"Yes, Dominic. I will be yours and you mine. Forever." He moved his hands up to her face, holding her as he devoured her mouth. He trailed kisses down her jaw and neck before he sat back from her. He had something else to ask her, something that couldn't wait any longer. His cat was pushing him hard to mark her and he was having increasing difficulty restraining himself.
"There's something else I need to explain." He moved so he sat next to her on the couch, and she twisted so she was facing him with her eyebrow raised.
"Is this a shifter something?"
"Yeah, it's a shifter something." He couldn't stop his chuckle; she really was handling the whole shifter thing a lot better than he'd feared she would.
"As well as getting married, I want us to be mated."
"And what exactly does getting mated entail? We don't have to have witnesses in the bedroom or anything, do we?" The slight panic in Adele's eyes had him chuckling again; trust a female to draw that conclusion.
"No, love, nothing like that. No one other than us will ever be in the bedroom with us." He couldn't resist giving her a quick kiss before he continued; she was so sweet and naive.
"Shifters mate for life. When we mate, I'll leave my mark on you and you on me. Others then know we belong to each other, and they also know to keep their paws to themselves."
"What do you mean 'mark'?"
"We will make love and when we climax together, claws will sprout from the fingers on my right hand and when they do, I'll scratch you. Don't worry, it doesn't hurt because it's magic, I'm not really cutting into you. You'll be left with my mark. It will look like four wide scratches that reveal leopard spots beneath. People who see it will think it's a tattoo."
"But how do I mark you? I'm not a shifter? This mating thing, it won't change me, will it?" Adele's forehead was all creased up as she was obviously getting herself all tied up in knots. He'd better finish explaining this before he totally lost her to her mind's randomness.
"After I mark you, the magic flowing from me to you will allow you to grow claws, just this once, enabling you to mark me. It won't change you. You need the right DNA to be able to shift. It's not like the movies where a bite or scratch is going to convert you."
He sat silently watching the emotions flicker over Adele's face as she processed everything he had told her.
"One last question. Where will you mark me? And where do I mark you?"
"We can leave our marks wherever we want to, but traditionally the male leaves it just above the inside of his mate's right hip bone. The female leaves it over the male's heart on his left pectoral."
He watched her straighten her shoulders and raise her eyes so she held his gaze with her warm chocolate colored eyes.
"I love you, and I don't ever want to be without you, Dominic. Yes, I will mate with you." As she spoke those words, he felt like his heart had just exploded from the sheer happiness he simply couldn't contain. Then she wrapped her left arm around his neck and pulled him in for a scorching kiss he felt all the way to his blissfully happy soul.
~ * ~
Jake sat down with a sigh as Sophie curled up next to him on the couch. They'd just settled Kelly into bed and were now enjoying a glass of port together. Jake had spent the afternoon going over the lists of Lost Ones, starting his own list of all the ones that were suspected of being in Australia. He'd also looked back over Choden's advice and decided it meant he didn't need to worry about the whole next Alpha thing at the moment. So he wasn't going to. The Lost Ones search would keep him plenty busy enough, especially while he was back on Captain duties down at the station.
"I can feel your worry, Jake. Tell me what's troubling you." Sophie could always read him so clearly.
"I've been going over the Lost Ones lists. There are so many, and there are a lot that they suspect are in Australia. I'm going to have to send out a search party I think. There's only so much you can do on the net and by correspondence."
"Which Leaps suspect their Lost Ones have come to Australia?"
"The Chilean Leap suspects that a pregnant widow-mate whose mate was murdered by the Caravan of Death in the military coup of 1973 escaped the country on a boat bound for Sydney. Unfortunately, the Leap was caught up trying to save the remaining shifters in Chile. By the time things settled down and the Leap could start looking, they couldn't find any trace of the widow-mate.
"The French Leap have a pregnant future-mate that went missing back in 1989. They have no idea where she's gone, so we're all looking for her.
"Then the African Leap are still searching for four families who were in Rwanda around the time of the genocide in 1994. They might have been killed but they might have managed to get away. Being able to turn into a leopard has its benefits in Africa, the only place where it actually makes hiding easier. There are more, all similar stories."