“And you establish it with a ritual?” I asked. “A ritual around food?”

“No. There is a ritual, but it’s mostly a celebration. When the bond is locking into place, it is at its most intense. The shifters involved become unfit for society, to put it mildly. They become much too possessive. They’ll violently defend their mate over the smallest of grievances. So we have a celebration when the shifters are entering this final phase, and then we send them into the woods on their own. They get to celebrate their bond, reveling in each other, and everyone else gets some peace.”

“So then, how do you…establish a bond? Magic? A spell?”

“I’ve never had to explain this to an outsider,” Kingsley told Austin. “It’s surprisingly difficult.” He poured himself more wine and took a deep breath. “First, you don’t choose a mate. Not the kind of mate we’re talking about. Shifters can get married without ever experiencing the mating bond. Or you can start dating someone, and bam, you slip into the mating bond and forever knocks on your door before you really even know the person. Usually, though, it’s somewhere in the middle. You meet someone, you get to know them, and you gradually slip into this long slide of mating. It’s basically falling in love.”

“It is falling in love,” Austin said, delivering the white porcelain dish in front of me, the sugary top browned to perfection. He laid down a cloth napkin and placed a spoon on top. “Sometimes you fall in love gradually, and sometimes all at once. The mating bond happens when two souls unite, and there can be no other.”

“But you choose who you fall in love with,” I said, cracking into the surface of the crème brûlée. I loved that sound.

“Do you?” Kingsley asked, picking up his newly delivered spoon.

“Well, you choose to date them, then like them, and then it grows from there.”

“Which is usually how mating works. For shifters, at any rate. I have no idea what it’s like for gargoyles.”

I told them what little I knew from Mr. Tom.

“Probably a very similar setup to shifters.” Kingsley scooped up some of his dessert. “But you don’t choose. You don’t will the bond to come. It’s a natural process your animal mostly decides. It happens or it doesn’t. You feel it, and give in to it, or you don’t.”

“What if you don’t give in to it?” I asked, then slid a spoon of custard into my mouth. As with everything Austin had made, the flavors exploded on my tongue. I moaned and put my hand on his arm. When we’d moved inside so he could finish preparing dessert, I’d claimed the middle seat so I could sit next to him.

“Damn, brother, I might have to start moaning too.” Kingsley scooped up more custard. “This is good.” He swallowed before he continued. “Sometimes you do get a bullheaded shifter, usually female—”

Austin laughed. “He just says that because he was the one who tried to dig in his heels.”

“If she digs in her heels,” Kingsley went on with a smile, “then it might never happen. But I’ve never heard of anyone strong enough to resist forever. Still, nothing can force one person to stay with another. If two people are bonded and one of them leaves, they’ll feel each other, always, but some people don’t want the settled life. They prefer to stay solo.”

I stopped with the spoon nearly to my mouth and looked at Austin. “Is that what happened with you and Destiny? You told me you thought she’d be your mate.”

“I thought it would happen between us, yes”—his lush lips closed over the spoon, and I couldn’t help but watch—“but now I realize it was never going to happen.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

He shrugged, daintily loading the end of his spoon. A big, strong man, still in his apron, dainty with his dessert. It stoked my desire to impossible levels.

“Because I’m older now,” he said. “Wiser. If I found my mate, I would never leave her. I would always protect her. Nothing would tear me away from her.”

The pressure on my chest made it hard to breathe. Hard to even think. His cobalt eyes burned with fire and determination, and my heart and core had started to throb in tandem.

“The good news, for those that are a lee-tle wary about commitment, is that it usually doesn't happen all at once. It is a slide,” Kingsley said, tilting his dish and scraping it clean with his spoon. “You’ll feel it happening, and everything might seem a little topsy-turvy, but you’ll have time to get used to it. As someone who got used to it very slowly, I know this is true.”

I finished off my crème brûlée and immediately looked over at Austin’s to see if I could steal a little more. Finding half a dish, I smiled and leaned over with my spoon out.

“Are you going to eat all of that?” I asked.

“Take whatever you want, milady,” he answered softly.

Smiling, I tried to take a dainty spoonful, but I scooped up more than I’d planned and couldn’t find it in me to feel guilty. It was simply that good.

“Before you ask,” Kingsley said, standing with his dish and walking around to the sink, “I don’t know if there is one special mate for everyone, decided by Fate, or a few for everyone and you just go with the first one you find.”

“I’d like to think there’s only one.” Austin’s deep voice rumbled, and shivers skated down my body. “I’d like to think Fate plays a hand in bringing us to our perfect mate, even if the road to finding her is long and lonely.”

The moment reduced down to him and me, and I felt the power of it beating in my chest. The need to clutch on to him and never let go.

I wondered if the situation was the same for female gargoyles. Was there one possible mate or more?

Was this slide Kingsley had described what was happening to me?

“You never got a look at the upstairs.” Austin led me away from the kitchen and Kingsley, who was doing dishes. “Would you like to? Or maybe we can sit out on the deck with a glass of wine. Of course, I can take you home if you’d prefer.”

I slipped my arm around his middle, sighing when he pulled me into his arms. “You have a deck upstairs, don’t you? I thought I saw a wraparound one up there.”

“I do, yes. Would you like to sit up there?”

“Yes, please.”

Austin nodded and opened a fresh bottle of wine. Apparently Kingsley would be drinking the rest of the other one. Grabbing two glasses, Austin guided me upstairs.

“There is a second living room up here, for overflow or if people want to get away from each other. Then a few guestrooms.” Austin stopped next to the living room, similar to the one downstairs but without a fireplace.

“Your room?”

A wave of heat and nervousness washed back and forth across the link, both of us feeling the same heady combination.

“This way, please, milady.” He gestured me down the hall.

I started forward with a dopey grin. “It’s so corny when you call me milady, and I love it so much.”

I chuckled as we reached a flat storm-gray wall with a plant standing in front of it and a large painting of the deep woods, with moss-covered rocks and swooping branches. He looked down at me, as though waiting for me to comment on it.

“Really lovely. It reminds me of Ivy House.”

With a smile, he stepped around the plant and disappeared behind the wall.

“What the…” I put out my hands and stepped forward, draping the wall with magic to see if I could decipher the spell. Upon closer inspection, though, there wasn’t a spell. It was a trick of the eye. The oversized painting clung to the edge of a wall that ended, the plant positioned in such a way that it further masked the opening. A small hallway beyond it led to a door, which opened into a spacious room at the back of the house. The setup was very similar to my bedroom in Ivy House. Instead of a table by the window, though, he had a love seat and a table set off to the side around the fireplace.

“No TV?” I followed him to the veranda, where a table was set up to look out over the darkness. The sky stretched out above us, the sea of stars infinite and breathtaking.

“I don’t actually watch much TV.”

“Hence why you are so good at your hobbies.”

He set the glasses and bottle onto the table and pulled out a chair for me. He pulled a wine opener from his pocket and sat before opening the bottle.

“Is the hidden doorway in case someone tries to attack?” I asked, leaning back and sighing.

“Yes. The wraparound porch gives me a range of places to jump down if I need to escape. I never trust wards. Mages put them up—they can pull them down.”

“Too bad you don’t have a magical house to protect you.”

“Yes. Too bad.”

He poured our wine and then held his glass up. “To you finally getting to know my brother. I hope you don’t ghost me.”

I laughed and clinked my glass with his. “I like Kingsley, actually. I don’t think he’s as chill and balanced as you always said, but he’s good people.”

“He is chill and balanced for an alpha, trust me.”

“Not as much as you.”

He frowned at me. “That’s probably because I’ve always allowed myself to smile with you. To laugh. I’m only newly an alpha.”

“Yeah, why is that? You never gave me that hard alpha shtick—even the hard shifter shtick—like Kingsley and all his people do. Like you do to most of the people in your bar.”

He was quiet for a long while. “Probably because I knew, even then.”

“Knew what?”

His gaze was heavy on me. “I haven’t wanted to smile and laugh for…so long. Since I met Destiny, but before that, too. The stigma of my father has always hung over me. The bad apple. The black sheep. I’ve always feared that I’d become the thing my mother dreaded. Even when I was a kid, I was too rough with play, too aggressive. At one point, I thought power was the only answer for taming my beast. After I left home, I decided it was solitude.