Letting me off for good behavior seemed like a long shot at best.
“I know. I’m just not sure what else to call it.” She turned to face me on the end of the bed and squeezed my hand again. “Come with us, Robyn. It’ll be fun!”
“I can’t go to a shifter wedding with you!” The whole place would be crawling with eligible toms itching to make a play for the only of-age, unspoken for tabby in the country. “Hell, Melody will probably throw the damn bouquet right at me!”
“So duck.” Another shrug. “There’ll be dancing and an open bar. Think of it as a party. A chance to let loose.”
“While everyone’s staring at me like a fish in a bowl? Sounds like torture.”
“It’ll be whatever you make it, Robyn. But either way, Jace and I are going. This could be his last chance to see his mother and his sister for years.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I stood, suddenly itching to be moving. To…run. Instead, I grabbed the clothes I’d worn when I fled the Southeast Pride—someone had done my laundry while I’d slept—and shrugged out of the robe to pull on my underwear. “Jace’s family could come see him here even if the council never lifts his exile.”
“But they won’t,” she insisted. “Melody and Patricia don’t feel safe in the free zone, and they won’t even after it’s officially a Pride. They’re kind of…precious.”
“So I recall.” I’d only met Melody and her mother once, but that was plenty. “Abby, if I go back, they’ll never let me out of their sight again.”
She shook her head. “Faythe and my dad gave you their word. They won’t break it.”
“They said I could stay with Titus for two weeks.” I pulled my jeans on over my underwear. “They didn’t say they’d let me leave again if I came back early. And anyway, the whole council’s already broken their word, letting Jace visit after they said—” I gasped as the truth hit me like a slap to the face. “That’s what this is about.”
Abby gave me a confused look as I buttoned my jeans and reached for my bra. “What are you talking about?”
“They’re trying to lure me back early. They don’t think Titus will keep his word.” And I was starting to hope they were right. Titus might be trying to turn the free zone into another Pride territory, but that was like trying to build a brick house out of rough-cut stone. His “house” was never going to look like all the others, because he was using different building materials. Strays, instead of Pride cats. And if I could make him understand that his territory shouldn’t be like all the others—that he didn’t need to give his Pride a dam—then there was no reason a female stray couldn’t live in peace there like all the others.
“You think my brother’s wedding is a ploy by the council to get you back?” Abby frowned. “Robyn, they’ve been engaged for two months. You’re starting to sound paranoid.”
I shook my head as I shrugged out of the robe. “Not the wedding. Lifting Jace’s exile.” I hooked my bra into place, then pulled my shirt over my head. “They’re letting you and Jace come to the ceremony because they think I’ll come with you. And once I’m there, I’ll never get out again.”
“I doubt they’ve put that much thought into it.”
“She’s right,” Jace said, and I looked up to find him in the doorway, leaning against the frame. “They’re making a play for Robyn, and she can’t come with us unless she’s willing to go to Atlanta after the wedding.”
Abby crossed her arms over her chest. “You really think my dad and Faythe would do that?”
He shrugged. “I think they only make up one-fifth of the council, and even if the other four-fifths agree on nothing else in the world, they agree on getting Robyn back. For the research potential, at the least.”
“I hate to think they’d be so duplicitous about it,” Abby murmured.
Jace stepped forward and pulled her up by both hands. “Your faith in people is adorable.” He kissed her on the forehead, and they looked so sweet together that I almost gagged.
When I looked past them, I saw Jace’s packed bag lying on the floor in the hall, next to their closed bedroom door. “When are you leaving?”
“After breakfast.” Abby turned around in Jace’s embrace until she was pressed against his chest. “Robyn, you will be okay here. Titus won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Nothing you don’t want, anyway,” Jace added, and my pulse spiked at the thought. Abby elbowed him in the gut, but he hardly even flinched. “I’m kidding,” he amended. “The man’s a perfect gentleman. And he’s not looking for a wife.”
I could feel my face flame. Abby told him about my suspicion. Jace must have thought I was a total egomaniac. “Good.” I cleared my throat and pushed past my own embarrassment. “I’m only here because the alternative is Atlanta.”
Abby stepped out of Jace’s embrace and looked up into my eyes. “Robyn, promise me you’ll be here when we get back.”
I shrugged. “Where else would I go?”
“I just… Don’t run, okay? It’s not safe out there by yourself. If you really don’t want to go to Atlanta, we’ll figure something out after the wedding. You have my word.”
Jace laid a hand on her arm. “Abby, don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I…” She didn’t seem to know how to finish that. Instead, she nodded. “We’ll be home in a week. Stay put, okay?”
“I will.” Probably.
After the paper plate revelation of the night before, I’d expected breakfast to consist of two or three enforcers in jeans and dark tees eating cold cereal and slopping milk on the countertop. What I got instead were Jace, Abby, and six toms in various stages of undress, pouring coffee from a French press, squeezing orange halves in a steel-handled juicer, and devouring homemade waffles.
On paper plates.
Though I’d already met several of them, I lingered in the arched entryway for a minute, watching. Trying to decide how—and whether—I fit in. Trying not to be intimidated by the crowd, and by how close they all obviously were.
I’d spent more than two months with the Di Carlos and never felt like I knew a soul, other than Dr. Carver, who only visited to draw my blood.
“Hungry?” a voice asked from my left, and I jumped, startled to find that Drew Borden had snuck up on me. Only he hadn’t really snuck. He’d probably just walked with a cat’s inherent silent grace.
Even in human form, my hearing was excellent when I paid attention to it. But I hadn’t yet mastered the art of listening to my surroundings without conscious effort, something a natural-born shifter never had to learn, as far as I could tell.
But these weren’t natural-born shifters. I was finally among people who truly understood what I’d been through and what still lay ahead. I should have been thrilled for the company—for the commiseration—yet the thought of stepping into Titus’s kitchen made my chest feel tight.
My presence had put them all at risk from the US Prides. They would either hate me for bringing war to their doorstep or be all over me, because I was only the second tabby they’d ever met.
I gave Drew a hesitant smile. “Yeah, I could eat, but…” I let the statement trail off when I realized how pathetic my fear of a hot-or-cold welcome would sound. I’d made my own bed.
Drew smiled. “They don’t bite. Not in human form, anyway.” He’d exchanged last night’s jogging pants for a snug pair of dark jeans, but instead of an enforcer’s typical black tee, he wore a navy polo, which distinguished him from the other enforcers laughing and talking as they put away massive quantities of food. And somehow, Drew wore the minor wardrobe upgrade as if it were a hand-tailored suit.
Still, though I could see in an almost academic way that he was hot as hell, I felt no real attraction to him. So how come every time I got even a whiff of Titus, I wanted to rub myself all over him until we both smelled like each other?
Maybe it was his scent. I’d spent four hours in Titus’s, yet I hadn’t really gotten close enough to the others to notice any
thing from their scents other than the obvious trace of werecat.
Indulging a sudden impulse, I stood on my toes and pressed my nose against Drew’s neck, inhaling deeply. He smelled good. Clean and masculine. Yet…nothing.
He chuckled. “What was that for?”
I shrugged. “Just testing a theory.” Then I turned to the kitchen and changed the subject while my face flamed. “How long have you known them?” I asked him.
“About a year and a half, for most of them.” His gaze scanned the kitchen, and I could practically smell pride emanating from his pores as he studied his fellow enforcers. “Nearly a decade, for Titus. We met in college. He got me a job at his dad’s company a couple of years before his parents died and he took over the reins.”
“You were friends before you were both infected? That’s a hell of a coincidence.” Or maybe not. Being Abby’s friend is what got me infected.
Drew nodded, arms crossed over his polo. “We were actually scratched on the same night, at a work event, and were dragged into this whole shifter thing together. We came up with the idea for a stray territory over fish tacos and imported beer about a year later, and look at it now.” He spread his arms, full of pride for what he and Titus had created, and I couldn’t resist a smile.
“Yeah, you guys are doing good work.” But then I glanced again into the bustling kitchen, and my insides began to twist with nerves.
Drew stepped over the threshold and tugged me along gently by one arm. “Hey!”
All laughter and conversation came to an abrupt halt as everyone turned to look. Abby’s green eyes brightened when she saw me, a bite of whipped cream-covered waffle inches from her mouth.
“For anyone who hasn’t heard, this is Robyn Sheffield. She’ll be staying with us for a couple of weeks, so I want you all to dust off your manners and put them to use. When she goes back to her territory, we’d like her to have only good things to report about the world’s first stray Pride.”
“Does that mean I have to put on a shirt?” the youngest tom in the room asked with a light-hearted grin. He was about my age, with dark brown hair artfully tussled all over his head and the suggestion of a six-pack peeking through the bare, tanned skin above the waist of his jeans.
“It means you have to eat with a fork and pretend there’s a target in the bottom of the toilet bowl, Brandt.” The tom manning a matching set of rotating waffle irons dropped a fork on the younger man’s half-filled plate. Except for his face and the palms of his hands, every visible inch of the cook’s skin was covered in swirling geometric-patterned tattoos, from his neck to a low-hanging pair of jeans. “Hey, Robyn, come grab a plate.”
I dragged my gaze up from the fascinating canvas of his sculpted chest to his face, frowning as I searched my memory. He spoke to me as though we’d met, but I would have remembered those tattoos.
Then I saw his eyes. Brown with a ring of gold around the outside. Just like the cat who’d growled from Titus’s front porch the night before. “Knox?” A single sniff in his direction confirmed my guess. “I didn’t recognize you.” Without fur.
He laughed. “I don’t hear that often. Here.” He held out an empty heavy-duty paper plate, and I took it, grateful to have recognized one more not-unfriendly face. Knox motioned to the rotating waffle iron on the left. “This one will be done in a few sec—”
The waffle iron beeped, and Knox flipped it by the handle, then opened it to reveal a perfectly toasted Belgian waffle. He pried it loose with a plastic spatula, then slid it onto my plate.
“We have butter—whipped or melted—fresh berries, chocolate chips, and chopped bacon,” he said, waving one hand down the long kitchen peninsula at a series of disposable paper bowls and platters. “Also caramelized banana slices, toasted pecans, chocolate and caramel drizzle, and my favorite: homemade whipped cream, in the mixer at the end.”
“Homemade…?” I looked up at him, wide-eyed. “Did you make all this?”
“What, like waffles are so hard?” Drew grinned as he reached around me to sprinkle a heaping spoonful of chopped bacon on his waffle. “The directions are on the back of the box.”
“Blasphemy!” Knox accused. “Bisquick is for soccer moms.”
“I’m kidding.” Drew slapped one hand onto Knox’s shoulder. “Alistair here was a chef in Baton Rouge before he came face-to-face with a stray in the bayou a couple of years ago.”
Knox mumbled some colorful expletives under his breath over the use of his first name as he poured more batter into one of the waffle irons.
“And the others?” I whispered to Drew as I drizzled melted butter over my waffle.
“You met Spence and Lochlan in the basement last night. Er, this morning.”
“Yes. Good morning,” I said, as I passed them, eating on stools on the other side of the bar.
“Morning.” Spencer gave me a tired smile as he stirred a spoonful of sugar into a steaming paper coffee cup.
“You’re a doctor?” I asked as I dumped a spoonful of sliced berries onto my plate.
“A triage nurse.” His scrubs were gone, but he still wore exhaustion from his shift at the hospital, followed by a night spent helping Titus with the new stray. “He’s a doctor, though.” Spence elbowed the man on the stool to his left.
Lochlan rolled his eyes, and a tumble of dark blond waves fell over his shoulder. No man bun today. “Does that never get old, man?”
“I don’t understand,” I said as I dug a spoonful of toasted pecans from the next bowl. “Are you not a doctor?”
“I used to be an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke.”
“Ah.” My brows rose. “A PhD. That’s my plan too. History.”
Loch nodded. “Unfortunately, Duke isn’t in the free zone, so…” He shrugged, then cut a bite out of a waffle half-buried beneath caramelized banana slices.
Duke University was in Abby’s father’s territory. No strays allowed.
“Loch and Knox both lost their jobs and their homes when they got infected,” Drew said. “But all that should stop once we’re officially recognized by your council.”
It’s not my council…
“But not you?” I said with another glance at Spencer.
He shrugged. “I’m local.”
“What about him?” I nodded at the youngest tom as I followed Drew farther down the peninsula.
“That’s Brandt Fischer. He was infected a few months ago, but we didn’t find him until after his first shift. We brought him here for acclimation, and he just doesn’t seem to want to leave.”
“You know I can hear you, right?” Brandt spoke up from the breakfast table, where he sat at Abby’s left.
Drew rolled his eyes. “That’s a somewhat selective ability, in your case.” Then he leaned closer to whisper into my ear. “He wants to be an enforcer, and no one has the heart to tell him he’s too young and inexperienced. He mostly tags along after Knox and Naveen, doing whatever grunt work they throw his way.”
“Naveen?” I asked, glancing around the kitchen.
“Over here.” A man with thick, glossy black hair and piercing brown eyes stood from his stool at the end of the peninsula, holding an empty paper plate smeared with whipped cream and syrup. “Naveen Madan.” He extended his hand to me across the granite. “You’re Abby’s friend?”
“Yeah.” I transferred my plate into my left hand, so I could shake his. “We were college roommates until…”
“Until you were infected?”
“Well, until the council found out I’d been infected. But that was my own fault.” Turns out that killing four people—even bad guys—will quickly bring you to the attention of the authorities, both shifter and human.
And suddenly I was uncomfortably aware that if any of the men around me had done what I’d done, even if they were as traumatized as I’d been, they would have been executed for their crimes. Quickly, and quite possibly brutally.
But I saw no sign that they knew what I’d done. If Abby hadn’t told
them, I probably shouldn’t either.
“Ready?” Drew asked with a glance at my plate.
“Almost.” I took a scoop of luxuriously thick homemade whipped cream from the mixer at the end of the peninsula, then drizzled chocolate syrup over my mountain of food and followed him to the round table, where there were two seats left. “Is breakfast always like this?” I asked as I slid into the chair across from Abby.
She shrugged. “Sometimes there are omelets with arugula and pesto, or basil, chili, and parmesan.”
“Oooh, or smoked trout and fennel,” Brandt added.
I turned, wide-eyed, for another look at Knox, the tattooed chef.
Most of Di Carlo’s enforcers had sworn oaths of service and loyalty shortly after graduating high school. Serving as an enforcer and protecting a Pride had been their lifelong ambition—an inevitability from the time they were small.
But Titus’s men were a little older than the average enforcer and they’d obviously developed lives, careers, and talents of their own before they were infected. Before they came to work for their Alpha.
Lives and careers many had been forced to give up when they were exiled to the free zone.
Jace set his fork on his empty paper plate. “Robyn, I hate to eat and run, especially since you just got here.”
“But…” I could practically hear the word hanging from his tongue.
“But we need to get on the road.”
Abby swallowed the last bite of her waffle and stood, plate in hand. “I’m sorry. But we’ll be home in a week.”
“I know.”
She dropped her plate into a trash compactor, then pulled me up for a hug. “You’ll be fine here. There isn’t a man on Titus’s team who wouldn’t die to protect you,” she whispered into my ear. “They take their enforcer duties very seriously, because they all feel like they have something to prove.”
“To the council?”
“And to Titus. And now to you. They’re good guys.”
“I’m sure they are.” But they were also big guys, with the strength of several very large human men apiece. Big guys who had two solid reasons to dislike me, whether they knew it or not.