Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 116098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116098 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
“He’ll find it a struggle if he does decide to fight the bond. I never had a prayer of holding out. Maybe I knew that. Maybe I knew that if I put you in my path often enough I’d eventually give in. Maybe that was what I wanted, despite knowing you would learn things about me and my kind that it was better you never learned.”
“You know your secrets are safe with me.”
He combed his fingers through her hair. “I do. Speaking of secrets … There’s a little something I haven’t yet told you. Well, it was more that I haven’t had the chance to tell you until now. I only learned of it earlier today.”
Raini’s eyes lit with interest. “Oh? Spill.”
“Celia has the occasional … well, I wouldn’t call them premonitions. It’s not a warning system—the ability is too weak to serve as one. But she sometimes sees snapshots of the future. Some are of senseless, boring things. Some are a little more significant.” He paused. “Sometime after you saved Gunther, she saw a ‘snapshot’ of you and me near the cathedral. We weren’t alone. There was a little boy and two little blonde girls with us. She couldn’t give me accurate descriptions—the visual was gone too fast for her to absorb any specifics. But she thought we might like to know.”
Raini’s face went all soft and warm. “Why didn’t she mention it before now?”
“You and I hadn’t fully committed to each other at that point. She didn’t want to influence whatever decisions we made. Some are uncomfortable at the thought that, beyond us having predestined psi-mates, certain things are inevitable. She worried one of us could have gotten spooked and pulled back from the relationship. I wouldn’t have, though. And I don’t think you would have either. I wouldn’t have let you. You and I were inevitable. I took too long to see that. But now that I have, I’ll never let you go.”
“I don’t intend to go anywhere. We made a new deal, remember?”
He nodded. “We did.”
A huge smile took over her face. “A boy and two little girls, huh?”
“You’re good with that?”
“Oh yeah. You?”
“In all honesty, I never gave much thought to having children until she told me of her vision. But yes, I’m good with it.” He was about to comment on how great she was with Asher, but then he received a short telepathic message that made him inwardly sigh.
Her brow creased. “Something wrong?”
“That was Hector. He caught your father and his brothers trying to remove one of the stained-glass windows from the cathedral—apparently, they sell pretty well. Lachlan told him he’d give me 40 percent of the profit. Naturally, Hector sent them on their way. And he thinks one of them might have taken a shit close by.”
Flushing, Raini squeezed her eyes shut. “That will have been Bram. I’m sorry. There’s no excuse for them.” She let out a tired sigh, and then her eyelids fluttered open. “Really, I should have guessed they’d do that. One of the first jobs my dad took me on was a cemetery heist.”
“What exactly is a cemetery heist?”
“He stole—or purloined—some flower arrangements, religious statues, chapel windows, and then even went grave robbing. You’d be surprised how many people buy corpses. It’s kind of disturbing.”
Maddox smoothed his hand up her back. “Baby, as much as I like your father, I don’t think it would be good for him to ever be around our kids without supervision.”
She blew out a breath. “Yeah, that’s probably a good call.”