Page 68 of Wild Heart

“You’ll make beautiful babies,” someone else said, and Natalie only laughed, hand slipping protectively over her stomach.

From across the clearing, Mason stood by the edge of the trail that led to the wolf enclosures, holding a mug of cider and watching her.

She moved with such grace through the people, her smile real, her eyes soft. Every once in a while, her hand would catch at her belly, almost unconsciously, like she was reminding herself that yes, it was true. Yes, something sacred had begun.

Mason’s chest swelled with a quiet, reverent pride. He had known love before, weaker versions of it. Fleeting and shallow. Bright enough to warm him briefly, but never strong enough to hold through the dark. But this? This was different. Natalie was different. She had dug through his silences and found the man beneath. Not just the rehabilitator, not just the loner in a cabin with birds and wolves, but the man who wanted a home. A future.

His thoughts were interrupted by the soft tap of a cane behind him. He turned to find Olivia, her silver-streaked hair braided into a crown across her head, her knit shawl pulled tight over her shoulders. She looked at him with an expression that was neither hard nor fragile, just real.

“You two pulled it off,” she said, looking toward the clearing. “This place, this day. I wasn’t sure we’d ever get here.”

Mason exhaled a quiet laugh. “Neither was I.”

They stood in silence for a moment, watching Natalie lean over a pie table, laughing with a woman from town.

“She’s good at country life,” Olivia murmured.

“She was born for it,” Mason said.

There was a long pause. Then Olivia spoke again, more gently.

“I want you to know… I don’t carry any of it anymore.”

He looked at her, uncertain.

“The past,” she clarified. “The mistakes. The half-truths. I let them go, Mason. You don’t owe me anything.”

His shoulders eased. “I never wanted to hurt you.”

“You didn’t,” Olivia said. “Not really. We had history, sure. But it wasn’t ever meant to be this. Not what you and Natalie have. You were always my friend and that’s all I wanted fr om you, still do.”

Mason swallowed the knot in his throat. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.” She gave him a small smile, then added, “You loveher the way people pray to be loved. I’d thought I’d found that, but I was wrong, and maybe I was a fool to think nobody else would match up, and if they did they’d break my heart again. If I could go back in time and give my young self some advice, I’d tell me to take a chance, be brave. Kinda like you have been with Natalie.”

“There’s still time, Liv. Don’t write love off just yet.” Mason turned to his friend and smiled, receiving a raised eyebrow in return.

A gust of wind blew through the trees, stirring the lights above them. Somewhere nearby, a child shrieked with delight as two dogs tumbled through the grass.

Olivia reached out, touched Mason’s arm gently. “Be good to her. Keep showing up. That’s all she’ll ever need.”

“I will,” he promised.

She nodded and turned back toward the fire pit where a group was starting to toast marshmallows. Mason lingered a moment longer. Then, cider still in hand, he made his way through the crowd, toward Natalie.

The sky over the sanctuary had turned to burnished gold. Long strands of twilight threaded through the trees, the lights strung above the clearing now flickering gently in the dusk. Laughter had mellowed into something softer. Groups had formed around fire pits, mugs of cider passed between mittened hands, and the fiddlers had slowed their tune to something more wistful, more suited to stories and memories than dancing.

The setting itself, the wild, scarred, breathtaking piece of earth nestled deep in the Colorado mountains seemed to exhale in time with the people who had come to celebrate it. The sanctuary had always been more than a workplace. More than a mission. It was a patchwork refuge, pieced together with raw wood, muddy boots, and the kind of stubborn hope that could only grow in wounded soil.

Along the perimeter, the silhouettes of animal enclosures stood like quiet sentinels, gently lit by lanterns and solar lamps. Inside, owls stirred on their perches, rescued raccoons nested in straw, and one of the older wolves, Ash, with his greying muzzle and pale amber eyes, paced in slow, calm loops as though marking his place in this moment, too.

Pine trees wrapped the clearing like tall guardians, their branches dusted with the last breath of snow. Beneath them, wild sage and curled bracken made their slow emergence from winter’s hold, casting the ground in tones of silver and green. In the distance, the hills rose like folded cloth under the fading sky, their lines softened by shadow.

Natalie stood near the trellis arch Olivia had decorated with pinecones, cedar boughs, and sprigs of mountain laurel, cut from the sanctuary’s own edge trail. The arch stood beside the old barn, now converted into an education center for local schools, and the scent of hay and wood lingered faintly on the breeze.

She turned her face to the sky, then to the crowd. The ring on her finger caught the amber light like it was stitched into the landscape itself. She didn’t know when Mason had approached. She only felt it, a familiar hush settling over her body, the unmistakable sensation of him nearby.

“You’ve been glowing all day,” he said softly, his breath warm against her ear.

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