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Robb nearly jumped at the sound of Tahnee’s voice, having to draw from his deep well of experience in dealing with his sometimes-exasperating team at the Agency in order to keep a neutral expression.
She nudged him in the ribs. “Do you have arguments with your shifter animal as well, or are you just brooding?”
The dingo smiled triumphantly, projecting a feeling of what felt suspiciously like Our mate agrees that you pick arguments with me, and Robb struggled to come up with an answer that would satisfy everyone present… or at least not antagonize the dingo further. It was definitely starting to show its emotions a bit more than usual, now that Tahnee had made her unexpected reappearance, and Robb wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
If nothing else, the dingo had always been an extremely predictable presence in his life. If it decided that now was the time to finally cut loose and make up for its lack of a misspent youth, Robb didn’t know what he would do.
“We don’t have arguments,” he said solemnly. “It corrects me when I make a mistake – which I frequently do, apparently – and then I thank it for its input and take its feedback on board.”
Tahnee’s dark eyes twinkled. “Ah, and here mine is just demanding to know why I haven’t knocked you over the head, hauled you back to the safehouse and tossed you down on the bed yet, instead of eating cake. You should consider yourself lucky.”
Robb felt his face growing suspiciously hot, even as the dingo gave its entirely unasked-for opinion on the matter.
Despite the fact that he knew he had to go back to the office, he couldn’t help but wonder if they had time for one more quick go-around.
He cleared his throat.
“And why haven’t you?”
Tahnee somehow pressed herself in even closer against his side, her warm arm sliding under his jacket and around his waist like it belonged there. The sound of the waves rolling up over the shore filled his ears.
“Because this is nice,” she said simply. “Because I want to see the ocean.” The smile in her voice became more of a grin. “Because I want to let that giant greasy meal go down before I go down, if you get my drift.”
The heat in Robb’s face spread lower.
“Noted,” he said, the word managing to come out sounding more or less normal.
Tahnee’s laughter seemed to pass through the mate bond itself, filling him up from within. How had he managed to suppress their connection for all these years? Even now he still hadn’t quite let down all his defenses, but he knew that it was only a matter of time before they fell, whether he willed it or not.
The thought of leaving his innermost self so exposed to another person was beyond his experience… but, he thought, he was ready to try.
Maybe it was for the best that they’d waited so long, as painful as the past twenty-five years had been. He didn’t think that the Robb back at that New Year’s party had been ready to open himself up like that, and even yesterday he would’ve shrugged off the idea of being in any kind of relationship… but, he could admit, he had grown as a person.
It doesn’t hurt that Tahnee has also changed her modus operandi, he thought wryly. Maybe they’d both needed to grow up a bit.
But still, she did clearly have few qualms about using her power to turn things into gold when the need arose. He knew she wasn’t using it to help shifter criminals go on the run anymore, but he’d seen her using her powers to turn a scarf into gold only yesterday, without so much as a second thought.
And then there was the fact that neither he nor anyone else really understood how those powers worked or how she’d come by them. There were, of course, plenty of shifters who had other powers on top of their ability to shift. But he’d never heard of any like Tahnee’s before.
“I wonder if I might ask you a personal question,” he asked her, a little cautiously. He wasn’t sure if it was intrusive to ask – or rather, whether Tahnee would consider it rude for him to ask – but he hoped that she might not object to sharing that kind of information with her mate.
Now that we do seem to be mates, at last…
“Oh, fascinating,” Tahnee said, turning to him with a mock-coy expression, her hand covering her mouth. “A personal question. It better be something good and spicy.”
“You’re probably going to be disappointed,” Robb admitted. “I had always wondered though – how is it that you can turn things to gold?”
Tahnee raised an eyebrow, but she didn’t seem offended. “So is this just a personal question, or is it a professional one as well?”
“It’s just personal.” He hoped she could sense through the mate bond that he was being sincere. “I just want to know. You’re my mate, but I feel like there’s a lot I don’t know about you. I’m not asking for a full biography, but that is something I’ve been curious about. Professionally in the past, before you say anything. But now, I’d just like to know.”
Tahnee paused, clearly thinking. But then she sighed.
“I suppose there’s no harm in telling you, though it’s not something my family readily shares with a lot of people,” she told him eventually, looking back out over the choppy sea. “It’s been… well, both a blessing and a curse over the generations. It’s something my family has always been able to do, though some of them have chosen to hide the power, or never even use it.”
“I can understand that,” Robb said. And he could. Shifters with rare powers were often hunted, by both shifters and humans alike, if they knew about them. Hiding a rare power was often the only way a shifter had to protect themselves.
“However it came about, though, is just one of those things that’s been lost to time,” Tahnee went on after a pause. “The stories just say we could always do it. But I don’t know why us, or if we did something back in the day that gave us these powers and meant we could pass them on. And we can’t all turn things into gold. Just changing things into other things. My brother Jarrah turns things into iron. My Aunty turns things into quartz. I got gold, for whatever reason. But gold is just another element, like anything else. It’s only us that decided it’s more valuable.”
