“Alright. I think that’s enough for today. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m tired. Let’s go finish off some of those leftovers all these folks left us and get the two of you sorted for bed. Sorry, it’s the floor tonight, but it’s cooled off a bit, so I’ll build you a fire to sleep by. It’ll be cozy unless it sparks the air bed.”
Clara raised her eyebrows at him, but Rowanne burst out laughing, adding to the awfulness of his joke, “Then we really would be flamers.”
“Oh, good grief,” Clara said, leaving the room as she and Malcolm continued to chuckle.CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVENAutumn
“You need to rest,” Autumn told Malcolm a few days later.
“Rest? Why? I’m fine,” he said.
“In the past week, you’ve helped with eight babies, cleaned and painted the storage room, built furniture, and run all over the place to accomplish a million errands while I sat here doing nothing at home.”
“Having an appendectomy and eight babies, then taking care of them after the fact, wasn’t enough for you to do?”
“This isn’t about me. It’s about you. I don’t want you frazzling yourself trying to take care of all of us, including Clara and Rowanne. I’m sure they appreciate it, but you’ve got them sorted, and you’ve got us sorted. Take a break.”
“I’m fine. Really, I am. I’m in my element.”
“I just don’t want you overdoing things.”
“I’m not. I promise.”
“If you say so. I’ve got my eye on you, mister.”
“Yeah? Like what you see?” he teased, pressing his body against hers.
“I do.”
“How much?”
“More than I can show you for the next few weeks,” she laughed.
Malcolm laughed. She knew that having eight babies so soon into their relationship put a damper on the incredible sex they had been having. They were currently relegated to oral sex, which was hardly anything he was going to complain about, but a far cry from their usual antics. Usually, shifters healed faster from childbirth, but her recovery was a little longer with the loss of an organ.
He kissed her on the cheek and headed down the hallway. Autumn watched him for a moment and then followed, her head full of thoughts about whether he might lose interest in her now that their life wasn’t full of fun and adventure. They had met under pretty intense circumstances and though she appreciated the calm after the storm, she feared he wasn’t as enthralled.
“You want to look at these plans with me?” he asked.
“You’ve already started on the house?”
“Sort of. It’s only a rough sketch, but I took what we’ve talked about here and there and put it together as a starting point.”
“I’m not sure there are enough bathrooms,” she told him, pointing to the six rooms noted with as in the center.
“Me either,” he said with a serious face.
“My god, I’m kidding. We’re living in a house with only two bathrooms, and now you want six?”
“Well, right now, we have the master bath in our bedroom and a guest bathroom down the hall. It works fine because you and I share a bathroom. Clara and Rowanne are content to share the other bathroom, and we rarely have guests, but soon, we’re going to have eight kids fighting to get in bathrooms. We need lots of them.”
“A fair point. Okay, so six bathrooms then.”
“Yes, a master bath for us. A locker-room style shower room for the boys. Joined bathrooms for the girls, with a shower and toilet on each end connected to their rooms and a tub/sink area in the center. A single guest bath and two half baths as overflow for any diarrhea outbreaks.”
“Gross,” she replied, wrinkling up her nose.
“Welcome to parenthood,” he joked.
“Sound sexy,” she groaned.
“It can be,” he told her, kissing her playfully on the cheek before looking back at the house.
“This thing looks huge.”
“Six thousand square feet.”
“That’s crazy! Can we afford all that?”
“Yes, I can do a lot of the work myself and there are plenty of members of the pack who will help me. We aren’t on a timetable. I figure we have a solid year or so before we need to be in it, and it’s spread out across three floors so that we don’t have to take up most of the property with a house. Plus, I’m considering building a basement.”
“A basement? For what?”
“Same as the cellar at the cabin: extra food storage, a wine cellar, maybe some space to just sit and veg out for either of us when these kids turn into teens and we get tired of hiding in our room from them.”
“I may be ready for that by the time we get it built,” she laughed.
“So, what do you think?”
“It looks good. What are we going to do when all these kids grow up, move out, and we’re stuck in all this empty space alone?”