“Come in!” Kit called from inside, and Derek realized he had stopped to look around instead of following the boy.
The inside of the house was cozy. He kicked off his boots into the small entryway and walked into what he knew was calledtupain Finnish. The room was a kitchen, living room, and dining area, all wrapped in one. There were long rag rugs on the wooden floors, and the walls were all bare flat logs. The ceiling was white, which made a nice contrast with the medium-gray floors.
“This is such a lovely house,” Derek said, feeling as if he’d stepped inside a home, not a house.
“It’s super homey, isn’t it? Noah said we could maybe build an extension next summer and fix the upstairs rooms in case there are visitors. There’s no insulation up there now, so we only use the downstairs. Come see the bedrooms. There’s only two, but it’s not like we need any more space.”
The bedrooms were small, which made sense, giving the square layout of the building. Kit’s room had a desk, a bookshelf, and a bed that Derek knew would be slightly narrower than an American double. The bed sizes had been weird to learn back when he’d first arrived in Europe. He’d often wondered how people who moved from Europe to the States and back coped with no linens ever fitting right. Yes, those were the things Derek’s mind went to when he had off-time or was stuck with something tedious, like staring at the screens in Council’s security room.
“I like the colors here,” he commented to Kit. The floors were the same the house, but here, the walls had some wallpaper.
“Oh yeah, Jude likes interior decorating, so he picked the wallpapers, apparently. Like, these are special ones, meant for these old houses and to be used with log walls. It’s interesting how different all the building stuff is here.”
Derek smiled as Kit flopped onto his bed. “You do whatever you were going to, I’m putting this in your dad’s room,” he said, lifting his heavy backpack.
It went unsaid that since Derek was Cal’s mate, he wouldn’t sleep on the couch, especially with Cal not being there to tell him to do so. For someone as tall as Derek, couches were never ideal, and frankly the bed in Cal’s room when he got there was calling his name already.
It was a queen-sized one, or a bit bigger, again with the EU sizing, and he loved the warm blue cover and the conservative amount of pillows. He’d never understood the use of decorative pillows on beds. Those programs that showed professionally decorated houses with beds only halfway visible from under a mass of pillows, yeah, so not his style.
“Kit, is there a bathroom somewhere?” he called out once he’d put down his pack.
“Oh yeah, the door by the entrance. The one that’snotthe stairs to the attic.”
“Oh thanks, I would’ve gone and peed in the attic if you hadn’t told me that!” Derek called over his shoulder, on the way to find the correct door.
A delighted cackle followed him there, and he knew things with Kit would be okay. It wasn’t the young fox he needed to worry about, it was the fox’s adoptive father.
Noah, Dallas, and Maxim came by after lunchtime to start figuring out the shed situation.
“The adult wolves won’t come to this property before Cal has come back. We don’t want any canine scents to mess with his cat,” Noah said as he helped Derek make coffee and sandwiches for everyone as an afternoon snack.
“But Kit’s a canine,” Derek replied, frowning. “So are the other boys.” He gestured with a butter knife toward the window where they could see two rangy young wolves, a red fox, and a tiny fennec playing in the yard. “When did you have time to take off Jude’s cast?”
“Oh, last thing I did yesterday. He wants to go swimming and well, I think he’s healed enough if he can do all that.” Noah chuckled as he looked at the boys.
Jude, the slightly smaller one of the wolves, was calling everyone to play, his front down on the ground, leaning on his wrists, with his butt in the air and tail wagging.
“It must’ve been hard, not to be able to shift.”
“It’s hard to have a cast for any teenager, for a shifter who is used to running wild it’s doubly difficult. The boys are active, and I can tell how happy the others are to have Jude with them again. They hated leaving him behind and didn’t go running much while he couldn’t come with them.” Noah assembled the sandwiches, and the scent of homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers was clear to even Derek’s human nose.
“It’ll be good for Kit to be able to shift safely like this. To my knowledge, he’s never really had that,” Derek murmured as he started to pour coffee into various mugs.
“Yeah. Dallas knows all about that, even though his problem is a bit different.”
“A tiglon, right? Where Kit is small and rare, Dallas’s cat is massive and even rarer.”
“Harder to hide for sure.” Noah carried the massive plate of sandwiches to the long table that had a bench on each side of it.
“Yeah, at least Kit has been able to shift indoors sometimes.”
Noah chuckled. “Yeah, we have had a few emergencies where we’ve had a bigger cat shifting inside the house for an extended period of time and let me tell you, it’s always the tail.”
“What’s always the tail?” Dallas asked brightly as he toed off his boots and marched in to wrap himself around his mate.
“Shifting inside.” Noah took the kiss Dallas offered him, and then asked, “Are the others coming in?”
“Yeah, we smelled the coffee. Good thing you had the door open.”
