Total pages in book: 254
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 240032 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1200(@200wpm)___ 960(@250wpm)___ 800(@300wpm)
The question was poised on my tongue, ready. Two of them actually.
“Is he?” Franklin was the one who asked, his voice slightly high.
Was he what?
“Without a doubt.” The winking man chuckled with delight when Duncan leaned his head into his hand. “He is utterly and completely a hellhound.”
My donut was a hellhound?
The fact he’d answered just like that… it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because he’d said hellhound, and my mouth had dropped open, and a part of me couldn’t believe it, but a bigger part of me could. That had been on my list of beings I’d thought were a possibility. But there hadn’t been enough information about them to know for sure, and this man had just said without a doubt.
Duncan was a hellhound.
From the little I had read about them, there were stories in which hellhounds were legends that guarded the underworld. I could have sworn I might have read that in other folklore, they were rumored to be protectors of women. But the one idea I could remember to be the most common myth about hellhounds, was that they were highly feared, epic beings.
But there wasn’t a single scary thing about my boy.
The closest thing to hell he knew was getting a bath.
I couldn’t believe it. My Duncan donut was a hellhound.
And said hellhound turned to me over his shoulder, and he winked. “Yes,” he told me.
I stared at him. “Did you know what you are?” I wanted to think I sounded calm, but there was probably zero chance that was the actual case. I might as well have sucked a helium balloon dry.
Those ridiculously cute eyelashes covered Dunky’s ruby eyes, his ears twitching. “Love” was the answer he decided to go with.
I laughed in freaking awe. “That’s not a yes or a no, Duncan.”
The tail that had gotten us into this new stage of our life swayed. “Yes.”
Yes!
Before I could ask anything else, or celebrate this absolute miracle of a discovery, three different phones went off at the same time, and Ema, Franklin, and Henri pulled theirs out. The three of them frowned at whatever was on the screen. I’d learned that they, along with the ranch’s security, all had access to the cameras at the gate, and they were notified when someone was there.
Franklin lifted his head first, his normally sneaky face formed into this super irritated one that he aimed at the Alaskan leader.
Ilya, the firebreather according to Henri, crossed his arms over his chest and raised a dark eyebrow. “Is he at the gate?” he asked Franklin in a flat, unamused tone.
My biological uncle glared. “You brought him with you?” he spat out so out of character that even Ema looked at him strangely.
Beside me, Henri tipped his phone to give me a view of it. On the screen, the camera angle showed a man in maybe his fifties, partially hanging out of a driver side door, jabbing at the intercom keypad over and over again. There was nothing that special about him; he looked like a normal man in a T-shirt, being obnoxious with the way he kept pressing the keypad aggressively, like he didn’t understand why it wasn’t working.
“Is that who I think it is?” Henri asked from above my head.
Who did….
No.
My head snapped up.
“He wasn’t invited,” Ilya was quick to explain with a sneer. “He was on the same flight and wouldn’t say a word about where he was going, like we couldn’t piece his plans together.”
My uncle let out a curse I was surprised he knew in the first place.
Ilya raised an eyebrow but basically shrugged with his eyes. “There’s not much I’m unwilling to do, but I’m not arguing with him. He’s gotten more stubborn every year.”
I blinked and met my favorite set of amber eyes.
Henri’s forehead was furrowed. “I’m getting real sick of people showing up without an invitation,” he growled. I pointed at myself, and his expression instantly changed. “Not you, Cricket.”
I smiled, then I wiped it off in a way that he’d be proud of. We had business to get to. “Is that your brother?” I straight-up asked Franklin.
The dream god had already stuffed his phone back into the little case at his hip, and based off the energy he was radiating, this was the angriest I’d ever seen him. “It is.” His eyes narrowed from behind his glasses. “I didn’t invite him, Nina.”
I believed him and said that.
“He’s seemed real melancholic since your visit, Franklin,” one of the hellhound men admitted, the one who didn’t wink. “He’s constantly pacing. It’s quite irritating.”
“He overheard me talking to my second about the daughter of a fertility goddess mating with the Great Wolf,” Ilya said casually in a way that didn’t come across as all that apologetic. Especially when he knew he was my DNA donor. Did he have to stir shit up?