“I’ll need a sparring partner.” “Karate?” Those completely human-seeming eyes brightened in interest. “Katana.” “Hot damn. Let’s do it.” Lucas coughed. “If you two have stopped flirting, we have business to discuss.” Indigo grinned but stayed silent. Mercy wasn’t so reticent. “So that’s what it takes to get into Dorian’s pants. I’ll let the sentinel-chasers know.” Her packmate’s growl only widened her smirk.”

“The woman rolled her eyes. “DarkRiver males are damn possessive and complete exhibitionists during the mating dance.”Sascha ran through her dictionary of changeling terminology and could find no fit. “Mating dance?”Mercy whistled. Dorian winced. Tamsyn suddenly got interested in her dough. Clay and Vaughn mysteriously disappeared. Behind her, Lucas’s body was a hard wall of heat. “I think we need to discuss this upstairs.”

“So, you tumbled that wolf you were with?” Mercy was too much a pack animal to take offense at the personal question. She grinned. “How did you know it was me?” “Do I look senile to you?”...“Yes,” Mercy said. “And I'm not doing it again.” If she kept telling herself that, maybe her traitorous body would actually notice and shut up with its demands. The older woman gave her a sour look. “Damn shame. What, you like them prettier?” A snort. “In my day, we liked men who looked like men.”

“Dorian’s going to love this.”She glared. “I swear to God, you tell him, and I’ll” — what the hell could you threaten an alpha with?—“I’ll tell Hawke you want to go on daily bonding runs with him.”

“Take her to the kitchen,” came the order. “If she lies, throw her in the cauldron."“He was jesting about the cauldron, wasn’t he?You cannot have a cauldron big enough for a person?”Bard halted, sighed, looked at her with those wide, liquid eyes.“We,” he said, “have knives.”

“She got to me.""It happens to the best of us.""Yeah? Who gets to you?" He was so strong that sometimes she worried. Everyone needed to bend a little, even a panther responsible for the lives of his entire pack."That damn wolf. He sent you a present last week."Sascha smiled at the thought of Hawke's flirting. The SnowDancer alpha did it only to jerk Lucas's chain. "I never saw any present. What was it?""How the hell should I know? I stomped on it and threw it into the deepest crevice I could find." He smirked. "Then I called him to ask how Sienna was doing."She burst out laughing. "Wicked, wicked man.”

“Dorian gave a smug grin. “My mate thinks I'm the most gorgeous leopard she ever saw.”“Show us the footage before your head explodes,” Lucas muttered, but his own cat was grinning to see Dorian so happy. The sentinel had been latent most of his life, unable to shift into leopard form. Now that he could, he did so at every opportunity. “Have you managed to catch a rabbit yet?”A single eloquent finger. “Fuck you.”Lucas snickered. “What about trying for a turtle?”Dorian lunged out of the chair and went for Lucas’s throat.”