Dawning of Light (15 page)

“Really?” She looked hopefully at Dane.

Dane grinned. “Female,” he confirmed.

Felicia made a strangled noise and cupped her hands over her mouth. “Lightbearer magic sure comes in handy. First, cooking a perfect roast in record time, then finding out I’m having a girl. A little girl.” She simpered as she cupped her belly and smiled with bemusement.

“I don’t even really think about it,” Cecilia mused. “It has just always been a part of our lives.”

“Take it from someone who does not have it: you are very lucky.”

“I don’t know. The ability to change forms at will is pretty impressive. And has come in handy for Finn, a time or two.”

“So why are you two here, in Tennessee, anyway?”

Cecilia wasn’t surprised she asked. Finn had already asked too, and she’d avoided the question. How could she answer, when she wasn’t even sure?

“I’m here because she insisted upon coming,” Dane said.

Cecilia gave him a cross look before taking a deep breath and then saying, “I hadn’t heard from Finn in a few days.” She glanced at Felicia and then Finn. “And I heard he was considering moving here.”

“Really?” Felicia gave Finn a surprised look. His features didn’t change. “He didn’t say anything like that. He just said he wanted to spend some time with the family, get to know his nephews. That would be great if you decided to stay,” she said, speaking directly to Finn. “I’m sure our pack master would allow it.”

Cecilia thought that was a lousy idea. “He can’t stay. We need him, in the coterie,” she blurted.

“He’s a shifter,” Felicia pointed out. “And his family is here, all of us except Reid, anyway. Seems to me it makes perfect sense for him to stay here. Besides, why does a lightbearer coterie need a shifter?”

“It’s run by a shifter. Well, behind the scenes, anyway. Tanner can’t do it alone. Finn is—he’s like Tanner’s second in command. Tanner would be lost without him.”

“
He
would be?”

The emphasis on
he
was not lost on Cecilia. Feeling distinctly uncomfortable all of a sudden, she jumped to her feet and gathered what was left of the dirty dishes on the table and hurried into the kitchen.

Ben was just sweeping the last bit of broken ceramic into a dustpan, while his two young sons stood nearby and fidgeted as he lectured them on the necessity of being careful. Cecilia bumped into Ben, lost her footing, and the dishes in her hands went flying toward the floor. She used her magic to catch them before they hit and broke and then sent them flying over to settle gently onto the counter next to the sink.

The boys watched the process with widened eyes.

“Guess lightbearers don’t need to worry about being careful,” five-year-old Austin commented.

“Bath time,” Ben announced as he stabbed his finger at the doorway leading to the hall.

Felicia stepped into the kitchen. “You do that, and I’ll finish cleaning up,” she suggested. “It’s so hard for me to kneel next to the tub now,” she explained with a pat to her belly. “By the way, I’m getting my little girl,” she said with an impish smile.

Ben’s eyes darted from her face to her belly and back again. “Really?” he asked, sounding as if he did not believe her.

Felicia’s grin widened. “The lightbearer healer says we are. Finn says he would know. Can you believe it?”

Ben strode across the room and embraced his mate. “Thank the Fates,” he muttered wryly. “I was afraid you would want to keep having pups until we had a girl, and I can barely keep up with the two we have.”

Felicia laughed and pushed him toward the doorway. “Go give those boys a bath. We’ll celebrate later, after they’re in bed.” She winked broadly. Ben turned and hurried from the room.

Cecilia eyed the protruding belly. She had to be less than two months from birthing her babe. Or whelping, as the shifters called it. She thought about Olivia, who was randy nearly all the time. But Olivia was only four months into her pregnancy and was hardly showing. Felicia was carrying around the equivalent of a beach ball on her belly. It struck Cecilia as…difficult, if not damn near impossible.

“You really can still, you know…?”

Felicia chuckled again and set to rinsing dishes and loading them into the dishwasher. When Cecilia noticed she grimaced every time she bent over, she insisted upon taking over the task. Then she used her magic to clean the kitchen in just a few moments.

“To answer your question, yes, we can still have sex. Shifter style is the most comfortable, which is okay because Ben always gets ridiculously overprotective at this point of the whelping, and that reconnection helps him feel more secure.”

“Is that a shifter thing, the overprotectiveness at the end of your pregnancy?”

Felicia shrugged. “I suspect it’s a mate thing. Ben hates for me to be in pain, and as you know, whelping a pup is not exactly pain-free.”

Cecilia didn’t know, not firsthand at any rate, although she supposed it was common enough knowledge that giving birth, regardless of a female’s species, was difficult and painful.

Felicia abruptly changed the subject. “What is your relationship with my brother?” she asked, a note of warning in her voice.

Cecilia wondered what Finn would think, if he knew his sister was attempting to defend his honor. “We do not have a relationship,” she admitted.

“Then why are you and the healer here?”

“I told you. We just wanted to check up on him.”

“I think it’s more than that.”

“You can think whatever you want,” Cecilia retorted, losing her patience. She did not like the line of questioning. She did not like the way Felicia was suddenly sizing her up, as if she was trying to decide if she approved. She’d done nothing wrong. Why was it a bad thing for her to drive six hundred miles just to ensure that Finn was alive and well?

* * * *

Felicia’s frostiness carried over well into the evening. After their baths, Ben ushered the boys into his bedroom and read them bedtime stories, while Felicia, Dane, Finn, and Cecilia retired to the living room. Finn offered Dane a beer and poured a glass of wine without Cecilia asking, and then returned to the living room juggling two beers, the glass of wine, and a glass of water for Felicia.

“Sure is good to know you can cook,” he teased Cecilia as he settled onto the couch next to her.

Cecilia blushed. The blush deepened when Felicia coolly said, “It isn’t hard to make a roast when you have magic at your fingertips.”

Finn shrugged. “Come up and visit the coterie someday. When you try Carley’s cooking, you won’t knock it, I promise.”

Cecilia felt the first real bloom of hope since she’d arrived on Felicia’s doorstep earlier that day. Finn had just implied that he intended to return to the coterie. At least she hoped that was what he implied.

“I certainly don’t see myself traveling that far north any time soon,” Felicia said with a sniff. “And besides, if you don’t go back, there isn’t really any reason to, is there?”

Cecilia stiffened and slanted a sideways glance at Finn. He sat very still, deliberately drinking his beer and not looking at Cecilia. The silence hung in the air, thick and unrelenting as fog, until Dane abruptly stood and announced that he was rather tired and would not mind retiring to his bed.

He helped Felicia out of her chair, and she led him down the hall to one of the boys’ bedrooms. Finn stood and motioned with his head for Cecilia to follow him. He led her through the kitchen and out the back door and onto the deck. He stepped off the deck and walked across the backyard to where a swing had been hung from the branch of a massive oak tree.

“What
are
the sleeping arrangements?” Cecilia asked.

He held the swing steady so that she could sit, and then he sat next to her and used one foot to swing them to and fro.

“The boys are camping out on the floor in Felicia and Ben’s room. Dane’s in Austin’s room and you’re in Bryan’s.”

“What about you?” she asked, feeling disappointed that he wasn’t joining her in Bryan’s room.

“I get the couch.”

They fell silent for a short while, as Finn gently rocked the swing. After a while, Cecilia commented, “It is a great deal warmer here than it is back home.”

“We’re quite a bit south. Felicia says they barely have a real winter.”

Cecilia blurted her response without pausing to think. “You’re thinking about staying, aren’t you?”

* * * *

Finn contemplated his answer. “My family is here,” he said after a long pause.

Cecilia looked crestfallen. He found that fascinating. Was she really concerned?

“You want me to go back?” he asked.

She toyed with the tiny pearl buttons that ran the length of her cardigan sweater.

When she did not answer, he asked, “Cecilia, what’s going on? Is something wrong back at the coterie?” He’d just talked to Tanner a few hours ago, and Tanner hadn’t indicated anything at all was wrong.

“No.” She shook her head.

“Then why are you so damn nervous? And why the hell are you here?”

“I don’t want you to stay,” she admitted. She looked up at him with her big blue eyes, batting them rapidly, as if she was confused by her own words. “Here, I mean,” she added.

He wanted to kiss her. He shouldn’t be surprised by that thought, considering what happened in the bathroom a few hours ago. The feeling had been so mind-blowing that it had been better than sex with any other woman, and that was saying something, considering all he’d gotten out of the experience was a hell of a case of blue balls.

While the urge to kiss her wasn’t necessarily surprising, the strength of the urge was. It was almost as if he wasn’t entirely sure he would be able to take his next breath, if he didn’t lean forward right then and—

“Hey, come inside and play cards with us,” his brother-in-law called from the deck. “Felicia says you were a hell of a cardsharp when you were younger, Finn. Let’s see what you’re made of.”

Cecilia’s sigh was so deep, so heartfelt, Finn couldn’t help but laugh as he pushed away from the swing and pulled her with him. “Relax, Cici,” he teased. “You aren’t going to get rid of me that easily.”

“Uncle Finn, Uncle Finn! Grammy and Pappy are here! Grammy and Pappy are here!”

Finn reluctantly opened one eye just in time to react when three-year-old Bryan took a flying leap and would have landed on his very depressed and blue balls, had Finn not lifted his leg fast enough. Bryan bounced off Finn’s thigh, landed on the floor, and then scrambled to his feet again.

“Wait, did you say Grammy and Pappy? As in, my mom and dad?”

“Yep,” Bryan said matter-of-factly. “Daddy’s mom and dad are called Mamaw and Papaw.”

“Shit.”

“Mommy!” Bryan shrieked at the top of his lungs. “Uncle Finn just said a bad word!”

“Fates, Bryan, you’re killing me,” Finn muttered as he grabbed his head and struggled into a seated position on the couch.

He, Cecilia, Felicia, and Ben had played cards until far, far too late last night, and Finn had drunk far, far too many beers. He’d had to, because if he hadn’t been so drunk, he sure as hell would have crawled into bed with Cecilia, despite the fact that Bryan’s bed was a twin and was barely large enough for petite Cecilia. It wouldn’t have mattered to Finn, since he’d had no intention of sleeping anyway, and the activities he wanted to do involved two people getting as physically close as two people could get. A twin bed would have been just perfect.

Now he regretted his actions on two counts. One, because he
hadn’t
slept with Cecilia last night, and two, because his head felt like someone was banging on it with a hammer.

Crazy how the tables had turned, compared to just a few weeks ago. Hell, just a week ago, Finn had felt as though he could barely stand the lightbearer, even though he had acknowledged his sexual attraction to her almost from the start.

But all those traits he’d thought just annoyed the hell out of him were suddenly endearing.
Endearing?
His brain really was fucked-up.

Finn sat up and put his head in his hands. “Are your parents up?” he asked his excited nephew.

“I dunno. Austin went to tell them. I got to tell you. Next I’m going to go wake up the lightbearers. Do they glow when they wake up? It’s pretty funny how the girl one glows whenever she touches you.”

Finn’s head shot up, and then he groaned as the pain of his hangover hit him. He held his head with one hand and opened one eye to give Bryan a curious look. “She glows when she touches me?” Finn couldn’t say he’d really noticed. To him, Cecilia seemed like she glowed all the time, if ever so faintly. He thought it was a lightbearer thing. They all glowed, to some extent.

Bryan nodded solemnly. “It gets real bright,” he explained, lifting his hands as if he were forming an
O
, which Finn assumed was meant to emulate the sun. “Then it dims again when she stops touching you.”

Huh. That was a little piece of information that Finn would have to store in the back of his brain to analyze at a later date. He was certain that Cecilia was attracted to him on some base level—considering that every time he managed to get within kissing distance she attacked him like a dog in heat—but the fact that his touch caused her lightbearer glow to brighten was curious on a whole different level. Mutual sexual attraction was one thing. According to Tanner, though, the glow was the result of an emotional connection, not a physical one.

The front door burst open, and his parents stepped into the house on a chorus of, “Hello! Anybody awake yet? We brought doughnuts!”

As fast as hungry young shifters, Austin and Bryan were at the door, eagerly greeting their grandparents and clamoring for the box of doughnuts their grandfather held over their heads.

“How come there are
two
trucks outside with Michigan plates on the bumper?” his mother wanted to know. She stood over him, hands on hips, practically glaring at him as if he’d done something wrong.

Finn’s parents were typical shifters of their generation: they’d grown up in the same pack, played together as children, and started dating while they were still in high school. They mated shortly after graduation, and Vera whelped Finn before her twenty-fifth birthday. Reid came along a year and a half later, and Felicia two years after that. Vera stayed home and raised her pups, while George worked on a ranch that was located near to the pack. They raised their children to be shifters, making sure they were schooled by a pack-run school instead of the local human public schools.