I wasn’t meaning NOW,she was about to say.
Instead, she took the phone and hit the call button.
And Grant answered on the third ring. On freakingvideo.
Mathis clapped her on the shoulder. *Good luck.*
*You’re leaving me to deal with this alone?*
*Like you’d prefer me to stick around and watch?*
He had a point. Asshole. It was like he knew her after all.
Seeing Grant was a punch in the chest. She’d known him since he was a weedy pre-teen. They’d all known each other back then. Mathis, Grant, and Lance, with Mathis’s snobby twin sister tagging along when her own friends weren’t entertaining enough.
He’d changed. He was older, yes, but that wasn’t it. The Grant she knew was constantly on edge, so wary of his inner panther he was constantly looking over his shoulder. Except the danger was inside him.
He was calmer, now. More certain of himself. Solemn, but content.
And he was looking at her: the woman who’d accused him of murdering Mathis.
She forced a grin, then gave up. “Hi, Grant.”
“Hi, Frankie.”
Her heart twisted.Frankie.The name had felt like it belonged to someone else, when Eloise used it. When her brother used it, and her old friends … she didn’t want to be that person.
She swallowed. “Is this a good time—”
“I’m here, too.”
The camera moved, showing a dark-haired woman tucked against Grant’s side. She was all curves next to his muscular frame, though Francine remembered that she’d carried her weight more in her ass and hips, not—
She was pregnant.
Francine licked dry lips. “Irina.”
“Francine.”
“It’s good to see you.” A complicated but not unkind expression passed over her face. “The last time I saw you, I was worried your lioness would drown in that cave.”
“In the cave where I tried to kill you.”
“And ended up shot by your own men.” Irina tilted her head to one side, and Francine remembered the other rumors she’d heard during her self-imposed exile.
Irina Mathers wasn’t a shifter … but she was something. And thatsomethingcame out in her paintings, which seemed to take a shifter’s innermost secrets and lay them out for the world to see, like a butterfly pinned with its wings out wide.
Francine took a ragged breath. “I know there’s no way I can apologize enough for what I did to you.”
“I know that, too.” Irina’s voice was steady. Beside her, Grant’s eyes blazed furious green. Not the green of Julian’s eyes, deep and cold and clear, but the rich emerald green of a thousand summer leaves.
She didn’t need Irina’s magic paintbrush or even her own lioness’s instincts to understandthatlook.
His panther hadn’t been the threat he spent his life fearing. It had saved his fated mate. And it would protect her and their unborn child until the end.
“I don’t know how much you’ve heard about what’s happened here,” she began, the words clanking like stones into the video feed.
“Enough to be glad we stayed home,” Grant growled. “Kraken shifters? Metal birds?”
