“Is something amiss, my love?”

“Shut up!” she screamed with her head still buried in the pillows.

“Okay.” Lock stretched out beside her and began kissing along her back, down her spine.

Gwen instantly scrambled away. “Oh, no, you don’t! I need food before we can start all that again.”

“Can’t we eat after—”

“No!”

“We’ll order in then.”

“No, because we’ll have to wait and you’ll look at me with those big bear eyes and before I know it, I’ll be flat on my back again, and afterward I’ll be too weak to eat.”

“You know I’ll feed you.”

She slipped off the bed, stumbling as her legs almost went out from under her. He reached for her but she backed away, holding her hand up to ward him off. “I’m taking a shower and then we’re going out to eat.”

“Like boyfriend and girlfriend?” he asked, making sure to look particularly eager.

“What are you? Twelve?”

“Perhaps in an alternate universe where bears rule.”

She rolled her eyes. “Geek,” she muttered, turning away from him.

Lock stood up. “I need a shower, too.”

“Back off, Jersey. I go alone.”

He let his shoulders slump. “Okay. Of course…it’ll take us longer to get to the food.”

“Don’t even.” She headed to his bathroom.

Should he mention he had a second bathroom? Nah. “I thought you were hungry.”

“Fine. But don’t touch me!”

Should he mention that the shower was almost too small for him alone? Nah. “Okay. I’ll try not to.”

Mitch watched his mother file her nails at the kitchen table. “You know, Ma, you don’t seem real upset that Gwenie didn’t come with me.”

“I’m disappointed. I miss my Gwenie.”

Funny, she didn’t look disappointed. “If you miss her so much, tell her she has to come back home. Tell her she can’t just walk away from her Pride.”

“Oh, baby-boy, you know how your sister is when she makes up her mind.” She studied her nails for a moment, then went back to filing. “She’s an adult and can do what she likes.”

“You didn’t have that attitude when Patty Anne took off.”

“Because Patty Anne can’t handle living on her own. She can barely handle not setting herself on fire when she makes soda bread. My Gwenie doesn’t have that problem.”

“Because she hates soda bread?”

Roxy glanced at her son over her reading glasses. It was still early—for them—barely noon, so she’d yet to put in her contacts. She lookedmore…motherly with her glasses on and less Rockin’ Roxy as the neighborhood kids called her.

“You don’t consider Gwen part of the Pride, do you?” He’d had that thought since his mother had come to New York and then left again without Gwen. Before that moment, he’d never considered it—even when Gwen had told him as much over the years.

“My daughter,” Roxy answered, her gaze still focused on her nails, “has no constraints on her. She can do whatever she wants as long as she has the guts to follow through.”

“But she doesn’t belong here. Just like I don’t.” Although he didn’t belong because the males born to a Pride never stayed with that Pride. Some were bartered off, although that mostly happened in the richer Prides, but most left when they hit eighteen and found a Pride of their own or, like Mitch, a life. Yet it had never occurred to Mitch that Gwen wasn’t considered part of the Pride, if for no other reason than she was Roxy O’Neill’s daughter. Yet even without that, Gwen had lived her life for the Pride, she’d taken care of them, helped them, and at least eighty percent of the gang fights she found herself in the middle of was because of her cousins. How could they not make her part of the Pride? Hell…how could they not put her in charge of it? Just because she wasn’t full lion?

Roxy looked up from her nails and leveled gold eyes on her son. “The O’Neills will always be your blood, always your family. For you and Gwen. And we always protect our own, whether you’re in the Pride or not.” Roxy smiled at him. “Now how about waffles for breakfast? Or is too late for breakfast?”

Mitch rested back in his chair. “Maybe too late for breakfast, but it’s never too late for waffles.”

“Good.”

A newspaper landed in the middle of the kitchen table and his Aunt Marie sat down across from him, taking the seat his mother had just vacated, with a glass of orange juice in her hand. “Morning, handsome.”

“Hey, Aunt Marie.”

“Where’s your girl?”

“Sleeping.”

She smiled and began to read the business section.

Mitch watched his mother with her sudden urge to be domestic and his Aunt Marie not gossiping or yelling at him about leaving the toilet seat up again, and it hit him that they were relieved he hadn’t brought Gwen home with him. That they wouldn’t have to explain to her that she was family but would never be Pride.

He felt anger for his baby sister and, more importantly, worry. Who’d take care of her now, if not her Pride?

Who’d protect her? Did they understand that she’d be nothing more than another hybrid wandering the streets with no Pack, Pride, Clan of her own? Did they care?