“I can put this in the fridge,” Anna said briskly, breaking into the conflict Leah was about to start. “Or someone else can. How much of a hurry are we in?”
The problem with the wildling Anna had tried to help so disastrously had been that the wildling’s wolf half had been the sane part of that pairing. When Anna sent it to sleep, all that was left was the crazy human—who still had had a werewolf’s fangs and strength.
“I don’t intend to dawdle,” said Charles, giving in. “But any emergency is going to be over before we can make it there. As Leah said, Hester’s place is twenty-odd miles away—and most of that is rough country.”
“Okay,” Anna said. She took the spoon she was stirring her dough with and filled it, handing it to Charles to taste as she reached for the plastic wrap with her other hand.
“It’s Mercy’s recipe.” Anna wrapped the bowl with an efficiency that belied the relaxed-chat tone of her words. “I put some orange peel in, too. What do you think?”
The chocolate was rich and bitter in the sugar-butter-and-orange matrix—a brownie batter, he thought, though it might be some sort of soft cookie dough. His foster sister, Mercy, had always had a genius for baking things with chocolate. She’d also had an uncanny knack for driving Leah to unpredictable heights of craziness.
His Anna was really annoyed with Leah if she would go so far out of her way to bring up Mercy. He grunted and dropped the spoon-sans-dough in the dishwasher.
Anna could read his grunts. “Good.” She put the bowl in the fridge and turned off the oven. “Ready when you are.”
Leah had been watching Anna’s performance with narrow eyes, but when she spoke, it was only to say, “Hester’s old enough that a gift is a pretty good guarantee she’ll treat you like a guest instead of an interloper. Bran usually brings fruit because that’s one thing they can’t grow or kill. Give me a minute, and I’ll put a basket together for them.”
She left the room at a brisk trot, presumably to find a basket, because there was plenty of fruit on the counter.
Charles knew Leah well enough to know that whatever Anna had done to raise her ire wasn’t over. Leah didn’t let go of a battle—but she wouldn’t bring it up again until the situation with Hester was resolved.
He eyed his mate. To the untrained eye, she looked relaxed and calm.
Charles’s eye was not untrained. He murmured, “Trouble?”
His mate leaned against the granite counter and heaved a put-upon sigh that was only half-feigned. Then she straightened and shook her head. “It’s hard for her to have us here. She has no idea how to handle me in her personal space. She is finding it incredibly frustrating. And you don’t help.”
He raised an eyebrow.
She laughed despite her tension. “It’s not your fault. You don’t do anything wrong except exude Charlesness, but that’s enough to set her off.”
He didn’t know what Anna meant by “Charlesness”—he was who he was. He couldn’t help that. But there was no question that his presence had an effect on Leah.
“This seemed to be a more specific problem,” he said.
“Yes,” Anna agreed. “Tag stopped in while you were wrestling rhinos in Bran’s office.”
“I was moving bookcases,” he told her. “No African animals involved.”
She grinned at him briefly. “Sounded like rhino wrestling to me—complete with animal grunts and bellows. Anyway, he stopped in—apparently to tell us he was bored.” She hesitated. “He came in the middle of a discussion Leah and I were having. I think he had other business, but we distracted him.”
Anna was an Omega wolf. That meant that any dominant wolf felt the need to make her safe—which was the reason Leah thought she might help with Hester. If Tag had come into the room while Leah and Anna were having some sort of heated discussion . . . yes, the big Celtic werewolf would have done what he could to interrupt it.
“Tag suggested we reinstate the Marrok’s musical evenings,” Anna told him. “Apparently, they were a community staple before the Marrok allowed them to lapse a few years ago.”
“Almost twenty years ago,” Charles said, more than a little taken aback. What had brought that into Tag’s head? Surely there were things more likely to come to mind than events coated in decades of dust when someone walked into the middle of a fight between two women. “More than a few years.”
“Twenty?” Anna frowned. “That’s not what Tag said when he suggested it.”
“Tag’s sense of time isn’t anything I would rely on too much,” Charles told her dryly. “Ask him about Waterloo. He talks about it like it happened a week ago.”
She grinned. “Only if you are the one to tell him that the French lost the battle this time. I’ll sit on the sidelines and eat popcorn.”
Tag’s real name was Colin Taggart. He identified as Irish, Welsh, or Scot depending upon the day and the accent he was using. He’d fought for the Little Corporal during the Napoleonic War. Tag was still particularly bitter about “the English.”
“Anyway,” Anna said with a glance toward the doorway Leah had used to exit the room, “I thought that it would not be a good thing to institute sweeping changes while Bran is away. Leah disagrees.”
Charles blinked at her. It was not like his Anna to come down on the side of caution. Nor was Leah in the least musical. Not being interested in anything that wasn’t centered upon her, she’d been more relieved than almost anyone when they’d stopped.
“Leah thinks that the pack would benefit from some kind of social gathering beyond the moon hunts,” said Leah, emerging from the depths of the house with a basket in her hand and a bite to her voice.
“Anna thinks that the pack won’t fall into despair and boredom if we wait until Bran comes back,” said his Anna mildly, in a tone he had heard his da use on his recalcitrant sons. “She also believes that referring to oneself in the third person is absurd.”
Charles bit back a smile. Somehow, he didn’t think a smile would help the situation, particularly because he could tell by Leah’s pinched expression that she recognized the origins of that tone, too.
Leah restrained herself to a wordless grimace. Then she loaded the basket with apples, peaches, and bananas, which somehow, in her skilled hands, took on an artistic shape.
“Here,” she said to him, handing him the basket. “I hope this helps.” Despite the edge in her tone, she wasn’t lying.
Charles nodded gravely. “Thank you.”
* * *