Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changeling #15) - Nalini Singh Page 0,182

shyer than cats and they had to take care.

“But Jon isn’t a cat,” one of the girls pointed out, looking up through her eyelashes. “He’s human.”

“And he’s soooooo pretty!” Her friend all but melted into the earth.

A single growl from Hawke and they froze, spines dead straight.

Holding their gazes, their alpha said, “Go change, then you’re in charge of making sure Ben doesn’t get into trouble.”

Two faces fell, their looks of despair so comical that Hawke’s lips twitched. “For an hour,” he amended. “After that, I’m sure someone else will need to be punished.” He reached out to hug the girls to him one-armed. “You can sashay all you want when you’re a little more grown. Right now, you’re still pups. Now go put on your proper clothes.”

Feet dragging, the two disappeared off into the trees, where they’d no doubt stashed the clothes with which they’d fooled their parents. Hawke looked down at the pupcub in his arms as the child grumbled in her sleep before her expression turned beatific. “Yep, you’re going to be trouble, too.”

“Of course she is.” Lucas tapped Belle on the nose. “We wouldn’t have our cubs or pups any other way.”

“No,” Hawke said with a smile as the two girls he’d sent off returned in skirts and pretty tops. The pair went straight to Ben—who was currently hanging upside down from a tree branch while trying to stuff cake into his mouth. It appeared to be a competition, with Roman hanging in the same position beside him.

It was pack. It was life. It was family.

• • •

WALKER Lauren stepped onto the dance floor with his partner. Who beamed up at him, the lightest touch of pink lip gloss on her mouth. He wasn’t ready for his baby girl to grow up, and at a few months past ten years of age, she wasn’t quite there yet, but she was close enough that things that hadn’t interested her at all a year earlier now intrigued and fascinated.

Such as lip gloss she’d told him tasted like strawberries.

“Come on, Daddy.” Marlee held out her arms in perfect position for a slow dance.

Walker bit back a smile, because at this instant, she was his baby again, that small warm bundle he’d cradled and rocked in the darkness of the night when no one could see how much he loved her. In the PsyNet under Silence, such things had been forbidden, a father’s love for his child verboten.

No more.

“Just a second.” Reaching down, he picked up her much shorter form and, holding her easily with one arm around her waist, engulfed her raised hand with his other, their arms at a ninety-degree angle. “Place your free hand on my shoulder.”

Marlee obeyed his quiet instruction, but her mind was on other matters. “Don’t wrinkle my dress.”

“I won’t.” That dress was one Marlee had bought on a shopping trip with Lara. A vibrant blue that brought out the light green shade of Marlee’s eyes, it had a sparkling neckline studded with what Marlee called “jewels” and no sleeves. The skirt went to her ankles, with tulle underneath. It was the dress of a little girl turning into a big girl. Marlee adored it.

As Walker adored her.

Pressing a kiss to her forehead, he said, “Your hair looks beautiful.”

An incandescent smile. “Lara did it!” Marlee lifted her hand off his shoulder to pat the updo into which Walker’s healer mate had combed Marlee’s strawberry blonde locks. “You really like it?”

“I love it.” As a teacher and a father, Walker had always tried to encourage any child in his care, but it was only after leaving the PsyNet that he’d finally had the freedom to say such sweet words to his little girl.

And to the bigger girl who danced in her mate’s arms not far away.

Sienna sparkled tonight, her ankle-length black dress made of some fabric that caught the light in a hundred different ways. Unlike Marlee’s dress, Sienna’s hugged her form, the long sleeves tight to her arms and the neckline jaggedly asymmetrical. The dark ruby red of her hair fell down her back, hiding it, but he’d seen the deep vee there.

“Uncle Walker,” she’d said with a scowl when he’d warned her she’d get cold. Then she’d thrown her arms around him. “I love you, too.”

That his dangerous niece could say that to him was a gift. That she wanted to say it to him was an even greater one. Sienna’s eyes caught his right then as Hawke spun her out, and her