on a big salad bowl. The same salad bowl Susan gave me way back when we first met, so that I could ride in her car without getting sick on the seats. To my credit, I never did end up using it to yark in. All the women in this family drive more gently than Finn.
“We’d threaten to beat Lucan,” my dad tells her.
Susan freezes, hand poised to use Shane’s sleeve to mop up his slobbery lower lip. “What?”
Hearing his mother distressed makes Shane’s human ears turn furred and wedge-shaped.
Grinning, my dad fondly recalls, “You could walk Finn out to a tree and tell him to pick his switch, and he wouldn’t be sorry for whatever he’d done. He’d take a switching like a man, and his da and mam never knew if the lesson was really sinking in, you know? But we found out that if you told him to go pick a switch so that Deek would be punished in his stead, his whipping boy—well, Finn was right sorry then. He’s a rascal, but he’d walk over broken glass for his loved ones.”
Susan is not sharing the warm fuzzies that my dad is. This walk down memory lane has her concerned. “Did you actually whip Lucan for things Finn did wrong?”
Although she keeps her voice level, there’s an unmistakably protective edge to her tone. She may not be a werewolf, but she has the protective heart of an alpha.
And she’s all mine.
I leave the cookie dough I’d been rolling out, wiping my flour-coated hands on my apron as I round the counter and cross to her and lean down and kiss her.
She relaxes, eased that I’m not at all bothered by this history. Shane, however, heard the agitation in his mother’s tone and he’s turned into a full werewolf. When Susan feels his tiny but sharp claws on her forearm, she glances down at our bundle and sighs, beginning to strip off his onesie. “Half the fun of having a baby is picking out the cute little clothes,” she laments.
“Stop getting upset and your son will get to model the cute little clothes,” my father points out. “And nah, we never switched Lucan. But Saoirse would have me take him out to the woodshed while Finn watched. And Lucan was instructed to limp out, make a good show of his ‘punishment.’”
“That’s terrible!” Susan cries with a disbelieving laugh.
“But effective,” Finn calls out over the sound of him knocking his boots against the doorpost to clean them of as much snow as possible before he enters the house, bringing searing cold in with him.
Snuggling a furry Shane under her chin, trying to stop him from gnawing off the buttons at the throat of her sweater dress, Susan throws me a look asking for support. Not with Shane—with Finn and my dad.
I push the rolling pin over the dough. “It really was effective. The rest of that day, Finn would be an angel.”
My dad scoffs. “Only until he turned, what, eleven, and stopped being fooled?”
“It was about that, yeah,” Finn confirms, grinning wistfully. “But you all had me going, that’s for sure.”
“Where’s your mate?” I ask him.
“She’s getting our boy, and then we’re crashing at Night Howl all week. She’s hoping to do horseback riding with you, Sue, if you’re up for it. And Gin and Char.”
“Def—” Susan starts.
My dad turns away from the sink, a puzzled furrow lightly marking his brow. “What about a sleigh ride? While the girls go on the trails with the horses, you boys should get the kids together for their own adventure through the woods.”
“Ohhh, yes, please!” Susan exclaims. Her face is shining when she throws me and my father a happy grin. “Maggie—all of them actually—they will love that. Gosh, I love Christmas. Everybody here, something tasty baking in every house, and all the family doing fun things together.” She gazes down at our son, expertly removing her fingers from his teething mouth, making his tail wag.
“Personally, I’m now fond of Valentine’s day,” Finn says, stealing a ball of cookie dough from off my tray, the one meant for the oven in a moment. Susan hisses at him but I just drop another ball into the empty space and he keeps talking. “There’s excellent babysitters available in every house so there’s bound to be someone who’ll free up our hands, help us out so we can do date night right.”
I actually like this too but I don’t need to share my opinion. Finn