“Well, this game has small pieces that could be lost if the boys play it in the Courtyard,” Eve said. “I don’t want some youngster spotting a game piece in the grass, thinking it was edible, and choking on it. The boys will be playing on the porch, have already been told there will be dire penalties if they take so much as a step off the porch without supervision.” She placed her hands on the counter and leaned toward Simon. “And if they don’t stop pestering me about this so that I don’t have an hour’s peace to get some work done, I am going to get cranky and bite somebody.”

Her eyes held a feral quality that made him think it wasn’t the puppies who would get bitten.

Simon breathed in her scent and thought she might be in season. That would explain the snappishness, especially if she was one of those females who gave the “come here, come here, come here” signals one moment, then wanted to bite off her mate’s face the next.

Should he warn Pete Denby? Then again, the man had been mated to Eve enough years to recognize the warning signs.

“Sam . . .” He stopped. Let Sam go out among the humans alone? “Sam has never been out of the Courtyard. My sister was pregnant when she arrived in Lakeside. He’s never . . .”

Sympathy in Eve’s eyes now and in her smile. “It’s hard, isn’t it, letting them take those first steps away from you? It’s been just as hard for me letting Robert cross the street and play inside the Courtyard with Sam and the other young Wolves.”

Considering the results of mixing human and Wolf curiosity, innocence, and boy boldness, he couldn’t say the terra indigene adults had kept Robert and Sam out of trouble; they’d just put a stop to things before trouble became dangerous.

Of course, after dealing with a boy who had learned why you don’t tease a skunk—a smelly but useful lesson—Eve might not share a Wolf’s scale of “okay to dangerous” when it came to learning experiences.

“I’ll escort them across the street,” Eve said. “You can watch from the window right here. If they disobey and I don’t get to them first, feel free to come over and bite them. Better yet, send Nathan. I’m not sure Robert believes you’ll bite him, but he is sure that Nathan will.”

“I can bite as well as Nathan.”

“The logic is that a friend’s uncle can scold you—and be ignored—but a cop can arrest you?” Vlad asked, looking amused.

“Exactly,” Eve replied. “You don’t mess with the Wolf police.”

Laughing, Vlad went into the back to pull more stock for the out-of-town orders.

“Wait,” Simon said. “How can Robert pester you? He’s in school in the mornings.”

“Ruth needed a mental health day, so the kids don’t have school.”

“Ruthie is sick?”

Eve patted his hand. “When a woman takes a mental health day, she needs alone time, and a wise man lets her have it.”

Okay. Not sick. Calm unless riled, then watch the teeth. He understood that. But it made him wonder about something else. “Does a human female get as testy when a male asks about a mental health day as she does when he asks if it’s that time of the month?”

Eve showed her teeth. Might be a smile. Probably not.

“Okay,” Simon said. “They can play on the porch at your house.”

Eve patted his hand again. “I’ll feed them lunch if they haven’t lost interest in the game by then and returned to the Courtyard to play.”

Simon stood at the door of Howling Good Reads and watched while Eve walked Robert and Sam down the sidewalk on the other side of Crowfield Avenue. He watched Sam stop and wave to him before Eve and the pups went up the walkway to the Denbys’ porch.

“Worried?” Vlad asked, coming out of the back of the store.

“Meg saw danger.” She didn’t see anything that indicated any of the pups were in danger, but that was no reason to be careless.

“I know,” Vlad said. “That’s why I asked Leetha to keep an eye on the children. You could ask Jake Crowgard to go over.”

“He’d steal pieces of the game.”

“Probably.”

Leetha wasn’t Vlad or Nyx, but she did answer to Grandfather Erebus. If there was any trouble at the apartments across the street, she would sound the alarm.

• • •

Meg wrinkled her nose at the picture of bison on the front of the postcard, then smiled when she turned it over. It wasn’t addressed to her, but she figured every individual who had handled the card on its journey here had read the message that Jana Paniccia had sent to Jenni Crowgard.

She left the postcard on the sorting table next to her purse, along with a letter from Jana addressed to Merri Lee, which she put on the stack of mail going to HGR. She’d deliver the card to Jenni at Sparkles and Junk when she went out for lunch. Which would be a choice of bison burgers, bison meat loaf, or roast bison sandwiches.

She sighed. She’d been an idiot to turn down Simon’s offer to drive up to Ferryman’s Landing and buy some meat for her. But she hadn’t wanted special treatment—and regretted that decision when Merri Lee and Ruth told her they wouldn’t have turned down the offer; that because he was a Wolf, bringing her choice cuts of her preferred meat was probably Simon’s equivalent of giving her flowers and chocolate. Put that way, it sounded like she was turning down a suitor instead of passing up a pot roast.