All Chapters of My Step Daddy’s Holimate: Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

144 Chapters

101: A quick one

RONAN’S POVMy lips fused on hers. They were so soft, warm, tasting of salt and sunscreen. It was supposed to be a quick kiss, a brief, affectionate touch but it wasn't. It was a spark, a flicker of flame in dry grass and it ignited instantly everywhere in my body. We both knew it was something we need like oxygen because we have a timer. My hands were on her waist pulling her closer, my body responding with an immediacy that was shocking. Her arms wrapped around my neck, her fingers tangling in my hair pulling me deeper into the kiss.The boat rocked gently beneath us in soothing motion that was so different with the frantic, desperate energy building between us. I could feel the heat of her body through the thin fabric of her bikini along with the the rapid beat of her heart against my chest."Ronan” she gasped, her voice a breathy whisper against my lips. "Someone might see.""Let them” I growled, my hands roaming over her body loving every curve and dip. "I don't care."I backed

102: The cove

WREN’S POVThe cove tired us out in the best way. We got back to the cabin sometime in the mid afternoon, sun warm and salt scented and loose in the way that only a day on open water could make you. My hair was a complete situation. I’d given up on it somewhere around the second hour and let the wind do whatever it wanted.Ronan didn’t seem to mind. He’d been quiet on the ride back. Not the withdrawn quiet of earlier weeks, not the calculating silence that used to sit between us like a wall. This was different. The quiet of someone who was full of something they were holding carefully.I’d sat beside him on the boat rather than up front, close enough that our arms touched and neither of us moved away.We showered separately, which was a whole decision that neither of us acknowledged making. I came out first, dressed in a sundress that was soft and yellow and required very little thought. I sat on the bed towel drying my hair while he showered.The sound of the water running felt like

103: Pregnant?

WREN’S POVWe’d been on the balcony long enough for the stars to start making their arguments known when it hit me like the things my nurse brain had been filing away and politely ignoring for days suddenly deciding to present their findings all at once.The nausea yesterday morning. The exhaustion that had gone deeper than a hangover warranted. The fact that I haven’t seen my period in over a few weeks and thought it was just the change of environment. Also the way certain smells had been hitting differently this past week, the coffee that I used to inhale and now approached carefully, the way the boat fuel at the dock this afternoon had turned my stomach in a way it absolutely should not have. The tenderness that had nothing to do with anything else.I went very still. Camille was mid sentence about something, I’d lost the thread of it and she stopped when she registered that I’d stopped responding.“Wren?”I was counting backwards. “Wren.” Camille sat up, her feet coming off the

104: Final straw

WREN’S POVI practically floated back along the coastal path. The stars were properly out now and I walked fast despite the dark because my body seemed to have more energy than it knew what to do with. I was going to tell him. I hadn’t fully decided that until I was already walking, the decision had made itself somewhere between Camille’s balcony and the front door. I was going to walk into that cabin and tell Ronan Darknight that he was going to be a father and whatever came after that, whatever it meant for tomorrow and the day after and all the days I’d been so carefully not thinking about , I will deal with it once he knew.He deserved to know. And some reckless, hopeful part of me that I hadn’t fully silenced yet wanted to see his face when I told him. I want to know what expression a man wears in the half second before he had time to arrange it into something more careful.The cabin lights were on,spilling out onto the path. I slowed as I got close, catching my breath and pres

105: Leaving

WREN’S POVI didn’t sleep a wink that night. I lay on Camille’s couch through the last hours of the night with my knees pulled to my chest. By four in the morning I’d stopped crying and started planning, which felt like a kind of progress even though the plan itself terrified me more than the crying had.Camille was awake before I heard her move, akready dressed standing in her small kitchen with two mugs of coffee and an expression that told me she hadn’t slept either.“You’re serious about this?” She asked tilting her head. “I’m dead serious.”She set a mug in front of me. “Then we do it properly. Not half-planned or panicked. Properly.”We spent the hour before dawn doing the mechanics of disappearing. Money first. I had savings from four years of scrimping through nursing school, transferred into an account my mother didn’t know existed because some instinct years ago had told me to keep one thing entirely mine. It wasn’t much. It would have to be enough. Camille had more, which

106: Day three

WREN’S POVThree days in and I finally understood something about survival stories that nobody ever mentioned. They were boring in the middle. I don’t mean boring in the sense of nothing happening. Boring in the way your body stopped being able to feel the adrenaline of day one and settled into a grinding. We’d left the boat two islands over, paid the runner the rest of what we owed him and started walking north through territory that belonged to no pack Camille recognized. Which meant nobody’s protection either.The first night we’d found a rock outcropping and called it shelter. The second night, an abandoned fishing shack with half a roof. Tonight, we were somewhere in dense treeline with nothing but the bags on our backs and a fire Camille had built with the determine that suggested she’d looked up how to do it on her phone before we lost signal.“It’s not catching” she muttered, crouched over a pile of sticks that refused to cooperate.“Maybe if you didn’t stack them like a Jen

107: Teeth in dark

WREN’S POVThe sound woke me before I understood what it was it is not the regular snap of a branch or the ordinary rustle of nighttime woods settling into themselves. This is almost like sound a body made when it wasn’t trying to be quiet anymore because it no longer needed to be.I opened my eyes to almost no fire left just embers glowing weak and orange. Camille already sitting bolt upright beside me with her whole body gone rigid.“Wren” she breathed but it was barely sound at all.“I hear it.”Three shapes moved at the edge of what little light remained. Low to the ground md wrong in the particular way that told every instinct in my body this wasn’t pack. Rogues. My stomach dropped somewhere past my knees.“Don’t move” I whispered, though moving felt like the only thing my body wanted to do. Every nerve was screaming to run and running was exactly what would get us killed.Camille’s hand found mine in the dark, gripping hard enough to hurt. The nearest shape lifted its head then

108: Wolf form

WREN’S POVThe pain didn’t feel like pain anymore. It felt like being unmade. Every bone in my body seemed to liquefy and reform in the same terrible breath. My spine bowing forward, something cracking through my shoulder blades that should have made me scream except my throat wasn’t shaped for screaming anymore. My vision went white then red then something entirely without color. I heard myself make a sound that belonged to no human throat.The ground rushed up closer than it should have been. My hands weren’t hands anymore, they are not shaped for gripping branches or holding onto anything at all and for one terrifying moment I understood I was falling and had no way to catch myself.Then four legs hit the ground at once and I didn’t fall. I stood there instead. Everything about the angle of the world had changed, closer to the earth and somehow larger at the same time, my sense of my own body scrambled into something I had no reference point for at all.Ashley wasn’t sleeping any

109: Alpha Victor

WREN’S POVI heard it before I saw it. The weight moving through the trees made the ground itself feel different, some kinf if danger that every animal instinct in my unfamiliar new body recognized instantly as something far above my rank. Camille’s hand tightened where it still rested against my head.“Wren—”The thing that came through the treeline wasn’t a rogue. It was the largest wolf I had ever seen, larger even than the body I currently wore. Black as pitch except for a scattering of silver through its ruff that caught what little light remained. It moved like something that had never once questioned its own right to be exactly where it wanted to be, unhurried even at speed and every line of it radiated an authority that made my new instincts want to drop low to the ground without being told to.I didn’t drop though. Something stubborn in me that might have been Ashley or might have been entirely me, held my ground instead.The massive wolf didn’t slow as it entered the clear

110: Black diamond

WREN’S POVThe territory changed before we even saw the pack house. I felt it in the air first, some shift in pressure that had nothing to do with weather. THE way the trees themselves seemed to stand straighter here like they too understood whose land this was. Then the paths widened, worn smooth by regular use and finally the trees thinned enough to reveal buildings that spoke of old money and older power. The pack house itself rose out of the landscape like it had grown there rather than been builf dark stone and iron detailing. People appeared as we approached. Wolves in human form pausing whatever they’d been doing to watch Victor walk past with two bloodied strangers in tow. Nobody spoke to him or quite met his eyes either.A woman carrying laundry practically flattened herself against a doorframe to let him pass, her gaze dropping to the ground the moment his attention drifted anywhere near her. Two young wolves training in a side yard went completely silent, their sparring f

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