“And then one night, when I was wallowing in self-pity and one too many drinks, someone knocked on the door. A young shifter girl had been found in a known drug den, next to the body of a dead prostitute. It was the government’s law at the time that any shifter children found abandoned were to be taken directly to the nearest alpha, which was me.
“I’d just lost my mate. I had no idea how to help the little girl they shoved at me, but I took one look into her brown eyes, and I knew that she needed me and I needed to get my head out of my ass to be there for her. I could’ve given her to someone in the pack to raise, but I decided that she’d been brought to me for a reason. So when the government said I could apply to be her foster parent, I did it immediately.
“A few years later, I found a young wolf male who had escaped being killed during a takeover coup with his former pack. My daughter, Whisper, wanted him to be her brother, so I took Kayne in, too. And a little later, an elderly couple brought an abandoned wolf male named Kross to me, and I took him in.
“I adopted all three kids when they were teenagers. They still live in Beyton. Whisper is mated to three hyena-shifter males, and my sons are wooing their hyena-shifter mate right now, as well as trying out being alpha for the next month.”
“I didn’t know that it was a government law for alphas to be responsible for abandoned children.”
“It’s because they don’t understand. They think because we’re shifters that we automatically care about all other shifters, but it doesn’t necessarily work that way. It worked out well for us, though. I got a family I didn’t know that I needed, and they got a protective father figure to watch over them.”
“They never found anyone from Whisper’s family?”
“Actually, last fall she went to a hyena gathering in Pennsylvania and found her mates, and also her three hyena brothers. She’d been kidnapped at age two, and her family lived in Maryland, not too far from where I live. She was reunited with her family, but she chose to stay in Beyton. She teaches music at a local studio, her mates work at the bar, and she and my sons play in a band at the bar.”
“It sounds like you made a wonderful home for them, that’s so sweet. I’m sorry you lost your mate. That must’ve been so hard.”
“It was, but I always hoped that I’d be able to make peace with that loss, and because of my kids, I could.”
“Is that why you came to the resort?”
He nodded. It felt good to share his past with Miracle. “It was time. My kids are grown and mated and starting their families. I knew that none of the pack females were a match for me, and I didn’t want to just randomly pick someone and hope that things turned out well. My wolf wanted to find our other half. To be honest, I wasn’t sure it was possible to have a second chance at love, but I’m sitting here with you right now, knowing that you’re exactly what I needed.”
Her eyes glistened, and she inhaled shakily. “Oh, Mack. You’re just what I needed, too.”
Cupping her face, he kissed her gently. Then he picked up the orange, dug his thumb past the rind, and began to peel it. “That was my backstory; it’s your turn now.”
He dropped the peel onto the plate and split the orange in two, giving her half. She peeled a section off and chewed it slowly. “Do you know anything about dragons?”
“Not a thing,” he admitted. He’d never met any, and couldn’t ever remember even hearing about one, let alone a group of them.
She smiled. “My parents were in their fifties when I was born. They’d tried for years to have offspring, but although neither were sterile, it just never happened. When my mom finally became pregnant, they said I was their miracle – so that’s where my name came from. Right away, the clan thought something was wrong with me because my eyes are different colors. It’s an abnormal trait. The elders were all watching me, like they were afraid I was defective. Then when I didn’t shift into my dragon at the traditional age of twelve, they were certain that I would never shift. I did, finally, at eighteen.”
“Did they apologize for being assholes?”
He didn’t even know the dragon elders, but anyone who thought something was wrong with a child just because she happened to have bi-color eyes wasn’t a good person.
“Of course not,” she said, shaking her head with a chuckle. “That would mean they were wrong, and the elders are never wrong. My shift is screwy, too. I have odd-colored scales; they’re dark green with splotches of brown and black, which isn’t in my family’s color line. My mother is a beautiful jade green, and my father’s scales are steel blue. No dragons in my clan’s history have ever had multi-colored scales like mine.”
“Did they try to exile you from your clan?”
She didn’t say anything for a few moments while she finished the orange half. She didn’t meet his gaze, which told him that she was embarrassed about whatever had come after she shifted.