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  CHRISTMAS IN THE KITCHEN

  Timeline: This story slots in before Bonds of Justice, and is part of my informal series that explores the everyday lives of the characters, away from politics and turmoil and tension. These are the stories of the hidden moments, glimpses through the window of their continuing lives.

  I love writing these, and I hope you continue to enjoy reading them. (This particular story ended up being a bit longer than my usual shorts, but I didn't want to split it into two parts and hey, it's the holidays. So find a comfortable spot and settle in. :-) ) For those of you unfamiliar with the Psy-Changeling series, this story features several members of the DarkRiver leopard pack, including two sentinels (the most senior members of the pack aside from the alpha).

  Christmas in the Kitchen

  By Nalini Singh

  Dorian was a highly trained architect with a magical ability on computers, and a license to fly. He was also a sniper who could shoot with cold-blooded accuracy, had a former Psy assassin as his sparring partner, and had been called an overachiever by more than one person.

  None of those people had ever seen him trying to deal with the plumbing.

  "Crap," he muttered for the third time in a row as the pipe dripped onto his face.

  "I think that still counts as a bad word," his son said from where he crouched in front of

  the sink, shining a torch into the dark space beneath.

  Wiping away the water and shoving the white-blond of his hair out of his eyes at the same time, Dorian twisted the wrench again. "Are you going to nark on me?" It was a whisper.

  "Nu-huh." Keenan shook his head as he whispered back. "Men stick together."

  Dorian's leopard grinned at the boy who was his in every way but for genetics, and the latter mattered nothing to his cat. It knew only that this cub was its own to protect and to nurture. "That's right." Lowering the wrench, he waited for another drip.

  Nothing.

  "Quick, let's make our getaway before it decides to stop behaving." Scooting out of the space, he stood up and in spite of his words, double-checked everything was functioning as it should. "Excellent work partner," he said, rubbing his hand over Keenan's head, the silky dark of his son's hair sliding through his fingers. "I think we deserve cookies."

  Ashaya looked up from where she was icing said cookies at the counter opposite the sink, the lush brown of her skin luminous in the early afternoon light. "I think Keenan deserves one but I don't know about you, Boy Genius."

  He bared his teeth at his mate in a playful growl. "Don't make me bite you, Shaya."

  "My terror knows no bounds." Striking eyes of pale blue-gray bright with laughter, she bent down to cuddle a grinning Keenan.

  "Traitor." Grabbing the boy up into a hug when Ashaya rose back up, Dorian deposited him on the counter beside the tray of cookies.

  "Dirty hands," Ashaya said, and cleaned Keenan up with a wet wipe before allowing him to choose a cookie.

  Dorian, having washed up at the sink he'd just fixed, came over to wrap his arms around Ashaya from behind, nuzzling at her curls until they started to escape the bun she'd put them in earlier that morning. He'd watched her do so as he lay sprawled in their bed, watching cartoons with a pajama-clad Keenan. And even then, he'd plotted to unravel the neat creation.

  Now she cried, "Dorian!" in laughing rebuke.

  Unrepentant, he used one hand to pull the entire mass free, wild curls going every which way. "Pretty," he said, pressing his jaw to her temple, his leopard endlessly fascinated by the vibrant life of her hair. Sometimes when he was in leopard form and she was lying beside him in front of the laz fire, he batted at it, just to see it bounce.

  "Now give me my cookie." He squeezed her to show her he meant business, nipping at

  her neck at the same time.

  "Sugar fiend." Handing over a heavily iced chocolate cookie, she said, "It's the perfect balance of nutrients and junk. I made sure to use vitamin enriched flour and vegetable protein." Catching his dubious look, she laughed. "Don't worry--you can't taste anything but the chocolate, sugar, and fat."

  Taking a bite, he verified that was true. "I won't take away your baking license," he said with mock solemnity, surprised his scientist mate had taken to the domestic activity with such enthusiasm. "Why do you enjoy cooking so much?" he asked, tugging gently on a curl as Keenan kicked his legs and licked the icing off his cookie.

  "It's a creative pursuit," Ashaya said, "and it's good for me to stretch myself in that way." An unconscious reminder that she'd been permitted no such play while in the icy trap of the PsyNet. "But," she continued, "this is a creative endeavor with order--recipes have set ingredients, and while experimentation is permitted and encouraged, results are easy to judge. It calms me, makes me happy."

  "Lucky for me and Keenan." And the occasional packmate who sniffed out the menu. Funny how often that happened.

  Taking a second cookie, he kissed her cheek and stepped away to lean on the counter beside Keenan's seated form. "Your cookies are even better than Tamsyn's," he said, naming the pack's healer.

  "Charmer." A delighted smile. "Wait until you see what I made while you two were watching cartoons."

  Both he and Keenan waited curiously as she slid up the cover of the storage space on one end of the counter, and pulled out a tray holding a multi-hued array of cupcakes. Picking up two, she gave them one each, along with a kiss on the cheek for Keenan and the same for Dorian. "For my strong, capable men."

  Dorian was about to tug her into a much more adult kiss when a familiar face appeared in the rectangle of light that was the open back door. "Do I smell cookies?" Kit sauntered in, eyes fixed on the baking.

  Ashaya pointed a finger at the muscled young male, halting him in his tracks. "One cookie, one cupcake."

  "I'll take it." Grabbing the items, he reached over to ruffle Keenan's hair, his own dark auburn strands wind-tousled. "Hey, little man. Why's your mama hoarding the cookies?"

  "They're for the pack's Christmas party tomorrow," Ashaya told him, her stern expression belied by the affection in her eyes. "I'm starting to understand why Tammy told me to bake twice what I intended to bring along."

  Hitching himself up on the counter attached to the sink, Kit finished off the cupcake in two bites. Not that long ago, Dorian had literally thrown the novice soldier out of a bar, Kit had been so drunk. Before that, Dorian and another sentinel had busted up a fight in which Kit had bloodied a packmate. But the youth had grown in many ways in the intervening time and was now one of the steadiest young soldiers in the pack, his strength not just in his body, but in his will and his loyalty.

  "I like your hobby," Kit said to Ashaya now, biting into the cookie and trying out a slow smile Dorian knew full well had coaxed more than one girl to follow him into the trees. "This cookie is amazing."

  "Forget it," Ashaya said with a laugh. "I live with a cat, remember? I know all about sneaky charm."

  Looking disgruntled, Kit scowled at Dorian. "Way to ruin it for the rest of us."

  "Find your own woman, kitten."

  Keenan laughed, sweet and mischievous at Kit's growl, a drop of icing stuck on his nose. Wrapping his arm around the boy's neck, Dorian was about to pretend to steal Keenan's half-eaten cupcake when he caught several familiar scents, followed by the sound of little feet running on the fallen pine-needles outside.

  Releasing Keenan to grab Noor in his arms as she raced into the house, her pigtails bound up with bright orange ribbons, he smacked a k
iss on the little girl's cheek before perching her next to Keenan on the counter. His son's best friend beamed, her beautiful dark eyes open and without guile.

  "You want some?" Keenan asked, offering Noor a bite of his cupcake.

  Nodding, she bit in, getting crumbs on the denim overalls she wore over a pretty blue sweater. "Yummy." When Shaya passed her a purple frosted cupcake, she said a happy, "Thank you," and turning immediately to Keenan, offered it to him for a bite. "Your one was green. This one will taste different."

  "Do you think so?" Keenan asked, and at Noor's nod, took a bite. "It's like grapes!"

  Dorian met Ashaya's gaze over the two little heads, and he knew she was thinking the same thing he was: That it was good to see the children, extraordinary and unique, act exactly like the babies they were. It was the pack's honor and their privilege to make sure Keenan and Noor had the chance to grow up loved and cared for, their incredible gift allowed to develop at its natural pace.

  "Hey," came another male voice from the doorway, "how come short stuff get cake?" Jon's intense violet eyes, a startling contrast to the white-gold of his hair, held a scowl. "Did you get cake?" the teenager asked Kit.

  Kit gave him a smug smile, just as Talin and Clay appeared behind the boy. Dorian's fellow sentinel and his mate followed Jon into the kitchen, the two of them going around the counter to grab the stools on the other side, while Jon leaned up against the sink next to Kit.

  When Noor offered to share her cupcake, the boy smiled an unexpectedly sweet smile and said, "It's okay, Princess. That one's yours."

  Dorian caught Clay's gaze. "Good to see you."

  The green-eyed sentinel returned his fist bump.

  "I tried to bake a cake for the party," Talin was saying to Ashaya, "but it collapsed in the middle. It was so bad, I was going to throw it out--"

  Kit made strangled sounds.

  "--but Jon ran off with it." A laughing glance at the teenage boy the couple had adopted into their family.

  As Ashaya turned to look at Jon, Clay stole two cupcakes with feline stealth and threw one over to the teenager. Pretending innocence when Ashaya turned back, the dark-skinned sentinel stared at the cupcake sitting in front of him as if he had no idea how it had appeared.

  Dorian stifled a laugh. Clay had always been too serious, too close to his leopard in a dangerous way, until they'd all worried he wouldn't come out of the darkness--to see him play made Dorian's own leopard drop its jaw in a grin full of gleaming white teeth.

  Ashaya's lips twitched and then she threw up her hands. "If you're all going to demolish my cupcakes and cookies, you have to help me ice the spare set."

  Noor and Keenan, having been chatting to each other in their own language, which was all but incomprehensible to adults, clapped at the idea, and pretty soon, the kitchen was filled with laughter and color and sugar. Jon and Kit sat down good-naturedly at the kitchen table to help Keenan and Noor with their creations--though half the baked items ended up in the young males' bottomless stomachs, while Ashaya offered to help Talin mix up a cake she assured the other woman wouldn't collapse.

  "I've experimented with it multiple times," she was saying as she brought out the recipe.

  Talin rolled her shoulders, her tawny hair pulled back with the same color ribbon as Noor's--though Talin's bow was wobbly, as if tied by little hands. "Okay," she said. "Show me what to do."

  As Ashaya and Talin continued to talk, Dorian grabbed some coffee for himself and Clay, and walked around the counter to slide onto the stool next to the other sentinel. "Couple of years ago," he murmured in a sub-vocal tone that would reach Clay alone, "could you have predicted this?"

  The sentinel's eyes lingered on the woman who was his mate. "I don't think I even knew to dream this big."

  "Yeah." In his wildest dreams, Dorian couldn't have imagined that he'd be loved until it was a quiet, intense pulse inside him, his Shaya's heart locked with his own. And Keenan--how could he have ever known what it would mean to him to be a father, to hold the trust of an innocent in his hand? It still rocked him at times, the gifts he'd been given.

  "Did Tamsyn ring you up about the tree?" Clay asked into the companionable silence between them.

  Dorian grinned. "She said her twins chewed through the wires last year, so she asked me to pick up a new batch of lights." The pack's healer had begun the tradition of a giant pack Christmas tree two decades ago, and that tradition had held through pain and loss and time.

  As Clay shook his head in affectionate amusement, Dorian nodded subtly at Jon. "How's he doing?" The boy had been through things that would've broken grown men.

  "He's settled in, made some rock-solid friendships." Clay's tone held a quiet, deep pride. "And he's great with Noor--as far as she's concerned, he's her big brother and that's that. He even sits through tea parties with her dolls in the miniature tree house I built for her, even though he has to squeeze inside."

  Dorian chuckled, as proud of the boy as Clay was. After what Jon had survived, no one would've blamed him for being too scarred to take care with the vulnerable heart of a child. That he'd overcome the ugliness of what had happened to him, learned to laugh again, it spoke of a strength that would hold him in good stead in the years to come.

  "Kylie used to make me do the same thing," he said, able at last to speak of his lost sister without being overwhelmed by rage at her stolen life. Her loss still hurt, but he tried to remember the good times now, tried to think about how much she would've adored being an aunt to Keenan and sister-in-law to Shaya. "Then she'd let me choose the game and I'd send her dolls into the jungles with my action figures." His sister's poor dolls had always met terrible fates at the hands of alligators and anacondas, only to arise anew for the next adventure.

  "Know something?" Clay's expression held surprise. "I'd forgotten until now, but I used to drink tiny cups of tea with Tally when we were kids. She had this rag doll and she used to be so strict about my not sipping my tea until the doll had hers."

  It made Dorian laugh, the thought of big, often silent Clay waiting patiently for a doll to have her tea. "Women--the things we do for them."

  "Talking about women"--Clay lowered his voice even further--"I meant to talk to you about Jon. He has a thing for Rina, so he might turn up while you're training with her. Don't be too hard on him."

  Dorian winced. Rina was Kit's older sister, and one of the strongest, most headstrong female soldiers in the pack. "Even if he was a grown man, and not a juvenile, she'd eat him alive."

  "I think he'd die happy." Clay's cat prowled in his eyes, huffing with laughter. "Truth is, she's being gentle with him."

  "Rina? Gentle?" Dorian was Rina's trainer and supervisor, the task falling to him after the young woman wrapped her previous trainer around her finger. He liked her, and was dead certain she'd become one of the backbone pieces of the pack as she grew further into her strength, but gentleness was not Rina's style. Like all adult leopard females who were dominant, she was more apt to challenge a suitor than to pet him. "You think she knows he's into her?"

  Clay nodded. "I figure she's trying to let him down easy, since he's just a kid--but my money's on Jon. Give him a few more years and age difference or not, I bet you he goes after her."

  "Big call, man." Dorian whistled softly. "But I tell you what--if you're right, I will bake you a cake, complete with frilly pink icing."

  "You're on."

  Ashaya came around the counter to lean against Dorian, the hair he'd messed up once more neatly in its bun. "What are you two talking about?" she asked as he resisted the wicked urge to undo her work all over again, his cat rubbing against his skin at having her so close, the feel of fur sliding underneath his skin no longer painful now that he could shift into his leopard form.

  "You're hatching something," his mate added in a distinctly suspicious tone.

  Grinning, Dorian did what he'd wanted to earlier and hauled her into him for a long, luscious kiss that had her fingers fisting in his T-shirt, the
sound of the children's delight swirling around them.

  "We're talking," he murmured afterward, "about baking cakes."

  Ashaya, her lips swollen from the nips he'd taken during the kiss, and her voice a little husky, said, "Didn't you tell me you could make the best banana cake? I have some ripe bananas."

  "In fact," Talin said from the other side of the counter, reaching out to tap Clay on the nose with her mixing spoon, "how about a contest? Dorian versus Clay."

  Kit and Jon, having turned to listen, gave the thumbs up. "We volunteer to judge," they said magnanimously.

  "You think I can't bake a cake?" Clay said to his mate, a glint in his eye.

  Talin's cheeks creased, the freckles on the golden skin of her face adding to the mischief in her expression. "I think you'll kick Dorian's pretty butt." She blew Clay a kiss that had the other sentinel's lips curving.

  "While I agree with your assessment of Dorian's body," Ashaya said mock-solemnly as she played her fingers through Dorian's hair in a way that made a purr vibrate in his chest, "I must disagree with the rest of your statement." His scientist leaned in close, all soft curves and warm femininity. "My mate will leave yours in his baking dust."

  "I think that's a challenge," Kit said, a little bit of the hellion he'd been back in his voice.

  "Way I hear it," Jon added, "sentinels never back down from a challenge."

  ~

  Three hours later, Dorian clinked beer bottles with Clay as they stood outside the house, and said, "It wasn't too rubbery. Truly."

  "And yours didn't have too much salt," Clay replied, loyal to the bone.

  Looking at one another, they started to laugh, the sound carrying through the air to where the children played and their mates sat talking. Kit and Jon were gone--Kit had taken the boy with him as he continued on to his watch position, the teenager looking up to the young soldier, but they'd promised to return for dinner.

  "I think," Dorian said when he could breathe again, "we should give the judges big slices for dessert."

  "Serve the smartasses right for egging us on." Clay took a drink of his beer. "That was a cruel and unusual death for those bananas."

  "You're one to talk--what the hell did you do to the chocolate? I think Shaya and Talin are still in mourning."