Allegiance of Honor (Psy-Changeling #15) - Nalini Singh Page 0,33
holding her own cub. Her eyes stung.
Naya only allowed Sascha’s hold for a little while before wriggling to be put down. Circling Lucas and Sascha—falling and getting up and slipping—Naya growled and purred and had a rest every so often against her parents.
Sascha, one hand on Lucas’s bare chest, couldn’t stop watching her. “Remember that day I held Julian for the first time?”
“You mean the day you gave yourself away?”
Sascha smiled through her incipient tears. “I wish I could’ve kept that boot he chewed on.”
“You kept me. I’m a better souvenir.” Lucas raised one leg so it was bent at the knee, the towel immediately falling open on either side of his muscled thigh.
Her mind split in two. “Stop that,” she ordered the gorgeous adult panther on the floor while a gorgeous baby panther tried to bite at his arm with tiny panther teeth. “I can’t have you being all sexy while Naya’s being all adorable.”
Her heart might explode permanently.
He chuckled, moved over onto his front—and that towel, it just couldn’t keep up. Before she could drag it back into place, the air filled with shattered light and a large black panther now sat beside her. Delighted, Naya tried to bite at Lucas’s tail but she couldn’t catch it because he’d swept it over. Moving in that adorable, stumbling way, she tried to chase it—and Lucas swiped it back.
Sascha laughed as Naya tried to catch it again.
The simple game kept her amused and excited until she crawled into Sascha’s lap and fell fast asleep with the quickness of the toddler that she was. Stroking her hands through Naya’s soft fur, Sascha caught light from the corner of her eye. “Now you’re naked.” She tried to glare at her mate without looking at his body. “Do you want me dead?”
Chuckling, Lucas moved so that he was leaning on his arm behind her, his lower body mostly out of her range of vision. “I can’t wait to take her for runs, to teach her the forest, show her how to climb to the aerie.”
Sascha’s overworked heart thumped. “Oh God, she’s going to be so much more mobile.” While still a baby in every other way.
Lucas tapped her on the nose. “She’s a cat. We’ll also teach her the rules.”
“Is she going to start jumping off the balcony?” It was strength in motion when Lucas did it. The idea of Naya’s tiny body flying through that much air had Sascha close to hyperventilating.
Rubbing her back, Lucas made a reassuring purring sound in his chest. “Not tomorrow or the day after. She’s going to need time to build her strength.”
Sascha had the feeling he was easing her into Naya’s inevitable jump, and she was okay with that. Any woman would need to be petted and reassured when her baby was about to start flying off a balcony. “She’s so beautiful as a cat, too.”
“Of course she is.” Lucas nuzzled her. “She’s your daughter.”
“Ours.”
“Ours.” Fingers weaving into her unbound hair, Lucas kissed her with a smile on his lips while their daughter slept in her lap. Sometime during the kiss, Naya shifted spontaneously back into human form—and the dinner burned. Neither Lucas nor Sascha cared. Not with their child snoring sweetly in her dreams.
Chapter 9
THE ARCHITECT, THE one who’d put together the Consortium, the one who’d had the foresight to see the fall of Silence on the horizon and to understand the power vacuum it would leave in the world, considered the latest data on the Trinity Accord.
If successful, Trinity and the ensuing United Earth Federation would kill the Consortium, though right now, the accord appeared to be barely treading water. Still, the Architect took nothing for granted. The Consortium had made the decision to go under to regroup after a member in the uppermost echelon of its membership was captured by the Arrow Squad, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t action small-scale disruptions.
The Human Alliance, for example, would have little patience for Trinity business if anti-human insurgents started making trouble in their territory. As it happened, the Architect knew of one such group. All it needed was a nudge to the right location and a catalyst to light its destructive fuse.
It was a small thing, but all chaos had to begin somewhere.
As for the much bigger operation that had been put into motion by another one of the core members of the Consortium . . . The Architect looked down at the brief on Nadiya Hunter. It was pitifully empty, but then the child