now. And she tried to jump a fence that was too high for the horse. She broke her neck.”
Parker pulled her hand away from her mouth, sure that her eyes were the size of half dollars right now. “Oh God. So much makes sense now, Ty. I can’t even imagine what Jared went through, or what you went through, for that matter. That’s why it makes you so nervous when I do more than you think I should. I can see now, too, why you would put off telling me the truth for as long as you could.”
Ty closed his eyes briefly as he shook his head. “I didn’t know how to tell you in a way that didn’t scare you. Jared tried to tell me that maybe Cassie’s reaction had been an aberration. He said that Ellie, Jake’s mate, had hardly blinked an eye when she found out about shifters. I couldn’t make myself take the chance, though. How could I be so lucky to have you accept it? And so I kept putting it off, putting myself through hell, torturing myself with all the ways you’d react badly… and here you’ve known the whole time.”
“You could have avoided that if you would have just told me. You would have had to eventually anyway, Ty. This baby is part wolf. I even tried to push the conversation with that stuffed wolf last night, but you ran instead of fessing up the truth.”
Ty laughed ruefully. “I even wondered if you were trying to tell me something with that, but I brushed it off as a coincidence. I know I would have had to tell you sooner rather than later, but I kept putting it off. I wanted to keep you as long as I could. I had decided this morning that I would tonight, though. I was determined. I needed to put the uncertainty behind us.”
Parker squeezed his hand. “You should have listened to Jared. He sounds like he gives good advice. I’m not Cassie. We’re different people, with different reactions. I’m glad you were going to tell me tonight, though.”