Christmas in the Kitchen

collapsed in the middle. It was so bad, I was going to throw it out—”
    Kit made strangled sounds.
    “—but Jon ran off with it.” A laughing glance at the teenage boy the couple had adopted into their family.
    As Ashaya turned to look at Jon, Clay stole two cupcakes with feline stealth and threw one over to the teenager. Pretending innocence when Ashaya turned back, the dark-skinned sentinel stared at the cupcake sitting in front of him as if he had no idea how it had appeared.
    Dorian stifled a laugh. Clay had always been too serious, too close to his leopard in a dangerous way, until they’d all worried he wouldn’t come out of the darkness—to see him play made Dorian’s own leopard drop its jaw in a grin full of gleaming white teeth.
    Ashaya’s lips twitched and then she threw up her hands. “If you’re all going to demolish my cupcakes and cookies, you have to help me ice the spare set.”
    Noor and Keenan, having been chatting to each other in their own language, which was all but incomprehensible to adults, clapped at the idea, and pretty soon, the kitchen was filled with laughter and color and sugar. Jon and Kit sat down good-naturedly at the kitchen table to help Keenan and Noor with their creations—though half the baked items ended up in the young males’ bottomless stomachs, while Ashaya offered to help Talin mix up a cake she assured the other woman wouldn’t collapse.
    “I’ve experimented with it multiple times,” she was saying as she brought out the recipe.
    Talin rolled her shoulders, her tawny hair pulled back with the same color ribbon as Noor’s—though Talin’s bow was wobbly, as if tied by little hands. “Okay,” she said. “Show me what to do.”
    As Ashaya and Talin continued to talk, Dorian grabbed some coffee for himself and Clay, and walked around the counter to slide onto the stool next to the other sentinel. “Couple of years ago,” he murmured in a sub-vocal tone that would reach Clay alone, “could you have predicted this?”
    The sentinel’s eyes lingered on the woman who was his mate. “I don’t think I even knew to dream this big.”
    “Yeah.” In his wildest dreams, Dorian couldn’t have imagined that he’d be loved until it was a quiet, intense pulse inside him, his Shaya’s heart locked with his own. And Keenan—how could he have ever known what it would mean to him to be a father, to hold the trust of an innocent in his hand? It still rocked him at times, the gifts he’d been given.
    “Did Tamsyn ring you up about the tree?” Clay asked into the companionable silence between them.
    Dorian grinned. “She said her twins chewed through the wires last year, so she asked me to pick up a new batch of lights.” The pack’s healer had begun the tradition of a giant pack Christmas tree two decades ago, and that tradition had held through pain and loss and time.
    As Clay shook his head in affectionate amusement, Dorian nodded subtly at Jon. “How’s he doing?” The boy had been through things that would’ve broken grown men.
    “He’s settled in, made some rock-solid friendships.” Clay’s tone held a quiet, deep pride. “And he’s great with Noor—as far as she’s concerned, he’s her big brother and that’s that. He even sits through tea parties with her dolls in the miniature tree house I built for her, even though he has to squeeze inside.”
    Dorian chuckled, as proud of the boy as Clay was. After what Jon had survived, no one would’ve blamed him for being too scarred to take care with the vulnerable heart of a child. That he’d overcome the ugliness of what had happened to him, learned to laugh again, it spoke of a strength that would hold him in good stead in the years to come.
    “Kylie used to make me do the same thing,” he said, able at last to speak of his lost sister without being overwhelmed by rage at her stolen life. Her loss still hurt, but he tried to remember the good times now, tried to think about how much she would’ve adored being an aunt to Keenan and sister-in-law to Shaya. “Then she'd let me choose the game and I'd send her dolls into the jungles with my action figures.” His sister’s poor dolls had always met terrible fates at the hands of alligators and anacondas, only to arise anew for the next adventure.
    “Know something?” Clay’s expression held surprise. “I’d forgotten until now, but I used to drink tiny cups of tea with Tally when we were kids. She had this rag doll and she used to