“I didn’t need it before, and I thought I had time to do it myself. I didn’t get around to it, and now I need a nice place for my mate. I can’t expect her to live like I do. She deserves better. So, I want to make it nice before she gets there. I don’t think she’d ask for anything better than I have, but I definitely want to give her better.”
“What exactly do you want? Like my mom’s?”
“Not that big or extravagant. Just… nicer, warmer, more comfortable, safer.”
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Tempest said, smiling at her uncle. He was not delicate or charming in any way. He was no nonsense, blunt, and so direct it was often considered offensive — though that wasn’t his intention. And here he was, doing his best to convince his mate — his human mate — that he was theright one for her. He was almost little boy like in his innocence in how that could best be done. But in a way, that was almost better. She’d never be able to say she was misled in any way. He was the epitome of ‘what you see is what you get’.
“Just… I don’t know. Something safe, and comfortable.”
“You said that,” Tempest said with a soft chuckle.
“Help me. Please”
“Come on in the house. Let me wake Brandt up to take care of Elijah and we’ll pop home and see what we can do real quick,” Tempest said.
“You sure you don’t mind?”
“You know I don’t!” Tempest said. “Maybe I’ll stay and have breakfast with Mom and Dad, too.”
~~~
Tempest and Boon stood right outside his hut, as he called it, right on the banks of the bayou where he’d grown up fishing with his dad, Carnage. Tempest looked critically at the small structure, then at the ground she stood on. “You can’t have possibly been comfortable here.”
“I was always comfortable here,” Boon said with a shrug of his shoulders. “Pretty much.”
“Okay, here’s what I see. It’s a freaking peninsula. The bayou turns right here, and your hut is right on the edge of it. There’s reeds and grass so tall on the edges that it’s up to my knees. It’s only three feet from your door here in the front, but two hundred feet on each side. With your house sitting right where it does, if it rains and the bayou swells, it’s going to go inside the building.”
Boon nodded. “It’s happened.”
“Then you can’t build right here.”
“I like it here!” he exclaimed.
“Do you want my help or not?”
“I do, but I like it here. You can still get in and out from the back. The land lies higher in that direction.”
“Has anyone built in that area?”
“No, it’s just me for about a mile in that direction.”
“So, all this is still yours?”
“Yep. Enthrall made sure that nobody could build close to me, or on my island, as he calls it.”
“It’s a peninsula,” Tempest said.
“I know that. But he says I’d only like it better if it was an island, so he calls it my island.”
Tempest thought about it, before looking him in the eye. “You trust me?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, let me do this, if you don’t like it, I can undo it.”
“Don’t change my land too much. I don’t want to live anywhere else. I like it here. Only one way in and one way out, unless somebody comes in by water. Nobody close to me. Lot’s of privacy.”
“I know… let me think.”
