Blayne, after thinking on that for a few seconds, admitted, “Locker.”

“Right. So you may not want to cancel your wedding if the only reason is because of Livy’s father.”

Blayne sat down beside Vic. “What about having her as our photographer?”

“What about it?”

“Do you think it will be too hard for her?”

Probably, but not for the reasons Blayne was thinking. And Vic briefly entertained the idea of using this opportunity to get Livy out of being a dreaded wedding photographer—emphasis on the “wedding” part—but then he realized Livy wouldn’t want him involving himself in her career.

No. Livy would have to shoot or not shoot Blayne’s wedding on her own. All Vic could really do was keep her from throwing lockers at poor Blayne’s head.

“Livy is one of the strongest and smartest women I know. And I think you need to let her take the lead on whether she can handle shooting your wedding or not. She’s brutally honest, so if she doesn’t think she can do it, she’ll tell you. And probably recommend someone great who can step in for her. What’s important is that you trust Livy to do what’s right. Because she will.”

Blayne gazed at Vic for what seemed an excessively long time until she slowly began to smile.

“What?” Vic asked. “What did I say?”

“Oh.” She shook her head. “Nothing.” Blayne stood. “You’re right. I need to trust Livy.” She skated a half circle around Vic. “Hey, are you coming to our derby bout tomorrow? It’s just a local bout to help raise money for the tristate teams.”

“I’m not really a sports—”

“Livy will be playing, of course. She’s one of our shortest blockers, but also one of our meanest.”

“She is? Oh. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I can come.”

Blayne’s grin was amazingly wide. “Yay!” She skated off, then skated right back, leaned down, and kissed Vic on the cheek. “Thanks for your advice.”

“Anytime.”

He watched her skate off again, unable to shake the feeling something weird had just happened.

Deciding not to worry about it, Vic ate the last honey bun and finished off his coffee. He was going to go for another walk when he realized that someone was sitting next to him.

Vic turned his head to see Dee-Ann beside him. She glared at him with her dead, soulless dog eyes.

“You got somethin’ to tell me, son?”

Livy was going through some pics she’d recently taken of the shifter girls’ gymnastics team. Although these girls could never get into the full-human sports now that testing had become so invasive, it looked as if the shifter-version sport was about to go worldwide like hockey. Which, when Livy thought about it, wasmuch fairer to the full-humans.

When the full-humans destroyed a kneecap coming off the pommel horse, their careers usually ended. When a shifter did the same thing, it was usually not from the landing but because they’d vaulted themselves too far up and rammed their knee into a ceiling beam. Yet the shifters still managed to nail the landing and were healed within twenty-four hours. So . . . yeah. Not fair to the full-humans.

“Hey!”

Livy looked up from her pics and at Blayne. “Hey.”

“You’re coming to the bout tomorrow, right?”

“Am I?” Livy asked. It was decided that Livy would only come to derby bouts that impacted the championships. Last she’d heard, tomorrow’s bout was simply a fund-raising thing. Something casual between the teams that Livy’s competitive “win or die” nature tended to ruin.

“You’ve gotta come!”

“Well—”

“Great! I’ll tell the team you’ll be there!”

Livy let out a breath, wondering how she was not going to kill that girl at some point.

“She’s just so damn perky,” Livy muttered.

She returned to her work. She was annoyed because she knew she’d taken some pictures recently of the gymnastics team that she really wanted to use, but she couldn’t find them on the memory card she had. She spun her chair around and pulled her camera out of her bag. Livy turned it on and using the LCD monitor in the back of her Nikon, she viewed the first picture that came up. It was a black-and-white one of Vic that she’d taken in Massachusetts.

Smiling, she studied the image. It reminded her of how good she could be when she wasn’t thinking too much about it. When she was just letting the moment lead her rather than the million things going on in her head.

Livy placed her camera on her desk and hooked it up to her computer. She copied Vic’s pictures and enlarged them on her screen. With some miniscule tweaking, she thought at least one of the pics could possibly work for her upcoming show.

Livy dove into the work, forgetting everything around her as she toyed with the images, seeing what she could pull out of them.

She was so lost in her work, she didn’t realize that she wasn’t alone until she stopped and reached for the can of honey-roasted almonds she kept on her desk. When Livy found nothing but empty space, she looked up and found a bunch of her cousins standing around her office, passing her damn almonds around.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“We’re bored,” Jake filled in.

“That sounds like a you problem.”

“If you want us to play nice at your friend’s fancy house, you better give us a way to work off our excess energy.”