“Hell yeah!” Kong yelled from behind the bar.
Denison laughed with the others and lifted his glass higher. “To Bash and Emerson. Welcome to the family!”
And as the others drank a toast, Bash dragged her out onto the dance floor and hugged her close. Brighton Beck plucked some slow notes on his old guitar before Denison belted out a first, soulful note. Emerson melted into Bash’s embrace as he rocked them back and forth.
The bar was loud, crowded, sticky-floored, and perfect. There was a bear-shaped cake on a table near the stage where a couple of kids were swiping frosting. She thought Willa was going to chase them off, but the spunky redhead only took a swipe of her own and shushed the kids’ giggling. Beside Emerson and Bash, Beaston danced with his Aviana, and Mom and Dad were slow dancing near them, too. Today had been beautiful. It had been one of those days that had the potential to make an entire lifetime. It had been a fork in a long road. She’d taken a risk and it had paid off. She’d found the path paved with joy.
“You smell happy,” Bash murmured, his cheek against her hair.
“I am. I was really lonely before you, and now look what you’ve given me.”
“Sex and pizza rolls?”
She laughed and shook her head. “Those and so much more.”
Bash looked so handsome in the dim lighting of the bar. “Remember that time you told me you like everything about me?”
She slid her hands up his chest, hooked them around the back of his neck and nodded. “It’s still true.”
“No one ever said that about me before.” His lips twitched into a smile, then fell. “I feel like that about you. You make it easy to breath, Emerson. I think you’re my air.”
She bit her trembling lip and rested her cheek against his chest. “You’re my air, too, Bash Bear.”
Epilogue
In a daze, Emerson emerged from the trailer she shared with Bash and stumbled toward his waiting truck. The last week since the wedding had been complete and utter chaos with trying to get her name changed, her address changed, moving out of her duplex into Bash’s trailer, and writing her first article for submission.
In all the commotion, she’d missed something vital. Something amazing.
“Light a fire, woman,” Kirk called from the bed of Bash’s truck where he had piled in with Mason and Clinton, who was now staring at her with an obnoxious, knowing grin as though he was a damned psychic.
Ignoring them, she crawled into Bash’s truck and buckled in. When she turned and met his gaze, his dark brows were furrowed with concern. “What’s wrong? Is it Clinton? Do you want me to bleed him?”
“No. No, I’m fine. I’m just…surprised by something and need a minute to think.”
“You want music to think to? Heavy metal helps.” He turned the knob on his stereo and blasted a heavy beat.
“Ten bucks says Beaston won’t even let us hold him,” Audrey said from the back seat.
Harrison snorted as Bash pulled out of the trailer park. “He probably doesn’t even let Aviana hold him.”
Beaston’s call that his mate had given birth to their raven boy this morning was what had triggered a series of realizations. After her negative pregnancy tests, Emerson had been sure she would start her period at any moment, but then her life had gone chaotic with the wedding and the aftermath, and she’d forgotten about it completely. But now she was definitely a week late, and the test she’d just taken had two bold lines.
She was pregnant.
Pregnant.
She couldn’t help her smile, and her heart pounded against her chest.
The million things that had to come together to make a miracle like Clinton had said…well…she and Bash had done it. Emerson pulled her oversize purse closer against her stomach, now carrying a tiny, fragile life.
She was going to be a mommy, and he was going to be a daddy, and she was utterly overwhelmed with emotion right now.
“You’re making the air weird,” Bash said suspiciously. “Are you sure you’re okay? If you don’t want to go see Beaston’s baby—”
“No! I really, really want to see his little boy.” And cuddle him and smell him and cry over him because she and Bash would be holding their own cub soon.
Bash pulled to a stop at the main road. On the left, in the shadows of the evergreens, sat the new cabins where Holman and Brackeen were posted, an ominous symbol of the changes that were slowly affecting life here. But to the right lay the road to Grayland Mobile Park. And there, cradled in the arms of Beaston, lay something no one could take away from the shifters here. Hope.
The truck tires rattled over the wooden bridge that crossed the river fed by Bear Trap Falls, and gravel kicked up as they blasted down the road and under the Grayland Mobile Park sign.