Heart hammering, I crushed my face against his bare chest and took a deep breath, grounding myself with his scent.

I pulled back, not looking up at him. “I just want-I need to sleep.”

A slight tensing of his shoulder muscles, as if fighting the urge to prod. After a moment, he relaxed, pulled me against him and, eventually, I fell back to sleep.

I woke up the next morning to the sound of Clay’s snoring. I eased out of bed so I wouldn’t disturb him, then leaned over to brush my lips across the top of his curls, too light a touch to wake him.

As I headed downstairs, I heard Jeremy in the kitchen. When I smelled what he was cooking, I knew he’d heard me wake up screaming last night. I leaned against the wall and cursed my performance, knowing even as I did that it wouldn’t be the last. No matter how embarrassed and guilty I felt the next morning, in the darkness of night all my fears and insecurities came out to play.

I took a deep breath, pushed open the kitchen door and looked at the tottering stacks of pancakes and sliced ham on the counter.

“You don’t need to do this,” I said.

Jeremy fished the bottle of maple syrup from the back of the fridge. “The plates are already in the sunroom. Can you carry the pancake platter for me?”

“Really, you don’t need to do this. I’m being silly, and what I need is a swift kick in the rear, not comfort food.”

“What you need is baby furniture,” he said, handing me the platter. “Plus a nursery to put it in, but I thought we’d start with the furniture and choose the decor from there. I’m sure Syracuse has fine stores, but I propose a trip to New York. We’ll spend a couple of days, stay with Antonio and Nick, make a trip out of it. We’ll leave today.”

I shook my head. “I’m not ready, Jer.”

“We’ll go whenever you are. We have to wait for Clay anyway, although if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to leave him with Nick while we go into the city and shop.”

“I don’t mean-I’m not ready for a nursery. If something went wrong-I’m not ready.”

Jeremy laid down the ham and looked at me. “That’s why this is exactly what you need. Everything is going fine, and the best way for you to recognize and accept that is to keep moving forward, making plans and preparing.” A quarter-smile. “At the rate you’re progressing, we’d better get cracking, or we may end up with a baby and no place to put him. We’ll be fashioning diapers out of dishcloths.”

I tried to return the smile, but my lips wouldn’t budge. I looked away. “I can’t. Soon, I promise. Just…not yet.”

The kitchen door opened before I got to it. Clay popped his head in.

“Look who smelled breakfast,” I said.

As I brushed past him, I dipped my hand to his and squeezed it. An awkward apology for last night.

“I’ll take that ham,” he said to Jeremy.

I didn’t turn, but I knew more than theplatter passed between them. After I’d fallen asleep again last night, they’d probably snuck downstairs to devise “distract Elena” plans. Option one: baby shopping in New York. Jeremy would have signaled Clay that the idea had been torpedoed, so they’d have to find a way to segue to option two over breakfast.

I turned into the sunroom and put the pancake platter down, then reached for the coffee urn and started filling mugs.

“We should invite Paige up,” Clay said as he rounded the doorway. “For a visit.”

“No segue required,” I murmured. “Silly me.”

I exchanged his ham platter for a steaming mug of coffee, and sat down to fix my own. Decaf of course. Every bit of coffee in the house was decaf. I tried telling the guys, really, you can drink regular coffee in front of me, but they were having none of it. If I sacrificed, they sacrificed. A communal pregnancy. It was starting to drive me a little bonkers.

“Invite Paige here? Your desperation is showing.”

He shrugged and slid into his seat. “We’ve had her up before.”

“At my invitation. With you gritting your teeth the whole time.”

“I was never gritting my teeth. I’m fine with Paige. And if Lucas can make it…All the better. Maybe they’ll be working on a case, something to get your mind-Something to talk about.”

I’d rather take a trip to Portland to visit them, but I knew that was out of the question. Having Paige here would be nice, and if Lucas came along, Clay would enjoy the distraction just as much as I did.

Lucas had filled a space in Clay’s life that I’d never realized had been empty. Logan used to tell me how, when he’d first joined the Pack, Clay would drive him nuts with “lessons,” always showing him how to fight better, train better, Change better. He’d figured it was just Clay’s way of reminding Logan that he was the newest and youngest member, keeping him in his place.

When I saw Clay with Lucas, I realized there had been more to it than that. Clay had genuinely wanted to teach Logan, to assume the role of mentor to a younger werewolf. Maybe that was the wolf in him, instinctively wanting to pass on his life experience to the next generation. In the Pack, though, there was no next generation…not yet. With Lucas, Clay had found a substitute after Logan ’s death-if not a werewolf, at least an intelligent, thoughtful young man who not only accepted Clay’s counsel, but sought it out.

Most of Clay’s ideas for dealing with problem mutts weren’t the kind of thing Lucas would ever use on rogue sorcerers. He didn’t have the personality-or the stomach-for that. Yet he was astute enough to take Clay’s teachings and pick out the principles that worked for him. In seeing them together, I’d realized that Clay’s desire for a child had to do with more than pleasing me. For the first time, I’d seen him in the role of father…and not been scared shitless by the image.