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“Who likes to call who carrot?” Dani asked as she accepted a hug from Brynn and shook hands with Mia and Nila.
Nila chuckled. “Jack’s favorite word is carrot. When he met Mal, he started to call him carrot, too. It’s a pack joke.”
“But you can only laugh about it behind Mal’s back,” Mia warned. “It’s funny as heck though.”
“We’re kicking you out, Adam. We need to welcome your mate to the pack properly,” Brynn said. She lifted a large wicker basket from where she’d placed it on the floor when she took off her coat.
“What’s the proper way?” Adam asked.
“With chocolate, of course,” Mia said.
Adam lifted his coat from the hook by the front door and slipped it on as he walked over to Dani. “I’m supposed to meet Jeremiah anyway so we can work setting up a better schedule for the retirees. I’ll be back in a few hours. You have my cell if you need me.” He kissed her and she smiled.
“I’m in good hands, I think.”
“Definitely,” Brynn said.
Adam grabbed his keys from the coffee table and waved at Dani before shutting the door behind him.
Brynn sat next to Dani on the couch, and Mia and Nila pulled chairs from the kitchen and settled across the coffee table from them. Brynn lifted a beige towel from over the contents of the basket and said, “Mia, Nila, and I want to welcome you officially to the pack, in a totally unofficial way.”
Mia rolled her eyes. “It’ll be officially-official on the full moon. But for today, we thought it would be cool if we hung out for a bit and maybe answered any questions you had. We’d like to get to know you.”
Dani made a clucking sound. “Aw, you guys are so sweet.”
“It’s our pleasure. Now, tell us about the night you met Adam,” Nila said as she opened a box of chocolates and handed it to Dani. “I think it’s so cool that you found each other in the woods!”
Dani told them about meeting Adam. “Everything changed for me in that moment when he came out of the shadows.”
“Were you afraid?” Mia asked.
She shook her head. “I knew he wouldn’t hurt me.”
Brynn fanned herself. “So freaking romantic. Acksel crawled into my bed in the middle of the night, drunk as a freaking skunk.Notromantic.”
“But he made it up to you later,” Mia reminded her.
“True. But I reserve the right to hold it over his head for all eternity.”
Nila laughed. “Mal had the nerve to buy me groceries and be amazing with Jack.”
“Such a brute,” Brynn teased.
Dani nibbled on a brownie studded with walnuts. “What about you, Mia?”
“I’m in romantic limbo,” she sighed.
“With who?” Dani asked.
“My brother’s best friend, Lucian. He’s human and in the military, so he travels all the time. I’ve been in love with him since I was a kid, but Malachi has always said that I was off-limits to him.”
“If you’re mates, why would your brother keep you two apart?” Dani asked.
“Because Mal thinks he knows best. He says Lucian’s life is dangerous. The heart wants what it wants, though, and so does my wolf,” Mia said. Brushing her hands clear of crumbs from a chocolate chip cookie, she said, “Let’s talk about the bears. What was it like growing up with them?”
Dani settled deeper into the couch and told her new friends about her old home. That fateful night when she’d been orphaned and her entire herd killed, she thought she would die in the woods all alone. “It was just luck, or maybe fate, that I wandered into Oakville and Row’s mom took me in.”
“What about other reindeer?” Nila asked. “Did the bears try to find people like you?”
