“Ready?” Drew asked with a glance at my plate.
“Almost.” I took a scoop of luxuriously thick homemade whipped cream from the mixer at the end of the peninsula, then drizzled chocolate syrup over my mountain of food and followed him to the round table, where there were two seats left. “Is breakfast always like this?” I asked as I slid into the chair across from Abby.
She shrugged. “Sometimes there are omelets with arugula and pesto, or basil, chili, and parmesan.”
“Oooh, or smoked trout and fennel,” Brandt added.
I turned, wide-eyed, for another look at Knox, the tattooed chef.
Most of Di Carlo’s enforcers had sworn oaths of service and loyalty shortly after graduating high school. Serving as an enforcer and protecting a Pride had been their lifelong ambition—an inevitability from the time they were small.
But Titus’s men were a little older than the average enforcer and they’d obviously developed lives, careers, and talents of their own before they were infected. Before they came to work for their Alpha.
Lives and careers many had been forced to give up when they were exiled to the free zone.
Jace set his fork on his empty paper plate. “Robyn, I hate to eat and run, especially since you just got here.”
“But…” I could practically hear the word hanging from his tongue.
“But we need to get on the road.”
Abby swallowed the last bite of her waffle and stood, plate in hand. “I’m sorry. But we’ll be home in a week.”
“I know.”
She dropped her plate into a trash compactor, then pulled me up for a hug. “You’ll be fine here. There isn’t a man on Titus’s team who wouldn’t die to protect you,” she whispered into my ear. “They take their enforcer duties very seriously, because they all feel like they have something to prove.”
“To the council?”
“And to Titus. And now to you. They’re good guys.”
“I’m sure they are.” But they were alsobigguys, with the strength of several very large human men apiece. Big guys who had two solid reasons to dislike me, whether they knew it or not.
But I’d put myself in this mess.
“Give them a chance,” Abby whispered as she let me go. I tried not to panic as the men around me shouted out jovial goodbyes.
Chewing my first bite of a truly spectacular waffle, I listened to Abby’s and Jace’s footsteps fade as they headed down the long main hallway toward the front of the house. Only once the sound of Jace’s engine had faded from my ears did I notice that the Alpha was missing.
“Where’s Titus?”
“In the infirmary,” Lochlan said from his seat at the bar while he pulled his long blond hair back and secured it with a rubber band.
“Still? Doesn’t he ever…delegate?”
“I’ll go down to give him a break soon, but he tries to stay with new strays as long as possible,” Spencer said. “It lets the stray form an immediate connection and establishes Titus as an authority figure from the beginning.”
“Does that help?” I asked.
Drew shrugged from the chair to my left. “Natural-born cats rarely question the societal structure and authority figures they’re raised with. Titus is trying to replicate that by being present in the infancy of a stray’s transition. I guess time will tell if it works. He’s only been doing this for about a year.”
Drew stood to get a second helping, but I could only stare at my plate as his words played through my head again. I’d totally lost my appetite.
“What’s wrong?” Naveen slid into the vacated chair on my left. “You look like you were personally betrayed by that waffle.”
“I…” I shook my head and stabbed a chunk of pecan with my fork. “It’s nothing.” My complaints would sound like spoiled whining to men who wanted nothing more in the world than to gain official standing in the council’s eyes. To truly belong in a world that’s held them at arm’s length for generations.
A smile lingered at the corner of his beautiful, full mouth. “You’re areallybad liar, Ms. Sheffield.”
