Ravensblood Forest you found me and i found you

Lotte has been sick enough lately, so I am giving her a reprieve during this pregnancy. XD

“I will not be ill,” Lotte assured her love with a saucy wink. “Dorthe — Dagfinn’s and my äiskä — never got sick in the early stages of pregnancy; our father always said she took to motherhood like a fish to water.” Dorthe Ansbjørn had always been frank with her daughters about heat, fertility, and motherhood, and Lotte knew enough to know that immunity to morning sickness was not necessarily hereditary — but the idea of being sick again after the winter she’d spent was too disheartening even to consider. Besides that, in many ways, the soot-stockinged rogue was an optimist. She’d deal with the nausea if it caught up with her, but she imagined that as long as she was putting all that extra food to good use — and she was — her body wouldn’t see reason to expel it. Sighing softly, she leaned into her mate’s gentle caress, drinking in his scent and savoring the knowledge that only she was privy to this sweet softness.

“If we’d had to wait any longer,” Lotte murmured, a low rumble of displeasure at the very thought of it ticking like a time bomb beneath the warm, rich alto of her words, “I would have called upon all of my strengths to bend time to my will.” Patience was one of her assets as an battle-trained Enok wolf — but it wasn’t one of her natural strengths. She nestled against Arturo, preening lovingly at the fur at the nape of his neck, gently untangling a snarl at the base of one ear just above the sharp angle of his jaw.

Heat or no heat, her husband was irresistible.

“You bespell me,” purred the young mother-to-be with a giddy sigh. She wanted to ask him about important matters — about her role in Teaghlaigh and about the return of Olive and Dakarai and about the role Chusi would play as a big sister and as Ríchíosa — but she danced around them, granting Arturo and Lotte a few more treasured moments of peace and quiet before politics put new tension in Ceannasach and Banríon’s shoulders. “Are you a betting man, Ceannasach?” she drew out teasingly, the tip of her tongue tracing the bulb of his ear to its tip in a fond caress. “How many children do you think we’ll have, and what genders will they be?” She wondered whether she’d be able to tell what she would have. It seemed like an interesting game, to place bets on their children, and whether or not it was unconventional didn’t really matter to her. The possibilities were endless. Fur color, eye color, personality, chosen trades…