Page 62 of Witch Unexpected
She clasped her hands together. “You look like an angel with the sun lighting up your hair like that. I’d love to paint you sometime.”
“You paint?” I wanted to kick myself. “Of course you paint, otherwise why say you wanted to paint me.”
Her eyes twinkled with humor. “I do believe my boys will adore you.”
“Your boys?”
“Leif, Rune, and Torsten, of course.” She pursed her lips. “Although Tor can be difficult. He’ll come around, though. You’ll see to that.” She was talking about them as if they were her sons.
“I’m so confused.”
“About?”
“They’re not your sons.”
Her eyes were sad. “No. Not biologically, but they’re my mates’ sons, and so they’re mine. I love them, and they love me, and soon they’ll love you.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that. I’m doing this anchor thing to make sure the people I already love are kept safe. I don’t plan to fall for shifters I can’t have a proper relationship with, especially not three of them. I’m a one-man woman.”
“That’s exactly what I thought before it happened,” Charlotte said. “But the mate bond is strong. It’s unavoidable and inescapable. You will be drawn to each other.”
She didn’t know me, and she didn’t know about Jasper, but she looked pale, tired, and weak, and I wasn’t about to argue with her. I smiled and nodded.
“Ah, you’re humoring me,” she said. “No worries. Time will show you the truth. The connection you’ll have with them is primal. How much do you know about shifters, Cora?”
“Enough.”
“So, you know they have a mating instinct? A mate their wolf connects with.”
“Yes. Theirwolfmate.”
“That’s right. But when the alpha’s bind to you they voluntarily give up their chance of finding a wolf mate and choose you as their mate.”
My pulse spiked. “What the fuck?”
“How else do you think we’d benefit from the miasma they produce? The anchor becomes their mate.” Once again, there was sadness in her eyes. “And it’s impossible not to love them.”
I struggled to wrap my mind around what she was telling me. “But… They can never consummate their love for you,withyou…”
“We’ve become inventive over the years.” She gave me a cheeky grin.
“Well, I’d expect so. Bloody hell woman, and what happens when I take over as anchor?”
Her smile dropped. “Then I’ll be free, and so will they.”
“I don’t get it…”
“They’ll no longer feel mated to me, and then… Then we’ll see how far our love can take us before…”
“Before what?”
“Before they each find a female wolf to satisfy their primal mating instincts.”
Oh shit. “You think they’ll stop loving you.”
“I only know what’s happened in the past. The last anchor died a year after I took over. They say her heart gave up, but I know now that it broke. It broke when her mates moved on and found wolf mates. It broke when the bond they shared was taken from her.”
Fuck. There was no way this was going to happen to me. “Seems to me the best way forward is to keep a guarded heart.”
