“Good grief.” Frowning in the doorway, he looked like he wanted to groan. “The attic is worse?”
“It’s clean. No dust and I vacuumed around everything last week.” I might not have food on a regular basis but my house was neat. “Extra household goods are over there against the far wall and kid stuff is in the corner. I think that’s where the books are.”
Nodding slowly, Dorian moved through the maze of boxes. “I’m scared to ask what’s in the attic.”
“Um, furniture, some exercise equipment, oh, and a couple of boxes of baby clothes.” When he stared at me in horror, I wasn’t sure if the baby stuff came out right. “I don’t have kids.”
Blink.
Blink.
“Then why do you have baby clothes?” Dorian’s tone was confused enough that I wasn’t sure if I’d guessed the problem right. “Just in case?”
As he started looking through boxes I knew held kid stuff, I shrugged. “The women in the pack refused to give them away because they said they might come in handy.”
I wasn’t sure it was logical but I wasn’t dumb enough to ask that.
The Alpha Mate could do it.
“Okay, well, is anyone pregnant?” Dorian’s eyes widened as he got to the third box, and I hoped that meant he’d found books instead of something weird. “You actually have books.”
Perfect.
Nothing weird.
“I have enough stuff to outfit three houses. Of course there had to be books somewhere.” Statistically I knew we’dbeen bound to run into them somewhere. “And no…no one is expecting any pups.”
“Then we’re going to talk about all the baby clothes and everything else.” As he sorted through the books, he frowned. “Why does any shifter need exercise equipment?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Infomercials were tempting?
Dorian paused his book quest and frowned at me before he dived back in. He clearly didn’t like my answer, but I didn’t have a better one for him.
“I thought it was rude to ask.” His dumbfounded expression as he pulled out a couple of thick books said he didn’t agree with me. “It seemed personal.”
“You get to ask if they want to store things in your house. Packhouse or not.” His expression made it look like he thought I was ridiculous but I wasn’t sure why. “You need boundaries.”
As long as they weren’t about him?
“I think you’ll be good at helping me put those in place.” It didn’t seem to be my job, so I was assuming it was the Alpha Mate’s.
Shaking his head, Dorian set down one of the books and kept two. “I thought you were going to say that.”
Because he was smart…and he knew his mate very well.
Chapter 9
Dorian
Would it be rude to say he needed a keeper?
“We’ll come back to that.” I couldn’t make boundaries until I’d started meeting more people. “For now, you need a shower and I need something to sleep in.”
Ignoring the heat in his eyes, I nodded toward the door to the junk room that was supposed to be an upstairs office or lounge. “I know where the master bedroom is, but it would be rude for me to go in first.”
The heat was fading but I wasn’t sure the laughter in his eyes was any better. “You’d never do something like that. You have good manners, Wölfchen.”
