Loving Lachlyn (Ashland Pride Two) by R.E. Butler Page B

too.”
     
     

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 10
     
     
    Jericho looked at his new driver’s license.  Jericho Brio Fallon.   Everything was different except for his first name.  Don’s guy had changed his middle and last names, as well as changing his birthday to make him two years older than his current twenty-six.  The pictures used were taken with Alek’s phone, and his address was a warehouse in southern Indiana somewhere, and Lachlyn’s was somewhere in the northern part of the state.
    Lachlyn was staring at the birth certificate.  Alek spoke quietly to Don, and Jericho moved close to her.  She lifted her eyes, and tears pooled in the pretty blue depths.  “What’s the matter, Sunshine?” he asked with a low voice.
    “Why do you call me Sunshine?”  She sniffled, biting her lower lip to stop the trembling.
    He said, “Because you’ve always been a light in the darkness to me.  Even when we were young and the other kids were afraid of me because of my father, you were always there for me, with a smile or a kind word.”
    “Or half of my lunch,” she said as she smiled.  Tears spilled over her cheeks.
    “You’ll always be the sun in my life, Lachlyn.  I wish that things were different, that you weren’t in danger from my father, and we didn’t have to hide, but I wouldn’t change anything about our past because it’s brought us both to this place.  Now, love, tell me what the tears are for.”  He cupped her face and brushed the tears from her cheeks.
    “It’s weird to see a birth certificate without my parents’ names on it.”
    He looked down at the paper and saw that the forger had given her a maiden name of Jones with parents named Beth and Luke, and had changed her birthday to make her a year younger.
    “When the threat to you is gone, we’ll get your real birth certificate.  Then you can change your name legally when you marry Alek, and I’ll change my name, too.  The only thing that these papers mean is that we’re keeping ourselves safe.  We’re still the same people we were when you came back to the den, except we’re wiser.”
    She put the paper down on the counter and leaned into him.  He hugged her tightly, feeling her tremble.  He glanced over his shoulder and found Alek and Don looking at them.  He motioned with his head to Alek, who joined them quickly, pressing against Lachlyn’s back and gripping her sides.  Her trembling eased quickly, and it was one more way that proved Lachlyn needed two mates, and her other mate was Alek.
    After several quiet minutes, Lachlyn wiggled around between them and faced Alek.  “I saw the marriage license.”
    Alek smiled.  “What a whirlwind romance we had.  Met and married within three days.”
    She laughed.  “I know it’s not real right now, but I like being Mrs. Fallon to my two Fallon men.”
    Jericho nipped her neck and kissed her ear.  “It’s real, Sunshine, just not legal.”
    She shivered.  “I mean legal.  It’s definitely, definitely real.”
    After giving Don ten thousand dollars in cash to give to the forger, they said goodbye and headed home.  Jericho had a million things running through his mind; the foremost was marking Lachlyn formally.
    After dinner on Wednesday night, when Alek was working his night shift, Jericho and Lachlyn went for a walk in the woods behind the boarding house where the pride shifted on the full moons.
    As they walked through the woods hand in hand, he said, “I wanted to ask you about formally mating.”
    “I wondered if you were going to ask me.”
    “I do want to, but I recognize that it’s not just you and me in the mating, and I don’t want to offend Alek.  But it’s not my decision, it’s yours.”
    “What do you mean?”  She stopped walking, and he turned to face her.  The light from the setting sun that filtered through the trees bathed her in amber, making her look like a goddess, deserving of worship.
    For a moment, his brain derailed and his bear roared