“It’s the Hands-On Children’s Museum, and Elise loves it here,” Dane said, and it took me a minute to remember that he was answering my earlier question about the place they’d chosen to host their daughter’s first birthday party at.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Hangover or not, it wasn’t like me to feel so irritable. I tried to shake it off and focus on why we were here. Dane was like a brother to me, and even if it wasn’t by blood, he was the closest thing I had to a family of my own. At least, any family that I wanted to claim an association with. His family was the reason I’d come to the Pacific Northwest, I reminded myself—not to try and hook up with yet another human whose name I would just end up forgetting in a few months. Today was about Elise and her fathers.
“The museum is more about having kids learn by doing hands-on things, rather than just by looking,” Dane was saying as he set his own armload of gifts down on a glittering table in the heavily decorated party room. The place was an explosion of sparkling pink-ness, further evidence of just how much my formerly-brooding friend’s life had changed. “Wesley brings Elise here a few times each week for activities and classes with other toddlers her own age,” Dane went on without taking his eyes off his mate.
This was getting ridiculous. I could barely stand to look at the two of them and their ongoing infatuation with each other. The hot looks Dane was shooting across the room were making me even crankier, and I suddenly wished that I had taken someone home the night before, after all.
Wes was standing near a tower of pink-frosted cupcakes, holding a wobbling Elise by the hand while the little girl babbled at another toddler who clung to her pregnant mother’s leg. “…you should start to have more energy now that you’re past the first trimester, Sarah,” Wes was saying, clearly trying to ignore the smoldering looks Dane was sending him. His flaming cheeks were a sure sign of just how aware he was of his mate’s heat, though.
“That’s how it was when I was pregnant with Holly,” the young woman replied, nodding. She didn’t seem to notice the erotic by-play of the two men. She had dark circles under her eyes, and rested her hands on her baby bump as she spoke. “But with this one, it’s already my sixteenth week and I’m still exhausted.”
“Well, you do have to run around after a toddler this time. If your Holly is as energetic as our Elise is, that alone would wear you out, even if you weren’t expecting again.”
“That’s true,” she said, smiling tiredly. “Although my husband is such a help with her. I don’t know what I would do without him.”
I turned back to Dane, determined to give him a hard time about his ongoing obsession with his mate, when suddenly the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. The air in the room shifted, and my otherself woke up with a vengeance. I was vaguely aware of Dane giving me a curious look, and of the ongoing buzz of conversation in the room—“Here he is now. Have you met Devin, Wes?” the pregnant woman, Sarah, was saying—but all of those things ceased to matter.
I turned, my attention pulled to the doorway as if by a magnet.
A man had just walked in, and part of my brain made note of the unimportant things—he was young, and small-ish, with dark hair and light eyes behind rimless glasses. He had a dimple in his chin, and a vein pulsed near the base of his throat. It was beating faster and faster as I watched it, and I wanted to taste it.
The man was beautiful. My dragon recognized him. This man belonged to me.
He was my fated mate.
“Honey, come meet Wes and Elise,” Sarah said, crossing the room and hooking her arm through my mate’s. She pulled him over to the ridiculous pink cupcakes, and the little girl who had been holding onto her leg earlier lit up, beaming and reaching up toward him with chubby arms. “Wes, this is my husband, Devin,” Sarah said as my mate scooped the toddler up in his arms and kissed her on the cheek.
My fated mate was named Devin.
But Devin was married. He had a child, and a pregnant wife, and he stood a few feet away from me, holding his daughter, and chatting with Wes, and ignoring me completely.
As if the whole world hadn’t just shifted on its axis.
2
~ Devin ~
I could feel Sarah’s eyes on me, and I adjusted Holly on my hip, shifting her so that her little body blocked my wife from view. My wife. Two words that I’d never thought I’d be saying together.
Sarah knew me better than anyone, and I had no doubt that she’d caught onto my tension, even if she didn’t understand it. She would definitely grill me about it later, but right now I didn’t want to talk about it—not even to the extent of exchanging glances. I couldn’t. It was all I could do to try to keep my attention on the conversation with the slim man she’d just introduced me to. Warren? Wallace? I couldn’t remember his name, even though Sarah had just told me.