And then.
Meow.
Small. From the precise vicinity of my own ankle.
I look down. There is, sitting on the cedar floor at my feet, a kitten. Maybe eight weeks old. A very small smoke-grey tabby with the round serious eyes of a predator who has, for the moment, chosen to ally herself with the human nearest the door. Her ears flick. Her tail, slowly, taps the floor.
She rises. She rubs the side of her tiny head against the bone of my ankle.
Sweet baby Jesus.
I lower into a crouch with the slow careful descent of a woman who is afraid the small creature on her floor is going to dematerialize. I scoop her up. She fits in the palm of one hand. She is, against my palm, ridiculously warm and small and unimpressed, and her tiny weight rolls itself into the curve of my hand with the small confident relax of a creature who has decided this is, in fact, her person.
“What,” I whisper, “in the cute heavens did you appear from.”
“To be clear,” Matteo says from the doorway, “the kitten was not on the original list of surprises.”
I turn. He is leaning in the doorway with Rémi behind him propping a shoulder against the hallway wall, and Jude has just crested the back stairs with his arms crossed across his chest andthe small captain-look of a man surveying a project he was, in fact, the distraction half of.
“SOMEONE,” Matteo continues, accusingly, jerking a thumb back at Rémi, “could not leave the kitten in the wild when he stumbled upon her in the woods Saturday afternoon, an hour after you two left the cabin, while he was, and I quote, cutting cedar for the nest platform.”
“You found,” Jude addresses Rémi, with the level-flat of a captain trying very hard to register zero opinions, “a fucking kitten.”
Rémi shrugs. “I was minding my business, building our Omega’s empire. The kitten decided I was a jungle gym. She climbed me. I was, frankly, structurally outmaneuvered.”
“Rémi.” Jude. “What is it with you and animals. This is the third time. You found your dog at home in a ditch behind a gas station. Your cat let himself into your mother’s house. You are an animal magnet. I do not understand the mechanic.”
“I am a calming presence.”
“You are an animal magnet.”
“Same thing.”
I look down at the kitten in my hands.
My eyes, traitor that they are, do the warm precise thing they have been doing on and off for forty-eight hours, and a small honest tear breaks loose without my permission and lands, with the small undignified plop of a Saturday morning in the cabin, on the cedar floor between my socks.
Do not.
Do not, in fact, cry in front of three Alphas on a Sunday morning over a kitten and an interior decorating project.
Too late.
“You guys,” I whisper. “You seriously did all of this. For someone like me.”
Three heads come up.
“Iris.” Jude’s voice has gone careful.
“You deserve to be spoiled, Pinky,” Matteo says, with the precise unbothered conviction of a man stating a small obvious fact. “That is, frankly, an extremely easy conclusion to reach about you. None of us is sweating about it.”
“It was not difficult, Iris,” Rémi adds, mildly. “It simply needed the time. We had the time, the labour, and the wallet. The only missing variable was you out of the house long enough for the saws to get loud.”
Matteo crosses the room. He hooks one finger under my chin, lifts it, and presses a kiss against the corner of my mouth. “Do you like it.”
“I love it.”
“Okay. For the public record — Rémi did all the actual carpentry. Bob the Builder of this house is one hundred percent his department. My contribution was the fashion eye in the decorating phase. Curtains, throw colours, the brass sconces. I take full credit for the brass sconces.”
