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“Where did you learn to bake?” I asked.
He shut the oven door and put the finished cookies on the stove. The smell was incredible, all cinnamon and sugar and the moist perfection of melted butter and flour. Leaning against the edge of the sink, he faced me with a smile.
“My mom taught me and Dominick. Penny is a bit resistant to learn, which Mom doesn’t quite know what to do with. I don’t think any mother in Sunnyside ever had a daughter fight so hard against baking. ”
Penelope Alvarez was Desmond’s twelve-year-old sister, and I had only learned about her existence after he moved in. Since she wasn’t a werewolf yet, he liked to keep her distanced from the dangers of his and Dominick’s life. When Penny turned thirteen she’d be able to decide for herself if she wanted to become a wolf, and if she agreed, she would go through the coming-of-age bite ritual called the Awakening.
I suspected Desmond wanted her to refuse the change. As the oldest male werewolf in his family, it would fall to him to bite Penny and change her over. Every time the topic came up, his features got heavy with sorrow and he was moody and quiet for hours.
“Speaking of Penny…” he began, and I stiffened. The evening was going so well. I didn’t want it ruined by discussing his sister’s future.
“Yes?” I tested the waters cautiously.
“Mom is insisting you come over for Christmas Eve dinner. ” He returned to baking the instant the words were out of his mouth, removing the cookies from the tray and putting them onto a rack for cooling, as if he hadn’t said anything.
In the doorway, I chewed my lower lip. I guess I’d hoped to avoid the whole awkward meet-the-family ordeal altogether. Desmond had met my mother once, and I figured it might set the precedence for why familial get-togethers should be passed over. When Desmond and Lucas met my mother, Mercy, she was in the process of ripping my face off with her partially changed werewolf claws because I’d murdered her mate.
Ain’t family grand?
“Des…”
Sensing my uncertainty, he left the baking to meet me in the doorway and drew me in for a tight, warm hug. He smelled so damn good I wanted to lick the sugary sweetness off his skin. Instead I tucked my head against his chest, rubbing my cheek on the softness of his sweatshirt. Like Lucas, Desmond’s tastes leaned towards the finer things, and the simple shirt was cashmere.
For the first few months of my acquaintance with the wolves, I’d believed Desmond’s income was provided solely by Lucas. It wasn’t until the week after he’d moved in that I learned he was an architect at a prestigious New York firm. That the firm was owned by Rain Industries and its primary service was to design new concepts for Rain properties meant Lucas did pay Desmond, but not the way I’d figured. Desmond had laughed at my misguided assumptions and pointed out it would be hard to file taxes with the job description of kept man.
He brushed my hair behind my ear and tilted my chin up with his thumb. “I know you don’t want to. ”
“I…I’m just not good with families. ”
“What are you talking about?” He snuggled me closer. “What do you call this?”
My heart did a flip-flop. “Is it important to you?”
“It would mean a lot to me, and to them, if you came. Plus, Dominick will be there, so it’s not like you won’t have protection if Mom gets nasty. ”
I paled, which is an impressive feat given how white my skin is, and Desmond seemed to recognize the foolishness of his word choice. He started to apologize, but I put a finger against his lips.
“I’ll go. ”
If I could kill a vampire Tribunal leader, I could handle Momma Alvarez, right? I wonder if he’d let me bring my sword.
Chapter Four
It was just after five o’clock in the evening on December eighteenth and there was still no snow.
In the office I shared with Keaty on the 100 block of West 80th, I sat behind his wide desk, kicked my shoes off and stared at the desk calendar. Someone had a case file open and paperwork spread all over. It hadn’t been me, and it definitely wasn’t Keaty. Only one other person had access to our office and this desk.
I flipped idly through the open file on the desk, trying to glean what Nolan might be working on in Keaty’s absence. Depending on what type of case it was I’d be able to figure out how much faith Mr. Francis Keats had in our young apprentice.
The front page was a generic form we had all clients fill out, with name and address and payment information. The next was an immaculately handwritten collection of notes, outlining an apparent missing-p
ersons case. Teenager, a moody type who the police were convinced was a runaway but the parents believed had been snatched.
Run of the mill, except we didn’t do standard missing persons. Sure, Keaty was a licensed private investigator—he had to be in case anything came back to bite us in the ass if an investigation went wrong, plus it meant he was legal to carry a weapon. I never let the logistics stop me, but I found you got in less trouble when the law was on your side with stuff like that. But even with the license, we didn’t really take on human cases. If someone came knocking on our door, it was for a reason.
I kept flipping through the file until I found that reason.
Were-panthers. The missing boy’s family were shifters, and so they’d come to Keaty—or in this case Nolan—looking for help that the police wouldn’t be able to offer. They needed people who understood the supernatural.
