That simple drink turned into an impromptu dinner, complete with takeout brought up by Riley and Mercy when they finished a security run in San Francisco, and special desserts prepared by Lara’s mom. Having returned from the tutorial he’d been running for his junior engineers up at the hydro station, Lara’s father, Mack, was also able to join them.

As Walker sat and listened to the ebb and flow of the voices—the laughter—around the table, an unexpected vocal music, he realized his family had grown by a factor of multiples in a few short years. Each Lauren mate had brought a cascade of family and friends into the mix, adding to the bonds he, Judd, Sienna, and the children had formed, and those connections would only continue to grow, lives entangling and intertwining.

It was an extraordinary network, beautiful and steel strong. Never again would any member of his family have to fight alone, hurt alone.

His eyes lingered on the wild curls of the woman who had banished the agonizing, endless loneliness that had lived in him for so long, he’d believed it part of his psyche. Even now, though she was laughing at something Indigo had said, her hand was a gentle heat on his thigh, the intimacy already familiar. He’d placed his own arm along the back of her chair, his fingers brushing her hair.

Regardless of what the future held, one thing he knew: He could never go back to the way he’d been, his body nothing but a tool he maintained because it was useful. It had become so much more, a source of pleasure for him and for his mate.

Fox-brown eyes meeting his own. “Happy?”

He twined a curl around his finger, his answer instinctive. “Yes.”

Lara’s smile was slow, deep, for him…as it was that night when she pressed him to his back and tasted him with unhidden passion and a sweet feminine possessiveness, until his nerves overloaded with sensation, his spine locking in a pleasure so intense, it was thunder through his blood.

•   •   •

A couple of nights after the move, Lara growled as she tore the shirt she was taking off, her claws having escaped to prick the fine cotton.

Walker dropped his hands from the buttons of his own shirt, looking at her in that way he had of doing—as if he could see through her very skin. “Do you need to hunt?”

“Healers have trouble hunting,” she muttered, suddenly angry at him for seeing her so clearly when so much of him remained a mystery to her. “It goes against our instinct to heal. But”—she took a deep breath in an effort to clear the fog in her head—“I could do with a long run.”