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She followed him, and to her surprise, a woman was sitting and pouring water into a foot spa, had a hand soak set up on the table, and a little girl was sitting in the corner, playing with a stuffed version of Makso.
The woman smiled. “Hello, miss.”
“Ven. Call me Ven, please.”
“Ven. I am Solai; this is my daughter Haril. That is her toy, Arfloof.”
Solai gestured for Ven to sit as she opened a case and pulled out small containers about an inch tall. “First, I am going to take off that botch job, and then we are going to put on the layers overtop. We will have to keep it up while your nail grows back out, but we should be able to manage this with maintenance every week.”
Ven sat. “What are those?”
“Those are the dips.” Solai explained the procedure and smiled. “Okay, first, we get that gnarly grey off, and then you pick your colours. Thank goodness they seem to have left you some length in your nails.”
The little girl got up and came over. “Lady, why are your hands dirty?”
Solai made a noise, but Ven said, “They aren’t dirty. My skin is just a different colour. See? I even have spots like Arfloof.”
“Oh.” The little girl poked the dots, looked at her finger, then stroked Ven’s inner arm and smiled. “You are really soft.”
She smiled. “Yeah. That just happened one day.”
Ven was astonished at how fast things went. One hand was stripped and dried while the other was worked on. Her feet went next, and Haril laughed. “Mom is fast. She says she has stuff to do, so if she goes fast, she does more stuff.”
Solai smiled, checked on the nails, frowned, and then said, “So, why did you come to the island?” Her tone went to the chatty tone of manicurists around the world.
“Oh, I was asked to come as a companion to Syar, but I am getting the feeling that there are hidden clauses I didn’t know about.”
Solai laughed. “They are smarter than they look.”
Ven blinked. “Huh.”
“Oh, Syar is my second cousin. We went to school together.”
“Oh. And you...”
“Everyone here does whatever they feel like. I always liked doing nails and hair. I wanted to get married and have kids and live a normal life with normal people around me.” She twisted her lips while she worked and sighed.
“What went wrong?”
“I met Dalnet. Fell in love. Got used to him being away from home, and now he’s moving back.” She smiled slightly. “I have no idea what I am going to do once he’s home.”
“By your expression, he’s an alpha?”
She snorted as she dipped Ven’s fingers. “Yeah. My bad luck that I was at the beach, and a wave knocked me into him. And then it happened again. By the fourth time, I realized he was catching me, and we were two hundred feet from the others. At that point, I looked up at him, and he punched a shark in the nose. Yeah. Doomed.”
“My cousin’s lawyer came to the hospital to get her and the detective that was collecting information about her stalker are now expecting a baby with her.” She chuckled. “Happily doomed. And she got a bonus daughter.”
“Do you want kids?”
Ven sighed. “I did. I had a daughter. She didn’t make it, and there was damage during delivery.”
“Oh, god. I am so sorry.”
“It happened before Haril was even a gleam in your husband’s eye.”
“How did your partner take it?”
“Oh, he was long gone by then. Off to play with the omega his family bought for him.” She grimaced.
