Their Mating Rituals [Paranormal Protection Unit 4] (Siren Publishing Classic) (15 page)

Aiden sighed.
You will carry on and you know that Allister and Jackie would be there for you the entire way. So would Talon, Quincy, Kat, and her men. Everyone on the base would be there to help.
He knew what she meant, though. To lose a bond-mate would be like tearing out your very soul. You would be nothing more than an empty shell going through the motions. Aiden stroked her skin gently.
You are going to be an amazing mother. You have so much to give and do so willingly and without question, love.

I hope that you are right. I really and truly do,
Lina whispered in his mind and then pulled back with the slightest of sighs. “I really will be all right,” she murmured. “I will get over this. I need to get over it so that I don’t give our babies a complex.”

“There is that very valid point,” he agreed with a smile. Dropping a kiss to her lips, he lifted his head again to say. “I love you, angel, and we will get through this together just like everything else. I promise.”

“I know. Since the moment that the kidnappers took me out of the ER, you and I have walked side by side.” And for that she was so very, very thankful. “Together we will get through all of this. We are a team, right?” She had wanted to protect him then, and he was protecting her and their babies now.

“We are always a team,” he agreed with a grin. Dropping another kiss to her lips, he shifted her into his lap and hugged her close to her. “I think that we should head out though. You need to eat and then we have a doctor’s appointment.” And he had to tell her something that might not go over very well with her.

“I caught that,” she said with a frown. “Talk to me, honey. What’s happening? Please, darling, talk to me,” she murmured stroking her hand over his chest. “Or do we need to leave to do it?”

Making a face, he sighed, “No, we can talk here. Everyone knows except for blabbermouth over there.” He jerked a thumb to Jackie. Shooting her a look when she made a sound of protest, Aiden lifted a brow. “Oh come on, when haven’t you just barreled into a situation and given it all up once Allister told you a secret?”

Jackie shrugged. “Well, I can’t help that I want to make sure that there are no secrets. Secrets have a way of eating a hole inside of life. They are insidious and damaging. It’s better to have it all out there in the open so…” She paused. “What’s the big secret?”

“Hush, sister dear,” Aiden said and looked back to his mate. “I want it known that it was just kind of an accident that we found out. We weren’t digging.” Quincy coughed into his hand and Aiden reached over to smack him without looking. “‘We’ as in the rest of us besides Quincy the snoopy being of Mage-lore. He was updating records and was doing some searches on you out of his abnormal and seriously out-of-proportion curiosity and found something rather…interesting.”

Frowning, she looked around. “All right,” she whispered and felt her stomach pitting. She felt ill and didn’t know why. “Why is it that I’m feeling worse and worse with each passing second that you are saying this to me?” she asked quietly. “I don’t like this. Whatever you are going to say, I’m not going to like it, am I?” He had too serious a face. She just knew that this was going to be bad.

“I don’t honestly know,” he told her, quietly hugging her closer to him. “Quincy found out that your mother gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl. She gave the boy up for adoption and kept the girl, you, Talina. The boy was adopted, moved overseas, and only recently came back. His adoptive parents named him Nathaniel after the woman’s father.”

She was certain she didn’t hear him correctly. She knew that she couldn’t have heard him right, at all. She felt a strange buzzing in her head. She was sure she was going to pass out. Swallowing hard, she looked to Aiden again. “A twin?” she whispered and laid her forehead to his shoulder. “Oh God,” was all she could say before she passed out cold.

Heaving a sigh, Aiden rested his cheek to her hair. Another trip off to the infirmary was likely in order. But since they’d be there later he really didn’t want to take her there and have her wake. Shifting, he lifted her in his arms as he stood and carried her off the bleachers. “We’ll be in my office,” he told the others, heading for the doors. Or they would be there until he was sure she was all right and wasn’t suffering any adverse effects from her latest fainting.

When she woke, Lina looked up at Aiden and sighed. “I’m sorry.” She didn’t do stress well at all right now. Not with her pregnancy. “A twin.” She felt the tears falling. Her mother had given up another piece of her, so why had Lina been kept? “Oh God.” It hit her then. “Do you think that he knows what he is?” She had never had even a moment to believe she was anything other than human but wondered how that would work with a male.

“He would have found out in puberty,” he told her softly as he stroked her hair. Shifting slightly so she could see his face clearer, he sighed. “I’m sorry, love. We don’t know a lot except for the fact that he had a loving family, had two other adoptive siblings, and his parents still live in Australia, where they moved once all the kids were old enough. We know he’s in the States because of his passport being scanned, but beyond that we haven’t been able to track him. Or if Quincy has, he hasn’t said anything to me.”

“Why?” That was a question no one could answer. The only one who could have answered it was her mother and that bitch was dead and gone. “Have you told Talon about this?” Her father. She had been working on creating a relationship with the man and truly had created what she thought was a great one, but it was still “in progress,” as she liked to call it.

“Talon doesn’t know anything yet,” he told her. “We all agreed that you should be the first to know and then if you wanted us to, we’d tell him, or if you prefer, you can. He is your father, and technically Quincy was using company equipment in off-the-books searches of random and idiotic things. He had been doing some work, but really he’d been poking around like he likes to do when bored.”

Lina nodded and laid her head back on his shoulder once more. “All right,” she murmured softly. Taking another deep breath, she whispered, “Since Father will more than likely hunt us down to figure out what happened to me.” Her father was more than a little overprotective, and he needed a freaking vacation like whoa crazy.

“He was already here and I threw him out because he was giving me a headache. I told him I’d call him as soon as you woke. Give or take ten or forty minutes. He can just wait, though, until I’m assured you’re fine.” He leaned in to rub his nose to hers. “Are you fine?” he asked very quietly.

“Yes, honey, I am fine,” she whispered softly. “I was just so surprised, so shocked that I couldn’t handle it.” It was the combination of her pregnancy and stress. Sadly pregnancy wasn’t as amazing for her as it had been for Jackie. Lina had issues, and sadly her poor bond-mate knew it.

“I likely could have found a better way to tell you. I just didn’t know how to do it,” he said quietly to her. “I love you, Talina, and no matter what we find out about your brother I will always love you. I’ll get Q to give you all he’s found and you can decide if you want to make contact or not.”

“It’s all right,” she whispered and took in a deep breath. “It really and truly is all right. I think it’s just me. It’s pregnancy and my hormones and the, God, just everything. Rubbing her forehead, she sighed. “I think that pregnancy is just eating at me. I think when we do it again, and we will by the way”—she grinned—“I will need to ensure that my health is fully at one hundred percent instead of as it was when we got pregnant.”

“I’m glad we will do this again, baby, but not for a good number of years,” he told her honestly. “I want some time with you and just our kids. But in a few years we’ll have another couple of babies and we will both be ready for it that time.”

“I agree. I think more than a few years though. I want to allow our babies to have a full childhood before we even think of trying to have another baby. Hopefully next time it will be one instead of two,” she teased with a smirk.

“You can always hope, but I wouldn’t place bets on it, love, not with both of us being twins,” he pointed out softly. “And with my genetic line as strong as it is, you’ll be having twins each and every time we get you pregnant and they’ll likely always be boys if my line is anything to go by. Though”—Aiden smiled slightly—“I wouldn’t mind having a little girl. I think that would be amazing.”

“I would love to have a little girl,” Talina admitted with a smile. “I doubt that we would ever have girls though, so we will love our boys every bit as much as we would a girl.” She looked forward to having her sons, both of them. “All right, we should call my father in here so that we can tell him, too,” she whispered after several moments.

Nodding, he sat back on his heels and looked over his shoulder. Raising his voice a little, he called out, “She’s awake, Talon.” Looking back at her, not moving as the door opened and her father came inside, he murmured, “He wandered back this way about two minutes ago.”

“Are you all right, baby girl?” Talon asked, moving a little closer.

Looking up at her father, Lina smiled. “I’m fine, Daddy. This pregnancy and stress or shock just don’t agree with each other,” she told him softly. “Daddy.” He was her daddy, her father. No, they didn’t spend her childhood together, but he was here now, and that was all that mattered. “I need you to sit because we need to tell you something. Something serious.”

Staring at her for a long moment, Talon moved to a chair and sat down. “What is it?” he asked, looking from her to Aiden. “It’s not the twins, is it?” he asked softly.

“No, oh God no,” she said and covered her stomach protectively. “No, the babies are fine, Daddy.” A smile on her face was lost to a frown quickly. “We have something to tell you. It seems that my mother was even more off her rocker than we thought she was.” She looked up at Aiden. At his nod she continued. “I wasn’t the only child born to her. She gave birth to a son as well. My twin,” she added, letting father absorb what she was telling him.

Talon stared at them, his mouth hanging open, his lips moving slightly. “What?” he finally croaked out.

“It’s true,” Aiden said softly, moving so he could lift Talina into his lap and hold her. “Quincy was doing some background on Talina as per protocol and happened to find a dual birth on record at the hospital where she was born. A boy and a girl are on record. The girl was the only one named and taken home,” he continued as Talon seemed to be processing everything. “The boy was given up for adoption, put into the system, and adopted out about a month after the birth. He was named Nathaniel by the parents,” he added quietly.

“Hopefully his adoptive family was far better than the mother that gave him up. I’m sure that before we know it Quincy will have all of the information on him as well as an address for him now. Would you like to meet him with me?”

“Of course I want to meet him,” Talon said stiffly. Spearing Aiden with a look, he narrowed his eyes. “How long have you known?”

“I heard the first hint of it about two weeks ago. Quincy’s been digging since then,” he said quietly to him. “He’s got quite a bit of stuff now, but he’s still digging for more. He said we’d have the rest of it sometime tomorrow or the next day.”

“So I think for now we should let Quincy do his magic and find all that he can on Nathaniel,” Talina said quietly.

“I agree,” Talon said softly. “We need to have all the available information we possibly can so we’re not running around blind. Quincy can work it when he has time. No matter how long it takes, we need to know absolutely everything.”

“I just hope and pray that the family that adopted him were shifters as well,” Talina interjected. “Because if not that would have been a serious shock not only to him that first time he shifted, but his family as well.” She didn’t know who would have been more shocked, the boy or the family.

Wincing at that, both men nodded. “Very true,” Aiden said quietly. “The first shift for a Dragon is always hard. It’s not a continuous thing like some of the other Changers. Our first shift is in sections,” he told his mate. “Talon’s theory is that because we’re so much larger than the average Changer our body needs to stretch bit by bit and get used to the alterations that happen with a full shift.”

Lina found herself flinching and nodded. “Well let’s hope and pray that he had someone to get him through that,” she whispered. “Or maybe he’s like me and didn’t shift because he’s more human than Dragon?” she asked hopefully, knowing the truth though even as she spoke the words.

“Doubtful,” Talon said with a sigh. “While the Changer DNA can be buried in rare cases, genetic quirks if you will, it’s very, very rare. Especially in males, females less so, but in males it’s about a one in three million chance of the DNA being inert and no change coming on. So more than likely he is full-blood Dragon,” he murmured quietly.

“Especially with Talon’s bloodline,” Aiden threw in. “She might as well know, T. It’s her heritage, too. You and Talon both are the ancestors of a long line of Dragon Kings, including the first ever crowned by Gaia millennia ago. It’s one of the few crowns that has never shifted clans. The only other one I think is the Fae, but they are huge on bloodlines so it’s a little different. Plus Talon is the longest sitting King ever,” he said and got a long low growl from the other Dragon in the room.

“Oh well crap,” Lina muttered. “I was hoping.” And that hope was dashed quickly. “All right, so we need to make sure that Quincy finds Nathaniel as quickly as possible so that we can hopefully find out that he made it through the shifting and all that okay and ensure that he knows that we would welcome him. We would, wouldn’t we?” she asked as she watched her father and her lover share a strange look.

“Of course we would, Talina.” Aiden nodded, “But you are right. We need for Q to find everything he can on him and then we can decide how to approach him. We wouldn’t want to go at him if we’re wrong and he’s one of the few that has the genetic quirk to never become a Dragon.”

“This is very true.” Lina honestly prayed that Nathaniel was one of the ones with the genetic quirk like her. “Hopefully he has the same genetic quirk as I have and he didn’t shift.”