It was not only their livelihood, but their dream and passion. He and his two younger brothers had grown up watching their father sweat and bleed to provide for them and their mother.
When their parents passed away several years back, they knew they couldn’t let it fall under, so the three of them had teamed up and made it what it was today. He looked over to where Bram and Ford were busy going over a set of blueprints.
They were currently in the middle of building a new city hall named The Hampton. The last one burned down a year ago. The frame was up, and his men were busting their balls to make their quota every day.
“Charlie, come over here and look at this,” Ford called out. There were three other shifters looking at the blueprints with his brother. Everyone was tired as the end of the day approached, and each one of them was just as soaked in sweat as he was.
“What’s up?” Ford started talking about the pipes and foundation, but Charlie’s thoughts were elsewhere. Ever since watching Ary drive away several days ago, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. He wasn’t the type of male who chased after a female and wasn’t about to start, but hell, he wanted to go to her so damn bad.
Over and over, he asked himself what it was about her that drew him in, but he wanted everything about her, and therein lay the problem. At forty years old, he should have been married to a nice bear shifter female and have a handful of cubs, but as it was, he immersed himself in his work.
His parents had been so in love with each other, and even though Charlie wanted that, he didn’t want or need the heartache that came when the one who was loved above all else was gone.
It might have been a baseless emotion, because in reality he knew he couldn’t live his life like that, but the way things were going had been good for him this far, and he might as well continue on the same path.
“Yo, Charlie,” Bram called out, and he glanced at his youngest brother. He couldn’t help but feel slightly responsible that Ford and Bram were just as single as he was. Their lives were about the business. There was Ford, isolated because of some past relationship he refused to talk about, while Bram immersed himself in bar fights, because he needed an outlet for his anger.
They were good men, but had he inadvertently steered them away from wanting something more than what they had? How many times had he been drunk and asked Ford about Mina, even though he knew there was bad blood between those two?
He knew it was a sore subject, but he also knew that maybe if he made his brother remember what he had with the female, even if it had gone bad in the end, he might take the initiative and not let Charlie’s ridiculous fears consume him.
It was cruel to bring up Mina, and after the last time, when he saw the clear pain and rage on his brother’s face, Charlie never brought it up again. His brothers were old enough to make their own decisions, no matter how much he thought it was his fault or that they were going the wrong way.
“Yeah, I hear ya.” He told them what needed to be changed in order for everything to be stable enough and flow smoothly, and although some of the measurements seemed off, his mind was so fried from working and thinking about his kitten that he didn’t want to deal with it right now.
He wanted to leave, get cleaned up, and throw back a few beers. It had been a rough couple days, and only harder because he wanted to feel Ary again, and not necessarily in a sexual way.
Maybe he should just look her up. He still didn’t know how he hadn’t noticed her before taking her to his cabin. She had this magnetism that drew him in like nothing else that made him want to control her, take her, and claim every part of her body until she screamed there was nothing of her that he didn’t own. His bear tried to take him over, wanted to shift and hunt her down, mate with her, and mark her flesh.
He wanted to run his tongue along the mark he gave her and show it to everyone until they knew she was his. Shaking his head at his ludicrous and dangerous thoughts, Charlie knew he was treading on a very slippery slope, because despite the fact that he desperately wanted Ary with a fierceness that actually stunned him, it was all around bad news.
Thinking about her this way, and wanting her like he wanted to... mate with her... was not a place Charlie was going to go.
His life had worked out fine with only himself, so any thought about taking on a mate was off limits. No, there would be no looking her up. He would go on with his life, put her behind him, and move on.
She had been an incredible sexual partner, the best female he had ever been with, but that was where he needed to leave it.
“Come on, boys. Let’s call it a night and get drunk.”
10
Three weeks later
Ary stood in the center of her bathroom, that damn little stick of doom hanging loosely in her hand. She had known this was a possibility, but to actually miss her period, something that never happened, and to see those two pink lines show up on the pregnancy test was like dropping into the seventh realm of hell.
“Are you sure that two pink lines means pregnant?” Candace questioned, and Ary looked at her as if she lost her mind.
“Candace, I know none of us have been in this situation before, but damn, girl, don’t you watch TV and the commercials for shit like this?” Melissa asked her incredulously.
“Good God, Melissa. Of course I know two lines means pregnant, but I’m just trying to make Ary not feel so bad about it.”
Ary sat on the closed toilet seat lid and hung her head.
“It’ll be okay, Ary. I promise.” Melissa stood by her side and ran her hand up and down her back. They had shown up twenty minutes ago with a bag full of pregnancy tests. When she hadn’t had her period, she thought maybe, just maybe, she had stressed herself out to the point of her period stopping because of it.
She had certainly been worrying enough since all this happened and didn’t have any nails left because of it. Then she made the call to Melissa and Candace, asked them to grab the tests, because she was too much of a wreck to go get them herself, and here she was, freaking the freak out right now.
Casting a glance at Candace, who was looking just as worried and nervous as she felt, Ary had no idea where to go from this point on. She was a single thirty-year-old woman, an ocelot shifter, and was currently knocked-up, because she enjoyed one night of meaningless sex. To make matters worse, the baby she carried was the child of none other than Charlie flippin’ Wylde.
“So, do you think the baby will be an ocelot or bear shifter?” Leave it to Melissa to bring up something she hadn’t even thought about. There were no hybrid shifters. They were either one or the other, which meant her child would have her shifting genes or their father’s.
“You know we are here for you, right?” Candace moved next to her and got down on her haunches. Her strawberry-blonde hair was twisted in a cute braid and hung over one of her shoulders.
Her light-blue eyes were filled with so much compassion they had Ary bursting into tears. There was a hushed murmur from both of her friends, which only caused her to cry harder.
Yes, she was so scared about what all this meant, but she was also crying because she knew she was lucky to have these friends standing beside her. Their arms wrapped around her, and they held her tight.
Ary knew she had to tell Charlie, but she also knew she needed some time to herself to come to grips with all of it. This was huge, and until she was comfortable with it, how in the world did she expect to tell the father?