Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
The cub lifted its head, its ears pricked, and nodded.
Remi nipped his nose again, this time more playfully. The cub batted at him with unclawed paws. Laughing, he handed the boy over to his frazzled parents. Zion’s hair was sticking up in spikes and he had suitcases under his eyes.
He and his mate not only had Jasper, but a newborn cub.
“We turned our backs for one second,” the man grumbled, throwing the cub over his shoulder. “It’s like they’re made of pure grease—just slide out under doors.”
Leopard in full agreement, Remi left the two to wrangle their cubs, then made his way along the pack’s treetop highway to the dining aerie. “Rina!” he called out from the door.
When she glanced over, spoon paused above her dessert, he motioned her across. “Can I grab you for a sec?”
“You need me, too?” Lark asked, looking up from a truly enormous bowl of ice cream.
“No, just Rina.”
He’d jumped down to the forest floor by the time Rina made it outside. Seeing that he wasn’t on the balcony, she made the jump, too, her ponytail a blond banner behind her. It wasn’t a jump any human would ever make, the trees goliaths—and even Remi’s cats wouldn’t chance the jump from the very top, but the dining aerie was in the lower branches.
“What’s up?” the sentinel asked once she was beside him.
“Walk with me. I have some—good—personal news for you.”
Reaching up, she fixed her ponytail as she fell into a walk by his side. “Yeah?” A smile. “Don’t tell me. My baby brother sent another postcard from a random location.”
“Something like that,” Remi said, just as Rina’s head snapped up, her eyes nightglow as she stared at the trees to their right.
She was running full tilt in that direction a heartbeat later, having obviously picked up her brother’s scent despite Remi’s upwind approach.
Kit emerged from the trees to catch her and lift her off her feet as she slammed into him like a small tornado. The young male was laughing as Rina hugged his neck and yelled at him for not letting her know he was in the country. At this point, Kit far outweighed Rina both physically and in dominance, but you wouldn’t know it from the joyous familiarity of their big sister–little brother interaction.
Delighted for the sibling pair, Remi bowed out and returned to the dining aerie.
Lark was still working her way through the ice cream bowl as big as her head. “What happened to Rina?”
“You’ll see.” After grabbing a plate of food, he slid in beside the sentinel, two of his senior soldiers across from them. “Where’s Angel?”
“Security shift,” senior soldier Ihaka said, then scrunched up his nose. “You smell of a cat I don’t know…though there’s something about it that’s niggling at me.”
“I’ve had a torturous number of meetings with all kinds of people.” He buttered a warm bread roll from the fresh basket one of Fabien’s juvenile helpers had just placed on the table. “Thanks, Jack.”
“I hate kitchen duty,” the juvenile muttered before slouching off—but he made sure to brush his body against Remi’s as he did so. Because even big cubs just needed contact with their alpha sometimes—even if they were too moody to admit it.
“Ah, teenagers,” Felipe, the older of the senior soldiers, said. “Beaming balls of sunshine and light.”
“Kitchen duty is a pack rite of passage,” Ihaka added. “He can’t just be going out on runs all day like he wants to do.”
“I get him.” Lark poured more chocolate syrup over her ice cream. “I hated kitchen duty, too, but mostly because our cook was a grizzled old leopard who thought children should be lightly sautéed and served up on a platter.”
Remi allowed the conversation to flow around him, his cat happy to be in the heart of his pack. But even so, part of his mind couldn’t stop thinking about eyes of moonstone blue and a woman who was an enigma.
Which Auden would he meet the next time around? The quicksilver delight of a woman who fascinated him, the eerie psychometric who’d been there without being there…or the ice sculpture whose face gave nothing away.
“Holy drunk bears!” Lark’s low whistle emerged into a sudden silence.
Having already caught their scents, Remi wasn’t surprised to see Rina standing in the doorway with her arm proudly around her taller sibling. “Everyone! My brother, Kit!”
Kit, his skin flushed with happiness, held up a hand in a wave.
Lark, meanwhile, was waving a hand in front of her face and whispering, “Can you suffer an attack of heat wave at night, because, wow, I’m burning up.”
Her reaction was restrained in comparison to another one of their packmates, who yelled, “Is he single? Because if he is, I call dibs!”
From there, it dissolved into friendly chaos, with the young leopard welcomed with slaps on the back and a few kisses on the lips. Remi kept an eye on the situation, but it was clear that Kit could handle himself.