Quickdraw Slow Burn (Battle of the Bulls #3) - T. S. Joyce Page 0,53

mouse-brown hair fell backward toward her bun. “The person who did that to you. Did you make sure he will never do that to anyone again?”

Annabelle shrugged. She didn’t give details to strangers, but Robin smiled like she knew the answer. “Good. Do you want to see him?”

“Quickdraw?”

Robin shook her head. “No, the baby.”

Annabelle sat up straighter in the hospital bed, her heart kicking into a gallop. “Yes,” she rushed out on a breath.

She’d already heard the heartbeat. Heard it with her own ears. Robin even had saved the audio file and emailed it to her. She’d opened it on her phone and listened to it over and over with Raven, so she knew he was okay. Her little moodude. She just had this feeling her boy would be a bull instead of a wolf. Or maybe she wanted him to be like Quickdraw.

Was he disappointed? Would he run?

Those questions played in an endless loop. Today had been endless, too. She could sleep for three years.

Raven couldn’t stop smiling. Not since Annabelle had told her about the baby. Annabelle had a face filled with stitches, looked like she’d been through hell and back, and Raven wasn’t even concerned. Nope. She had been shopping online for baby clothes. Little baby boy was going to be spoiled rotten before Annabelle even finished growing him.

Robin squirted warm gel on her belly and placed a wand there, moved it around until she found a blob in a blob. “There he is. Look, you can see his little heart beating.”

On the grainy screen, it looked like a little person already with little paddle hands, a head, and little rounded tummy. Oh, the cute little tummy!

“You’re a wolf?” Robin asked.

Annabelle nodded. It’s all she could do. She couldn’t take her eyes off the little baby on the gritty black and white screen.

“Then your gestation will be about half of a human’s. That’s why he’s so developed already.”

“Well, that and you should see his daddy,” Raven muttered. “Heaven help Annabelle when she goes into labor. He’ll probably come out looking like a two-year-old. And when he hits his growth spurts? Good luck feeding him. His father is roughly the size of Mount Rushmore.”

Raven was teasing, but Annabelle couldn’t help the grin on her face at the visual. “I won’t mind.”

In this moment, she was falling in love.

Her emotions got to her, and her eyes burned with tears. It was Raven’s fault. When she dragged her eyes off the screen long enough to look at her best friend, Raven was smiling and crying and all emotional, and it tipped Annabelle over the edge, too.

Affectionately, Raven pressed Annabelle’s hand to her cheek as her shoulders shook. “This is amazing, Annabelle,” she whispered thickly. “I can practically feel how happy you are.”

“I’m not a lone wolf anymore,” Annabelle told her. “I’m not alone.”

“No, you’re not.” Raven squeezed her hand. “But you know, Annabelle? You never really were.”

****

Everything was red. It’s all he saw. Everyone was red, and he hated everything. He wanted to kill anyone he saw. Where was she? Where was his?

He couldn’t change into a human to ask. He just had to sit here in this fucking chute, pinned in a small space, while people doctored him with some putrid smelling cleaning shit. He would rather roll in guano than have this crap on him. He smelled like a fucking sterilized mango. Whatever scientist invented this medicine was definitely a woman and probably spent too much of her salary at lotion stores.

Was she okay? His?

He’d never wished to turn back into the man because the man in him was weak. Or so he’d thought before today. His human felt too much and offered too much mercy but, now, after he’d killed all those men to protect his, the bull didn’t hate him quite so much.

He wished he could be human so he could ask where she was. Where was his?

“He’s as good as he’s going to get,” Cheyenne said to Two Shots.

He had a good herd if one ignored their taste in medicine. It was hard to be a badass and smell like a fruit.

The announcers were calling a buck right now, describing it, explaining it to the crowds. He wanted to buck. He wanted to kill something. More somethings.

Someone was messing with his horns. He slammed his head against the chute.

“Cool it, man. We have to clean the blood off before you go out there. There are two more bucks before you’re up.” Two Shots was on