Loving Lachlyn (Ashland Pride Two) (9 page)

Chapter 10

Jericho looked at his new driver’s license. 
Jericho Brio Fallon.
  Everything was different except for his first name.  Don’s
guy
had changed his middle and last names, as well as changing his birthday to make him two years older than his current twenty-six.  The pictures used were taken with Alek’s phone, and his address was a warehouse in southern Indiana somewhere, and Lachlyn’s was somewhere in the northern part of the state.

Lachlyn was staring at the birth certificate.  Alek spoke quietly to Don, and Jericho moved close to her.  She lifted her eyes, and tears pooled in the pretty blue depths.  “What’s the matter, Sunshine?” he asked with a low voice.

“Why do you call me Sunshine?”  She sniffled, biting her lower lip to stop the trembling.

He said, “Because you’ve always been a light in the darkness to me.  Even when we were young and the other kids were afraid of me because of my father, you were always there for me, with a smile or a kind word.”

“Or half of my lunch,” she said as she smiled.  Tears spilled over her cheeks.

“You’ll always be the sun in my life, Lachlyn.  I wish that things were different, that you weren’t in danger from my father, and we didn’t have to hide, but I wouldn’t change anything about our past because it’s brought us both to this place.  Now, love, tell me what the tears are for.”  He cupped her face and brushed the tears from her cheeks.

“It’s weird to see a birth certificate without my parents’ names on it.”

He looked down at the paper and saw that the forger had given her a maiden name of Jones with parents named Beth and Luke, and had changed her birthday to make her a year younger.

“When the threat to you is gone, we’ll get your real birth certificate.  Then you can change your name legally when you marry Alek, and I’ll change my name, too.  The only thing that these papers mean is that we’re keeping ourselves safe.  We’re still the same people we were when you came back to the den, except we’re wiser.”

She put the paper down on the counter and leaned into him.  He hugged her tightly, feeling her tremble.  He glanced over his shoulder and found Alek and Don looking at them.  He motioned with his head to Alek, who joined them quickly, pressing against Lachlyn’s back and gripping her sides.  Her trembling eased quickly, and it was one more way that proved Lachlyn needed two mates, and her other mate was Alek.

After several quiet minutes, Lachlyn wiggled around between them and faced Alek.  “I saw the marriage license.”

Alek smiled.  “What a whirlwind romance we had.  Met and married within three days.”

She laughed.  “I know it’s not real right now, but I like being Mrs. Fallon to my two Fallon men.”

Jericho nipped her neck and kissed her ear.  “It’s real, Sunshine, just not legal.”

She shivered.  “I mean legal.  It’s definitely,
definitely
real.”

After giving Don ten thousand dollars in cash to give to the forger, they said goodbye and headed home.  Jericho had a million things running through his mind; the foremost was marking Lachlyn formally.

After dinner on Wednesday night, when Alek was working his night shift, Jericho and Lachlyn went for a walk in the woods behind the boarding house where the pride shifted on the full moons.

As they walked through the woods hand in hand, he said, “I wanted to ask you about formally mating.”

“I wondered if you were going to ask me.”

“I do want to, but I recognize that it’s not just you and me in the mating, and I don’t want to offend Alek.  But it’s not my decision, it’s yours.”

“What do you mean?”  She stopped walking, and he turned to face her.  The light from the setting sun that filtered through the trees bathed her in amber, making her look like a goddess, deserving of worship.

For a moment, his brain derailed and his bear roared in his mind to strip her and take her.  But then she cleared her throat and brought him back to reality.  “I mean that if you don’t want to mate me formally because of Alek, then we can do whatever mountain lions do.”

She chewed on her bottom lip.  “I can’t really mate you right, Jer.  I don’t have claws or fangs.  I might as well be human.”

He snarled and wrapped his big hands around her upper arms.  “You are special and amazing, Lachlyn.  I don’t give a damn that you can’t shift, but you’re not human.  You’re the child of two were-bears, and that makes you a bear whether you shift or not.  Don’t belittle your heritage.”

“Why didn’t I ever shift?”  She gripped his arms as he held her, her eyes wide and imploring.

Loosening his grip, he pulled her into his arms and said, “I don’t know.  But you’re still perfect to me.”

She squeezed her arms around his waist, and they stood in the silence of the woods while the sun set.  As they walked back home, he said, “If you want to formally mate to me and Alek, then Alek and I could mark each other in your place for the ceremonial marks.”

For bears, the mates used their claws to mark their mates — the females on their arms and males on their chest.  Then they used their fangs to mark the side of the neck.

“Do you think he would mind?”

“I think that he’d do anything to make you happy, Sunshine, and you know that I would, too.  You could still use your blunt teeth to mark our necks, and we could use our claws on each other and you.”

“I’d love that.”

The following day, Jericho left Lachlyn with James, John, all the kids, Tristan, and Wesley, and borrowed Tristan’s truck.  He drove into the next county to a bank.  Using his new identification, he opened up a checking account and then he withdrew funds from his off-shore account and transferred them into his new account.  He’d never had many bills, so he’d saved the money he’d earned from working for his father because he’d hoped one day to buy a house for Lachlyn and start over somewhere.

He hit up a department store and purchased clothes for himself and stopped at a grocery to buy a few things for Lachlyn.

He dropped the grocery sack on her lap.  “Oh!  What did you get?” she asked, beaming at him as he sat next to her on the couch in the family room.

“Just a few things for my mate,” he said.

She opened the bag and looked inside.  Gasping, she pulled out a box of Lucky Charms, a big bag of Skittles, and a bottle of Yoo-Hoo.  She laughed and hugged him, kissing him repeatedly on his face.

“You’re so sweet.  Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome.”

He liked seeing her smiling and happy.  Although she’d been markedly happier since finding Alek, he knew that she was fighting to stay positive, worried over what his father might do.

When Alek came home from work, the two of them took Lachlyn out to dinner.  They also took her shopping, since she was still wearing Sarah’s hand-me-downs.  Jericho bought a pickup with a bench seat so that all three of them could be in the same row together.

Lachlyn leaned against the hood of the truck after they got back to the boarding house.  “I didn’t know that you got paid so well, Jer.”

“I made a percentage from everything that I collected.  And I really never had any expenses so I just saved it.”

“Collection?  I thought you were an enforcer?” Alek asked.

“One and the same in my case.  My father was a loan shark, and when people didn’t pay, he sent me to collect from them.  Within the den, if he felt that a bear was out of line and needed discipline to remember that he was king bear, then I handled that as well.”

Lachlyn shivered, and Jericho knew she was most likely thinking about his father’s brand of punishments, which in her case would most certainly have ended in her death.

“Do you think we’ll ever be free of your dad?” she asked, her brow furrowing in worry.

Jericho cupped her face.  “We will be, Sunshine.  One way or the other.”

* * * * *

Friday morning, he and Lachlyn headed into the next town to find the supplies for their mating ceremony on Saturday night.  When Lachlyn explained the ceremony to Alek the night before and asked if he wanted to be part of it, he’d been thrilled.  In a perfect world, he and Alek would have been shopping for things together, but Alek had to work, which meant that the shopping fell to Jericho.  And Lachlyn hadn’t wanted to spend another day puttering around the house.  The kids were done with school for the summer, and although she had a ball playing with them, he knew she was feeling a little cooped up.

“So tell me again why we have to buy everything when half the stuff on the list is already at the house?” she asked, looking at Jericho’s new smart phone and the digital list he’d created.  He’d also bought a cell for her as well, with a girly white and pink sparkly case.

He braked at a stop-light.  “Because it’s bad luck to use old things in a mating ceremony.”

“Why?”

“Because, Sunshine, our people believe that physical objects retain the memories of the people who have used them before.  If we were to use a blanket that belonged to someone else, we’d be bringing in the memories of those people into our mating.  If they were good memories, that’s fine, but if they were bad memories, then we’d be tainting our mating.”

She hummed thoughtfully.  “When my parents moved to Georgia to be with me, my mom said that she had to buy a new broom.  I asked her why, and she said that she threw out the one she’d had before, because it was bad luck to use an old broom in a new home.  Something about sweeping the old problems into the new place.  Sounds similar to the mating rules.”

He agreed.  Squeezing her knee, he said, “Do I really think that using John’s tent or the blanket from Alek’s bed will cause our mating to be bad?  Of course not.  But I want to start out our mating on the right foot and follow our ancestors’ traditions, while making new traditions of our own.”

He looked at her as he put the truck in park and turned off the engine.  She smiled.  “I want our mating to start off on the right foot, too.”

Several hours later, they stopped for lunch at the diner in Ashland.  They’d found everything they needed for the ceremony, and he’d enjoyed spending time with Lachlyn out of the house.  He liked the boarding house, but it was a haven of activity, and unless they stayed up in the bedroom, it was difficult to find privacy.  Except for the times when he’d been having a private conversation and was interrupted, he liked having so many people around.

The cats were an amazing group.  They were very nurturing and caring and had accepted him and Lachlyn as easily as if they were cats themselves.  Alek’s family was amazing.  James was the kind of father who Jericho dreamed of having as a kid.  Supportive, kind, and generous with his time and affection.  His uncles and cousins were just as kind.  Even the other cats who had come from their former pride in Pennsylvania welcomed him and Lachlyn as one of their own.

When they arrived home, he and Lachlyn carried in their purchases, which they stowed on the covered back patio.  Tristan and Micah were in the kitchen when they came back into the house.

She poured a glass of juice for herself and Jericho and leaned against the island.  “We had lunch at Cherie’s and I had the most amazing banana walnut pancakes.”

Tristan smiled shyly.  “I’ve had that.  It’s really good.”

Lachlyn brightened.  “Do you think we could try to make that for breakfast?”

Tristan looked pleasantly surprised.  “Yeah.  We have everything here.  Tomorrow?”

She smiled.  “Sounds great.  I’ll meet you right here at seven.”

Jericho put his arm around Lachlyn as they left the kitchen and kissed the top of her head.  “You’re very sweet, Sunshine.  How’d I get so lucky to have such a wonderful mate as you?”

“I’m the lucky one, Jer.”

When Alek was home from his shift at the station and had changed into street clothes, he and Jericho left Lachlyn in the house and went into the storage shed where James was finishing sharpening two axes.

Jericho tested the weight of the axe in his hand.  It was small but sturdy and would do the job well.  Alek held a similar one once James was finished.  “So tell me again why you needed axes?”

“It’s part of the mating ceremony.  In the old days, the male, or males in a tri-mating, would spend time in the woods to prepare for their mates.  They would hunt an animal and skin it to make a mating blanket, they would clear out an area for the mating night and create a covered sleeping area, and they would chop down one tree per male to use as firewood for the ceremonial fire.”  Jericho explained.  “Everything for the mating is supposed to be new, unused by others and not even purchased by others outside of the mating.  It’s supposed to show that the males can provide everything for their mates, and that the mating starts off fresh and new.”

He and Alek left the barn, and James joined them.  “If you head to the left a couple hundred yards or so, you’ll find some areas where the trees don’t grow so close together, so you’ll have a place to set up for the night.  Just do me a favor and don’t cut off any body parts or anything,” James said and laughed.

“I’m glad you’re so confident in my abilities to swing an axe,” Alek grumbled good-naturedly.