She petted them and scratched the spot where their tails met their rumps until they were nothing more than wiggling dog flesh on the floor. Standing up, she pulled off her jacket and placed it over the banister. Her backpack dropped at the front door, Dez walked toward the kitchen, but before she got too far, the door opened and the most important thing in her life charged straight at her. Dez fell to her knees and opened her arms wide, laughing as the hyperkinetic bundle slammed into her body, knocking both of them to the ground.
She showered Marcus with kisses, knowing that everything she did during these long days and many nights was to ensure that one day he’d be able to roll around on the floor with his own son or daughter or both and all their dogs—because her son would have dogs. Even if he was a cat. Because what was a life without dogs?
“What is this on your face?” she asked him, realizing it was probably all over her face now, too.
“Okay,” Blayne Thorpe told her, barreling through the kitchen door. “It was just a slight mishap with the brownie mix. No reason to panic!”
Except Blayne appeared worse off than Marcus. Christ, the kid was covered. Did they actually bake any brownies?
“But I called in the heavy artillery,” Blayne went on, “to get this place spic and span.”
Dez got to her feet, lifting Marcus up until he wrapped his arms around her neck. “You called your boyfriend in to clean my apartment?”
“Someone had to do it,” came a voice from behind the kitchen door.
“Any other problems?” Dez asked, turning toward the front door as it opened and her husband walked in, his dog beside him. Apparently the mixed Rottie rescue was too good to stay at the house among Dez’s average, run-of-the-mill purebreds. Instead, she had to go into the city with Mace to help him endure the work day and keep Smitty’s dog, Shit-starter, from bothering him.
The little whore.
“Sorry I’m late,” Mace said. “Job ran long.”
“No problem,” Blayne chirped. She was perhaps the chirpiest person Dez had ever known. Marcus adored her and Mace . . . tolerated her more than most. And that said a lot. “No derby practice tonight.”
“My son,” Mace said, pulling Marcus out of Dez’s arms without an invitation and holding him high above his head. “Future of my bloodline.”
Dez shook her head in disgust, Blayne giggled.
Marcus scowled down at his father, pulled back his arm, and slashed at Mace’s handsome face with nonexistent claws.
“Viper child!” Mace snarled.
Holding out her arms, Dez ordered, “Give me my son, Llewellyn.”
“Momma’s boy. That’s what you’ve turned him into.” He shoved his son back into Dez’s arms. “An ungrateful momma’s boy. I allow you to live, boy! Don’t you forget it!”
“Thank you, Blayne,” Dez said over all the bellowing and her son’s giggling. “Are you sure we can’t pay you?”
“Absolutely not!”
“Yeah, because everything should be for free,” Bo Novikov complained from the kitchen. “So we can live in a Blayne-like utopia.”
Blayne smiled and said, “Excuse me a moment.”
Dee waited until Blayne had gone back into the kitchen before she faced her husband. “We need to talk.”
“What did I do now?”
“Nothing.”
“Because whatever it was, I’m sure I didn’t mean to do it.”
“You’re not helping yourself, Captain Ego.”
“And if I want to help a friend,” Blayne bellowed from behind the kitchen door, “I’ll do it! And you’re not going to give me any shit over it, you oversized Visigoth!”
“ ‘They’re such a cute couple,’” Mace imitated back to Dez from a recent wild dog party where she’d had a tad too many margaritas.
“They are a cute, if unstable couple.”
“He’s more bear than lion.”
“Which means what? That his head’s not as big as yours?”
“Okay.” Blayne came back through the door, her hand gripping Novikov’s forearm. Dez would never say it out loud, but the size of that man was . . . off-putting. To her anyway. Mace was only a nice, relatively normal six-four, but getting into the seven feet and over range just freaked Dez out. What was it like to fuck someone that size? Could you be smothered? Especially when he wasn’t some skinny basketball player type but nearly four hundred pounds of muscle. God, what if he died on top of her? Would Blayne be able to drag herself out?
Mace bumped her with his hip and Dez realized she was staring at Novikov again. She probably had what Mace called her “look of abject horror” expression. She had to work on that.
“Thank you both,” she said to hide the fear.
“No problem,” Blayne kissed Marcus on the forehead as the boy tried to latch on to Blayne with one arm while still holding on to his mother.
“You’ll need to buy more cleaning products,” Novikov told her, scowling down at her like he might bite her head off at any second. “I had enough to clean the kitchen but that was it.” He glanced around. “Although you really need someone to clean the whole house. It’s kind of a sty.”
“Okay!” Blayne began to charge toward the front door, dragging Novikov behind her. “Anytime, Dez. You need me, you call, and I’ll be there! ’Night!”
“ ’Night, Blayne.”
The door slammed shut behind the couple and Mace headed to the kitchen, shaking his head. “I think our house is clean enough, thanks. What a freak.”
He disappeared behind the door.
“Let me put Marcus to bed,” Dez said, “and then we can—”
The kitchen door slammed open again, Mace standing there, his eyes wide. “Dez, you have to see this kitchen. It’s like something from a freakin’ Lysol ad.”
Cella disconnected her call with her boss and tossed the phone onto the old kitchen table. It was one of the few things her mother hadn’t replaced as she’d done with almost all the other furniture in the Malone Long Island family home Cella had grown up in.
She knew that now she was back in New York, she’d have to get her own place. Probably a place in the city, but at the moment she was enjoying living with her family. One of the rare tiger families that had a male involved who wasn’t a son. Most She-tigers couldn’t stand having a tiger male around once they’d gotten pregnant, but her parents had met each other in grade school and had been together ever since. That was her parents, though. Cella had gone about things a little differently.
“You just getting home?” her seventeen-year-old daughter asked, closing the door to the basement that had been her bedroom since her mother had joined the Marines and left her in her grandparents’ care.
“Yep. Busy night.”
“Busy couple of days. There’s some leftover lasagna from dinner. You want me to put some in the microwave?” Her daughter always phrased such things as a question even while she was already cutting up the leftover lasagna, putting it on a plate, and dropping it into the microwave.
“Sure. Thanks, baby.”
“No problem.”
Cella stood, heading toward the stairs to her room. “I’m going to change clothes. I’ll be right back.”
“Okay. But Uncle Kevin spent the night so—”
Before her daughter could even finish, Cella was tackled from behind, her younger-by-four-years brother slamming her to the floor.
“Your skills are weak!” he told her like he told her every time he did this. “As always, I am the stronger sib—owww! Damn, Cella! Why do you always hit so hard? I’m telling Ma!”
Dee’s naked body collided with the wall, Ric buried deep inside her, his face pressed against her neck. He slid his hand under her thigh and lifted her leg, his condom-covered cock tapping some delicious new angle that had her panting hard and gripping his shoulders.