“Wait. You mean I can’t get pregnant right now.”
“Well, technically no. You would have to go through the mating ceremony first.”
Angel doubled over with laughter as she thought of all the false pregnancy scares she’d had, and all along she couldn’t get pregnant! She was the paranoid type. Even when she’d used protection, she thought she was pregnant. Shit! She could have used that information a lot sooner.
“Am I missing something?” Jacques looked skeptical.
“No, no, just thinking.”
Her laughter wound down as another thought came to her.
“Hey, wait a minute. What if I choose not to go along with this mating thing? Are you telling me I’ll never be able to have children?”
That thought scared her. She’d been focusing on her career for the last several years, but one day she’d fully intended on having children. What if she couldn’t?
“Why wouldn’t you want to go through with the mating? You’re my mate.”
“Look, Jacques, I like you, I think you’re a good guy, and you’re obviously attractive, but I can’t promise that at the end of these three months, I’ll be ready or willing to go through this mating ceremony with you.”
“I see.”
She could tell he didn’t
see
at all.
“I’m not trying to hurt you, Jacques. I’m just trying to be honest.”
“And I appreciate your honesty. I guess I’ll need to do all I can to make you want to stay.”
He flashed a toothy grin worthy of any gator before winking and digging his fork into his food.
They ate in silence for a while, each savoring their own dish. Angel snuck glances of him from under her lashes. She didn’t know what was happening to her. Even now she was wet for him. A man she barely knew. Her nipples were drawing into hard peaks, making her ache to massage them or have him do it.
As if hearing her thoughts, Jacques looked up at her, catching her in the act of ogling him. He inhaled deeply and she could have sworn his green eyes had changed to gold. Angel bit and sucked her bottom lip before picking up her drink and taking a healthy swallow.
“Tonight, we’ll need to do our engagement ceremony.”
“Wh-what?”
“We should have done it long ago,
cher
. A few of the other sovereigns will be at dinner tonight, and they’ll expect to see your markings. Once your markings are certified, everyone will expect us to do the engagement ceremony.”
“I don’t know, Jacques. That seems so permanent.”
“It’s really just a formality. Nothing between us has to change.”
Angel’s mind began to swim. If she did the engagement ceremony, it meant she’d be able to sleep with him and no one would bat an eye. But she’d also be formally announcing that she’d mate with him. She couldn’t be engaged to him knowing full well she might not stay.
“Jacques, I don’t plan on staying here, my home is in Vegas. I don’t want to go through a ceremony knowing I might not be here to officially mate with you.”
“The engagement doesn’t bind you to me,
cher
. And you’re under no obligation to stay. It’s a formal acknowledgement that you carry my mark. It’s a really easy process. We’ll allow the sovereigns to see the mark and then the priestess from my pod will bless our union. That’s it.”
It sounded easy enough and he looked sincere. Deep down something told her Jacques was not the type to force her into doing anything she didn’t want to do. She decided she’d do it. Honestly, she wasn’t sure how long she’d be able to hold out from falling prey to his smooth Cajun accent and that fiery stare of his. As it was, she wanted to swipe his plate off the table, spread herself in front of him, and beg him to have her for lunch. It was crazy, it was insane, but something about him had her twisted in knots, and at the moment she was more than willing to put on the straitjacket.
“I guess I can do it. As long as you don’t think this means I’m going to stay.”
“Don’t worry, I heard you loud and clear. But just so you know, I’m not going to make it easy on you.”
That Cajun accent coupled with the downright sexy look in his eyes had her squirming in her chair with her legs crossed. It was going to be a long day.
Jacques paced the spacious living room of the home his family kept in the Old French Quarter, or as the locals called it, Vieux Carre. It was spacious and decorated in a relaxed yet modern style. His mother had welcomed Angel nearly an hour ago, and the two were now upstairs doing whatever women did.
She’d been quiet since they’d left VingtEt Un. It killed him that he couldn’t put her at ease about meeting her parents and going through the ceremony. The look on her face when he told her about the mating ritual made his gut twist. For the millionth time, he cursed the Monreuxes. If they’d exchanged Angel as planned, he would’ve been raised with her. Their connection would have been absolute. They would have performed their mating engagement at eighteen, which was common among gator shifters in his pod. Then they would have had their official mating ceremony. By now they might have been on their second or third hatchling.
Just the idea of Angel carrying his seed made his heart quicken.
Mine
. He heard his gator growl. If he were back in Lafayette, he would have rushed home and gotten into the water, allowing his gator to burn off some steam while gliding through the calm waters of the bayou. Right now Jacques felt like a time bomb waiting to explode. He wanted Angel, but he was sure he’d scare her if he got too close right now. No, what she needed was someone who’d quiet her fears about meeting her parents and performing the engagement, not some over-sexed mate wanting to claim her as his own. He knew she was nervous about meeting her parents. So nervous, in fact, that she hadn’t asked him a single question about the engagement ceremony.
“She’s perfect!”
His mother sailed into the room like a hurricane. Jacqueline Bertrand was in her late fifties. She was tall and curvy and her hair was a beautiful strawberry blonde, which she kept cut in a short hairstyle his father had often called “sassy”. She was wearing black slacks and a black and white striped sweater that made her blonde hair stand out even more.
“To tell you the truth, when I saw her, I thought I was seeing her mother Sofia. She looks like her twin. I know it’s formality to check her, but like I told her, anyone looking at her can tell she’s Tom and Sofia’s hatchling.”
“I told her about having her markings checked and about the engagement ceremony.”
“I already know. She asked me about it. I told her what to expect in both cases.”
“Don’t you think that’s something her mother should have had the privilege of doing?”
“Well, Jacques, what would you have me do, stick my head in the sand and let the woman go into this thing blind? I laid it out for her. I wanted her to know why it’s important for her to be checked tonight, especially with Henri and Diane Dubois present. I swear that Diane Dubois can be like a barracuda at times. She’s your mate, so she needs to get used to the tedious formalities of being the mate of a sovereign bull. And one of those tedious formalities is dealing with ‘the mouth of the south.’ It’s not always easy being the sovereign cow of the Lafayette pod.”
Jacques gave a brief grin at the moniker she’d given to the sovereign cow of the Orleans pod.
“Mom, Angel’s been through a lot in the past few weeks. When I told her about her family, she was happy, but I can tell she was upset too. I don’t want her worrying about…”
“She’s tougher than you think, Jacques.”
“I know, but she wasn’t raised in the bayou, she doesn’t know our rules and traditions. She might not even choose to be mated to me.”
Jacques said the last part of his statement nearly to himself, but his mother’s hearing was just as good as his.
“Not choose to be mated! She doesn’t have a choice. She’s your mate! You and I both know full well what will happen if the two of you don’t mate. You have from February fourteenth to March first. That’s it.”
Jacques knew the stakes. There was a very strong possibility his family could lose their sovereignty if he and Angel didn’t mate.
“I know what’ll happen, but I won’t force her. She has to be willing or…”
“Or what? I’ll see my grave before I let that slimy bull, Philip Boucher from the Acadia pod, reign sovereign over the Lafayette pods. It’s bad enough your father allowed him to sit in Acadia as sovereign in the first place.”
“Well, it was either that or continue to fight him. We’ve been battling them for nearly a decade, and it hasn’t done any good. Better to call a truce than to keep losing shifters. There used to be hundreds of thousands of us in the U.S. and now look at us, we number less than one hundred and fifty thousand. Since Katrina, it’s important that we stick together, and that included making a truce with Boucher.”
Jacques stood his ground. He didn’t like Philip Boucher nor did he trust him, but his father always said it was better to keep your enemies close.
“Nobody knows how devastating that hurricane was better than me, but that man’s certifiable.”
“Let me guess, we must be talking about Philip Boucher.”
Jacques watched his brother Charlie walked into the room. He was just a bit smaller than Jacques and had long, dark brown hair. His attitude was playful and laid back. They always joked that Charlie was a lover not a fighter. He was the fun loving joker of their family. His mate had been one of the ones who’d lost their lives in Katrina. They hadn’t had a chance to get engaged. Charlie seemed to have taken it well, but Jacques saw loneliness in him every now and then.
“You guessed right. That man…”
Jacques’s mother didn’t get a chance to finish because Charlie spun her around and gave her a big hug and noisy kisses. Jacques watched in amusement as he teased her out of her tirade.
“You were saying.”
“Charlie, you know good and well I can’t remember a thing when you act like a clown.”
“Good. We only need good thoughts for tonight. How’s our guest?”
“Resting,” his mother offered.
“She looks just like Sofia but with Thomas’s dimples. She’s very pretty.”
“Looks like you lucked out, Jacques.” Charlie slapped palms with him and gave him a half-hug.
“Mom’s right, she’s a beauty, but I’m just a bit worried that all of this is going to be too much.”
“Don’t worry, bro, she’s with family now.”
Charles patted him on the shoulder in reassurance.
“He’s right. We won’t let anything go wrong tonight. The bayou takes care of its own.”
Angel checked her appearance in the mirror once more. To say she was a nervous wreck was an understatement. She’d purchased the red sheath dress because it reminded her of poppies and Chinese New Year. It was one of those dresses that you walked past the store window and then turned back around to stare at. It was definitely more daring then the neutral-colored clothing that made up the bulk of her wardrobe. However, since she’d donned the clingy, raw silk number, she’d second, third, and fourth guessed her appearance. On top of her nerves, she’d begun to perspire; the ceiling fan was on high, and the room she’d been assigned to hadn’t been overly warm to begin with.
Angel dabbed her upper lip, trying not to wipe off the thin layer of face powder she’d put on for her first meeting with her parents. Her stomach grumbled, and for the first time, she wished she’d been able to eat more than a handful of oysters and a bite or two of crab cake for lunch. At the time her appetite had vanished under nerves over meeting her parents and the engagement ceremonies. Now, it had returned with a vengeance. She placed her hand over her stomach in longing. Would it be rude to ask for a snack when dinner would start in thirty minutes?
Without warning, her lower back started tingling. Her hand went to the marking she’d had since birth. The tingle slowly radiated lower, and she clinched her butt cheeks together against the surprisingly pleasurable sensation. What was happening to her? She was sitting down on the bed when there was a knock on her door. Angel quickly shot to her feet.
“Yes.” Her voice was gravelly. She cleared her throat and tried again.
“Yes.”
“It’s me, Jacques.”
Angel did one more mirror check. Her hair was combed to the side with curls cascading down to just past her left shoulder. She wore red lipstick to match her dress, along with a pair of simple diamond studs her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday. Satisfied, she went and opened the dark mahogany door. Jacques stood on the other side, filling the entire door way. With her heels on, she could nearly look him in the eye. He looked at her with an honest appreciation that put her at ease.
“You look beautiful. What happened to your glasses?”
“Contacts, and thanks, you’re not so bad yourself.”
And he wasn’t. Jacques wore a well-tailored black suit with a crisp white shirt and a red tie nearly the same color as her dress.
“We look like we should be taking prom pictures or something. Either there’s a camera in this room, or you read my mind.” She raised one brow while motioning to their outfits.
Jacques shrugged. “Mates have a connection. Ordinarily you would have been raised around me, so we would have been connected in
every
way by now.”
The way he said “
every
way” made her clinch her thighs. The tingling along her spine started again.
There wasn’t much she could say to that. Heck, she didn’t know if she could even speak after that.
Jacques looked at her for a moment before holding up his arm for her to take.
“Your parents arrived early. I figured you all might want some privacy before the Dubois arrive.”
Panic, sheer and utter panic raced through her. She couldn’t even name the emotions. Her hand again went to her stomach to calm the butterflies there. Without words, Jacques placed his hands on her hips and pulled her toward him into a hug. His strong arms closed around her and he rubbed her back. Angel’s arms went around his neck as she leaned in and accepted his support and comfort.
This time, it was she who probed at the recesses of his mind, asking for entrance. When she felt his conscious give way, she uttered the only words she could.