dominance liked to be chased, or that was what Felix had always believed. He’d been trying to figure out if that meant he could ask her out without stepping on her toes, but she’d beaten him to it and he felt like that damn, vulnerable puppy again. All excited and nervous and—
“Felix, slow down before this old jalopy falls apart.”
Checking the speedometer at Indigo’s drawl, he eased his foot off the accelerator and twisted to glance guiltily through the back window. “Are they okay?” he said, returning his attention to the forest track.
Indigo snorted. “Hard cases, each and every one.” She stretched out her long legs. “Never seen you so eager to leave your babies.”
Felix smiled at the gentle teasing. The seedlings were babies—of the forest, of the land that succored them. “The soldiers on security detail have promised to babysit. Drew said he’d sing them a lullaby.”
Indigo laughed at the reference to her playful mate, her love for Drew an echo in the air. “Tell me. I won’t blab.”
“Do I look like I was born yesterday?”
“I’ll guess, then. It has something to do with the gorgeous Desiree, doesn’t it?” A pause. “You’re blushing, so I declare myself right.”
Felix cursed his inability to keep his cool where Desiree was concerned. “We’re going on a date.”
“Anyplace I know?”
He shrugged, trying not to betray the depth of his excitement. “It’s a surprise.”
“You know what they say about cats and surprises,” Indigo said darkly.
Felix shot her a startled look, conscious she was good friends with Mercy, and realized he’d been had. “Very funny.”
A wicked grin that lit up the vivid purple-blue of her eyes. “Hey, I had to do it.”
He parked in the den garage a few minutes later and though everyone else took off with shouted thanks or quick slaps on the back, Indigo fell in beside him. “Want some advice?”
“No.”
Of course, packmates being packmates, that didn’t stop her. “Dominant or submissive, a woman likes feeling wanted.”
Felix thought of the way Drew had courted Indigo so outrageously, until the entire den had been on tenterhooks waiting to see what the other man would do next. “You liked all the things Drew did?”
“He did drive me a little mad,” Indigo admitted with a slow smile, “but I never wondered if he found me attractive. Something to be said about that.”
Her words circled in Felix’s brain as he showered. It wasn’t that he didn’t know how to make a woman feel good—he did. Only, most of the women he’d dated after returning to the den had been submissives like him. There was no question of hierarchy between them, of who should lead the dance. But that, he thought, didn’t make Indigo any less right.
He dressed carefully in clean jeans and a chocolate-colored shirt that brought out his eyes, according to the young designer who’d gifted it to him after Felix did a show for him gratis. It had horrified Felix’s booker, but Felix had already known he was about to leave the modeling world for good, having been accepted into a horticultural apprenticeship.
Why not go out doing a show for a designer he liked who needed a hand up?
Ready and with several minutes to spare, he ducked out to one of the pack’s two massive greenhouses. Both were concealed from aerial view courtesy of some very clever positioning and creative camouflage that nonetheless didn’t block the sunlight needed by the plants—and Felix was the one in charge of how the greenhouses were utilized. The pack had asked him to take up a position with them after he’d qualified, and he couldn’t have been more delighted to accept. He loved working in SnowDancer territory, loved that everyone came to him for anything to do with plants.
Four years on and he’d been promoted to the head of the horticultural team when his boss retired. Today, at thirty-one, he managed a staff of five, their primary task to make sure SnowDancer had an independent source of fresh fruits and vegetables notwithstanding the season. That self-sufficiency became especially important in winter, when heavy snow could bog down the roads out of the Sierra Nevada and make supply runs difficult.
As for the flowers he and his staff nurtured—they weren’t for the stomach but the heart.
Smiling at the thought of some of the floral requests his team had fulfilled for packmates, he worked quickly to make a special bouquet. This wasn’t usually his job—he had a teenager on his team who was training as a florist—but he wanted this to