Page 32 of Selkie AU: Beyond the Storm

“Because it’s my nest?”Obviously.

“Why doesyournest need to smell likeme?”

“Because you’re my mate?” Again,obviously. “And I’ll need lots of your scent when I go into heat.”

His eyes widened. “What do you mean, ‘go into heat?’”

Did humans not have heats? I tilted my head at him. “Well, when we’re bonded as mates, and the goddess gives us her blessing, then I’ll go into heat, and we can have pups.”

“Pups?” He sat up, causing me to flop to the side and off him.

I pouted. “Yes. Selkie pups.”

“You can get pregnant?”

“Well, not right now, but soon.” I beamed at him. “It’s only a matter of time!”

16

Rowan

“I can be your family now.”

“It’s only a matter of time.”

I needed some fucking air. Everything was snowballing so fast, and I really didn’t know how to deal with it.

I’d given in. Well, really, I’d fallen face first into him with no plan on how I’d be getting back up, and it suddenly seemed like I was falling much further than I’d anticipated. He wanted to be my family? To have children with me?

This wasn’t just sex. It wasn’t a way for him to fill time before he got bored and moved along. He was really,trulyplanning to stayherewithme. And I didn’t know what to do about it.

For so long I hadn’t considered a future, and then in came Milo holding one up in perfect, inhuman gray fingertips. As if it were the easiest choice he could make. As if there were no other option.

Why?

Whyme?

I didn’t deserve him. Yet I wanted him so much. I felt an ache toward him unlike any other I’d ever known. Maybe it was my loneliness, or maybe it was the way his warmth managed to seep into the cold void at my center and wake things up I’d thought were long dead.

Days. It had only taken himdaysto show me how to feel again.

I wasn’t going to survive him. He was the storm I’d decided to lose myself in. As unstoppable and inevitable as a hurricane thrashing at the shell of the person I’d become.

He was more.

He was the first rays of sunlight that parted through the storm clouds. He was the rainbow after the rain.

Milo was going to destroy the hollow thing I was and leave me fragile and vulnerable as he offered me what I could become. A partner. A mate. A father. A family.

He wanted to give me a future, and I didn’t know how to take it. Didn’t know how to let myself have it and trust that it wasn’t going to disappear.

It hadn’t been long enough. I knew that. I knew it was completely irresponsible to trust him with my heart after so short a time, but I was finding I had little choice.

“I need to… I need to step outside for a minute,” I told him, feeling far too much and needing space to process it.

“I’ll come with you.”

“No,” I answered quickly. “Sorry, Milo, no.”