keeping him busy. Staring up at the trees, the leopard thought, Hmm, and then it jumped.
Dorian didn’t know which one of them was more surprised when they ended up on the branch with a single lunge. For a moment, the leopard retreated, startled by its own skill, and the man took control. Looking around, he realized exactly what his alpha had done. A second later, the leopard was back, its breath caught, and they began to race along the skyway of the trees, tracking Lucas from above—because Luc had underestimated him.
And Dorian’s nose was still smarting enough that he took great delight in jumping down on top of his alpha from his hiding place in the branches. Then he took even more delight in ensuring he got as much of the mud slime as possible on Lucas before letting go.
A sparkle of light and color and then a very dirty Lucas was sitting there scowling. “Damn it, Dorian. This stuff stinks.”
The leopard satisfied, Dorian gave in to the shift again, his human body covered in mud when he re-formed, his hair sticking up in spikes. The shift made clothes disintegrate like clockwork, but it was a crapshoot as to whether a single shift would get rid of ordinary stains or dyes, or stuff that was stuck to the body itself. Sometimes one shift and it was all gone, and sometimes it took six shifts to get even partially clean.
Today was clearly not a lucky day for either Lucas or Dorian. “Serves you fucking right,” Dorian told his alpha.
“Wasn’t my idea,” Lucas muttered. “Nate came up with that one. He wanted to join in even though we couldn’t shift the out-of-state meeting today.”
A feminine laugh from the right. “You have a stripe across your face, Blondie. Turning tiger on us?”
Dorian fixed Mercy with a narrow-eyed glare. “I know that was your trick.”
She blew him a kiss before shifting into animal form and scrambling up to lie on a tree branch as Vaughn and Clay prowled out of the trees. Vaughn shifted, while Clay curled up at the foot of Mercy’s tree. “I was hoping you’d fall into the pit,” the amber-haired sentinel said with a grin. “I told Luc to line it with banana peels and mushy apples, even stashed the supplies for him.”
Closing his eyes, Dorian wiped off a bit of mud that was stuck to his eyelid, giving Vaughn the finger with his other hand. It took him a second to realize the other sentinel hadn’t replied. Looking up, he saw Vaughn and Lucas had shifted back into animal form. They gave him a bare instant to complete his own shift . . . and then all four swarmed him, tumbling into him like overgrown kittens.
Startled, he kept his own claws sheathed and mock-battled with them.
And then, as Vaughn pushed him aside and Mercy took his side so that they could bully the jaguar, while Clay and Lucas stood there with feline laughter in their eyes, he understood.
No special favors.
No expecting anything less from him.
No being considered anything but capable.
He was a sentinel. He was one of them. Always had been. Always would be.
A crash of love down the mating bond, as if his mate had felt his elation. Laughing as he and Mercy managed to pin Vaughn, only to be attacked by Clay, who’d decided to turn traitor, Dorian thought his mate would surely help him devise a worse “foul” than a stinking slime pit or a snapping branch.
And then he stopped thinking and let the leopard play.
PARTNERS IN PERSUASION
Chapter 1
Felix looked up from checking a row of baby trees planted by a juvenile and found himself the target of a stunning smile. Bright green eyes, her hair in a million fine braids, and her skin bronze brushed with gold, she was more beautiful than any woman he’d ever seen. She was also a senior DarkRiver soldier who’d likely make sentinel in the next year or two if the interpack scuttlebutt was to be believed.
She raised a hand, wiggled her fingers, her eyes sparkling.
Blushing, Felix looked down at the plant he was checking. The juvenile had done a good job, but the boy was new at this . . . and he could still feel her looking at him. Glancing up from below his lashes a minute later, he found her leather-clad legs angled away, so he looked up fully. She was talking to Hawke, Felix’s alpha having run down to see how things were going with the