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“Thank you,” Ren said, running her fingers over the fabric with an expression of wonder. I wasn’t sure whether she was more amazed by the quality of the gift or the fact that my people where gifting her anything that had taken much consideration in the first place.
I bundled the clothes back into the box and set it on the table so that Ren could receive her next gift. The tiger shifter gave his own small bow and held out his offering.
“Mine comes with much the same thought,” he said. “My whiskers tell me we have a cold winter coming—as cold as it ever gets down here. Our littlest dragon shifter will need protection from chills. And she can dream of her first flight in the meantime.”
Ren unfolded a blanket more than half her height from the opened wrapping paper. “It’s lovely,” she said a little breathlessly. The blanket was velvet edged and made from the same soft wool as the coat and pants, woven with an image of a dragon in flight.
The mountain lion shifters stepped forward next. Ren unwrapped their present and lifted out a mobile of animal figures, each of them carved with the finest detail out of ebony and mahogany. They bobbed on their glittering strings as Ren turned it.
“To hang over her crib and keep her entertained,” the mother said. “Because any dragon shifter child will have an active mind in need of stimulation.”
Ren smiled, her gaze going distant for a second. “I know exactly where I can set it up. I’m sure she’ll love it.”
The leopard shifters handed over their box, the contents of which required a little more explanation. I could tell Ren was fighting a puzzled expression as she examined the silky rectangle of fabric with its loose strips on either side.
“It’s so you can carry her with you wherever you’d like,” the wife said quickly. “Light material so neither you nor her will get too hot and you won’t be weighed down. I thought you might want to always have her close by, even when you’re on the move. Let me show you.”
With lithe fingers, she demonstrated to Ren how to arrange the carrier’s straps over her shoulders and around her waist. Ren let out a pleased laugh. “I’ll definitely be getting a lot of use out of this. It’s wonderful.”
Coreen was the last to offer her present. The box was small, but Ren’s face lit up when she opened it. She drew out a silver rattle and mirror.
“Those belonged to my own son,” Coreen said in her resonant voice. “They were his favorite things to play with when he was a baby.”
Ren’s eyes widened. “Coreen,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t want to keep them in your family?”
The lion shifter’s lips stretched with a smile. “Your daughter will be part of my family—part of all of our families. It has been too long since a dragon shifter was born into our people. She will be our kin as much as you have proven yourself to be.”
For the second time in as many days, my mate appeared to be on the verge of tears. She blinked hard as I slipped my arm around her.
“Thank you, so much,” she said, and then turned to the watching crowd. “Thank all of you for being here today, and for working with me since I came back to you, even though you weren’t sure of me yet. You know… We can have more time for dancing, if you’d all like, but first I’d like to show you something else. Would you all come with me to the greenhouse?”
I tucked my hand around hers as she led the way into the hall, my kin following us with murmurs of retrained excitement. I was a little excited myself to see what our dragon shifter had cooked up. A couple of my attendants darted ahead of us, I supposed to get some part of the surprise in order.
Ren bent her head toward me. “Be honest—did you tell them what presents to get, or was that all their own initiative?”
“I suggested it might be a worthy gesture to present you with something,” I said. “The rest I left up to them. They did rather well, didn’t they?”
“Yes. Yes, they did. I wouldn’t have thought—” She stopped herself with a smile. “I guess we really have come a long way.”
We spilled past the greenhouse doors into the vast treed space. I drank in the floral perfume from the vegetation all around us. The lynx shifter next to me eyed the rock ledges along the glass walls as if he were itching for a climbing session.
“I know Christmas in Florida isn’t the same as the Christmases I grew up with up north,” Ren said to the shifters assembled around her. “But I thought you might enjoy a little taste of my kind of Christmas too.”
She motioned with her hand, and a whirring started from somewhere deep in the brush. A burst of glinting white dust shot out into the air over our heads—
No, I realized as the first few flakes hit my cheeks. Not dust. Snow. She’d brought us a white Christmas.
“Watch it, play with it—whatever you want,” Ren said, grinning. “Let the celebrations continue!”
The lynx shifter at my side had already scrambled out of his clothes and leapt forward in his feline form. He swatted at the tumbling flakes and spun around in their midst like he was returning to his kittenhood.
The growing flurry had stirred something inside all of my kin. Some of them hesitated, but as the first few dashed deeper into the greenhouse as their furred selves, others shed their clothes and joined the romp. My own jaguar urges tugged at me to spring into the artificial snowfall.
Ren was looking my way. “Go ahead,” she said, affection shining in her gaze. “It’s for you too. I’ll get plenty of snow to play with later.”
A chuckle broke from my throat, and then I was shifting into my jaguar self, muscles lengthening, tail swishing behind me. I bounded across the now-slippery surface of the path and swiped my tongue at the falling flakes. A giddy sensation swept through me.
It was strange, wasn’t it, to feel so childlike when I had a child of my own almost here? But maybe that was the real gift my mate had given me.
