Walker shook his head. The point is moot. To experience it is the only way to know. The glory, the raw punch of emotion, no words could ever do it justice.

"Put it down on the left," he said aloud, seeing Drew and Hawke arrive with the second sofa, followed by Indigo  - six cushions in her arms, her head peeking around the side.

The lieutenant's dramatic eyes, the reason for her name, locked with his.

"Gotta say, Walker," she drawled with a grin, "I never took you for a throw-pillow kind of a guy."

"I bought them," Sienna said from behind Indigo, a duffel bag in hand.

"Marlee and I chose the design." Her gaze shifted to Walker, and in her eyes was the memory of the piercing happiness she'd felt at being in charge of her own environment for the first time in her life. He recalled how she and Marlee had pored over the catalogue, how excited they'd been to get the cushions, put them in place precisely how they wanted.

A tiny thing, but it had mattered.

"All done?" he asked, running his hand over the distinctive dark ruby of her hair when she came to stand beside him. Kristine's hair.

She leaned into his body, cardinal eyes brilliant with stars as she spoke. "I gave the place a final sweep, picked up any odds and ends. It's clean, but Evie, the kids, and I will give it another polish tomorrow to make certain it's ready for the next occupants."

"Thanks, sweetheart," Lara said, coming out of the bedroom sans box.

"But for now..." Walking to the cooler, she pulled out a bottle of champagne and one of sparkling grape juice. "A thank you from us."

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."

Her wolf clawed at the insides of her skin, ready to race through the forest, the wind in its fur, the scents of the night sharp and bright in its nose. She could almost taste the cold slice of the air cutting through her nostrils, almost feel the crackle of leaves beneath the pads of her paws, her skin shimmering with the need to shift.

Walker redid the buttons he'd opened, eliminating a view she'd been enjoying in spite of her temper. "I'll ask Judd to keep an eye on the kids."

"No, you stay here," she said, kicking off her shoes and wiggling out of her skirt. "I'll be back in an hour." After she'd run off the frustration that gnawed at her, vicious and relentless.

A dangerous pause, before her mate spoke again, his voice flat, calm...lethal.

"You really think I'm going to let you out alone at night when the enemy was on the pack's doorstep less than two weeks ago?"

Lara wasn't about to be intimidated. "And you think I'll let you insult my intelligence?" It came out a snarl, her body and mind both ready for a fight. "I'm not a child. I know enough to stay in the safe zones."

Walker didn't yell, didn't get angry, which only increased her aggravation.

Instead, he crossed over and tugged her stiff body into his arms, her near-naked skin flush against his fully clothed body.

The rasp of the fabric was too much for her oversensitized flesh, and she pushed at him. "I can't handle that right now." He released her, but the set of his jaw made it crystal clear she would not be going out on her own. Fine, she thought, and not bothering to remove her underwear, shifted, her body turning into a million particles of light before coalescing into the wolf who was her other half.

Hackles raised, she padded out of the apartment and the den. Then she ran, daring her mate to keep up with her. He wasn't as fast as she was, but he was clever. He kept tracking her down, even when she raced away. The wolf liked his cleverness, liked his determination even more. It stopped trying to evade this strong, dangerous male who was its own, and they ran side by side under the diamond-studded Sierra sky, the night alive with the rustling of nocturnal creatures that froze when the wolf and her mate passed by, before going about their business again.

EVERY hair on Walker's body stood up at the haunting sound of the howl that rose on the night currents as he and Lara halted at the top of a hill, hearts thudding from the run, a silvery vista of towering pines and waving grasses in front of them.

Lara, her wolf stunning in silhouette against a heavy moon, went motionless for an instant before throwing back her head and joining in. The wild music was the most beautiful harmony he'd ever heard, so alive it made him want to add his own voice, so untamed it stripped away the civilized veneer to leave only the primal heart behind.

Only when the song had ended, the night quiet but with a complex depth to it that told him he didn't hear everything she did, did he run his hand down the proud line of her back, her fur thick and soft under his palm beneath the protective guard hairs. "Something is wrong, and you need to tell me." A cock of her head that he didn't need to be a wolf to read.

"Yes, it's an order." He hated seeing her unhappy. "You asked me not to close up on you. Don't do it to me." She could hurt him in ways no one else could on this earth, savage him from the inside out, but the one thing that would hurt worse than any other was being shut out from the loving warmth that had become integral to his existence.

The wolf looked away...and suddenly, the air fractured under his palm, her body dissolving into a million particles of light. He froze, his heart a drum. Her trust in him cut him off at the knees, told him all over again what he was to her. I will never, ever let you down. It was a renewal of the vow he'd made the instant he claimed her.

A heartbeat...an eon later, he was touching night-cooled skin, a woman with eyes of fox brown kneeling in front of him, her hands cupping his face. "It's not you, not us. You're my everything." He felt something in him break at the fierce honesty of her, didn't quite understand what it was, his emotions stuck in his throat. "Come here," he said, his voice a rasp.

Once she was in his lap, he petted her without further demands until she curled into him, her hand on his heart.

He knew she had a high tolerance for cold, but he took off the shirt he wore and made her shrug into it.

She did so without argument, then put her head back against his shoulder, her legs silky under his touch. "No one" - a long, appreciative sigh - "will ever convince me that there is a more beautiful place on this earth." Walker couldn't deny her words, the Sierra night a thing of near-painful beauty, but his attention was on his mate, on what might have caused her to snap at him in such an uncharacteristic way.

There was only one possible answer.

Texture of Intimacy Chapter 5

"ALICE?" THE HUMAN scientist had been put into cryonic suspension by unnamed parties over a hundred years ago, and now lay in a coma in SnowDancer's infirmary. Inside her mind were secrets that might further help Sienna understand her abilities, but whether that mind would ever wake, ever function as it should, was an unanswered question.

Lara fisted her hand on his chest, shuddered. "I can't reach her, no matter what I try." Not only frustration, but pain. "She doesn't deserve to die without ever living. I found out today that she was my age when they took her - she never had a chance to complete her work, fall in love, have children.

The bastards stole that from her." Tears rolled down her cheeks. "I want to give her life back to her, but I can't!" He gathered her closer to his warmth. "You know what was done to Alice was a high-risk, experimental process - the fact you've managed to keep her alive is an indication of your skill."

"Logic won't help, not when my wolf just wants to heal her."

Helpless, he realized, that's how she felt. And for a woman as strong and as dedicated to healing as Lara, that would be a terrible blow. Alice was likely never far from her thoughts, and source of intense stress though it was for her, that was nothing he could or would change about Lara - because her ability to care was at the very core of who she was as a person.