Magical Midlife Love (Leveling Up 4)

And now…

“With shifters, when you mate…that’s like marriage, right?” I asked.

Austin looked back at Kingsley, as if tapping him to answer, before bending over the last dessert again.

“No,” Kingsley answered, tracing the stem of his wine glass with his fingers. “Marriage is a legal contract establishing joint assets. Mating is a physical bond between two people. A chemical bond, I guess, that forges within the hearts of shifters.” He touched the center of his chest.

“And you establish it with a ritual?” I asked. “A ritual around food?”

“No. There is a ritual, but it’s mostly a celebration. When the bond is locking into place, it is at its most intense. The shifters involved become unfit for society, to put it mildly. They become much too possessive. They’ll violently defend their mate over the smallest of grievances. So we have a celebration when the shifters are entering this final phase, and then we send them into the woods on their own. They get to celebrate their bond, reveling in each other, and everyone else gets some peace.”

“So then, how do you…establish a bond? Magic? A spell?”

“I’ve never had to explain this to an outsider,” Kingsley told Austin. “It’s surprisingly difficult.” He poured himself more wine and took a deep breath. “First, you don’t choose a mate. Not the kind of mate we’re talking about. Shifters can get married without ever experiencing the mating bond. Or you can start dating someone, and bam, you slip into the mating bond and forever knocks on your door before you really even know the person. Usually, though, it’s somewhere in the middle. You meet someone, you get to know them, and you gradually slip into this long slide of mating. It’s basically falling in love.”

“It is falling in love,” Austin said, delivering the white porcelain dish in front of me, the sugary top browned to perfection. He laid down a cloth napkin and placed a spoon on top. “Sometimes you fall in love gradually, and sometimes all at once. The mating bond happens when two souls unite, and there can be no other.”

“But you choose who you fall in love with,” I said, cracking into the surface of the crème brûlée. I loved that sound.

“Do you?” Kingsley asked, picking up his newly delivered spoon.

“Well, you choose to date them, then like them, and then it grows from there.”

“Which is usually how mating works. For shifters, at any rate. I have no idea what it’s like for gargoyles.”

I told them what little I knew from Mr. Tom.

“Probably a very similar setup to shifters.” Kingsley scooped up some of his dessert. “But you don’t choose. You don’t will the bond to come. It’s a natural process your animal mostly decides. It happens or it doesn’t. You feel it, and give in to it, or you don’t.”

“What if you don’t give in to it?” I asked, then slid a spoon of custard into my mouth. As with everything Austin had made, the flavors exploded on my tongue. I moaned and put my hand on his arm. When we’d moved inside so he could finish preparing dessert, I’d claimed the middle seat so I could sit next to him.

“Damn, brother, I might have to start moaning too.” Kingsley scooped up more custard. “This is good.” He swallowed before he continued. “Sometimes you do get a bullheaded shifter, usually female—”

Austin laughed. “He just says that because he was the one who tried to dig in his heels.”

“If she digs in her heels,” Kingsley went on with a smile, “then it might never happen. But I’ve never heard of anyone strong enough to resist forever. Still, nothing can force one person to stay with another. If two people are bonded and one of them leaves, they’ll feel each other, always, but some people don’t want the settled life. They prefer to stay solo.”

I stopped with the spoon nearly to my mouth and looked at Austin. “Is that what happened with you and Destiny? You told me you thought she’d be your mate.”

“I thought it would happen between us, yes”—his lush lips closed over the spoon, and I couldn’t help but watch—“but now I realize it was never going to happen.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

He shrugged, daintily loading the end of his spoon. A big, strong man, still in his apron, dainty with his dessert. It stoked my desire to impossible levels.

“Because I’m older now,” he said. “Wiser. If I found my mate, I would never leave her. I would always protect her. Nothing would tear me away from her.”

The pressure on my chest made it hard to breathe. Hard to even think. His cobalt eyes burned with fire and determination, and my heart and core had started to throb in tandem.

“The good news, for those that are a lee-tle wary about commitment, is that it usually doesn't happen all at once. It is a slide,” Kingsley said, tilting his dish and scraping it clean with his spoon. “You’ll feel it happening, and everything might seem a little topsy-turvy, but you’ll have time to get used to it. As someone who got used to it very slowly, I know this is true.”