“Which means what? That his head’s not as big as yours?”

“Okay.” Blayne came back through the door, her hand gripping Novikov’s forearm. Dez would never say it out loud, but the size of that man was . . . off-putting. To her anyway. Mace was only a nice, relatively normal six-four, but getting into the seven feet and over range just freaked Dez out. What was it like to fuck someone that size? Could you be smothered? Especially when he wasn’t some skinny basketball player type but nearly four hundred pounds of muscle. God, what if he died on top of her?

Would Blayne be able to drag herself out?

Mace bumped her with his hip and Dez realized she was staring at Novikov again. She probably had what Mace called her “look of abject horror” expression. She had to work on that.

“Thank you both,” she said to hide the fear.

“No problem,” Blayne kissed Marcus on the forehead as the boy tried to latch on to Blayne with one arm while still holding on to his mother.

“You’ll need to buy more cleaning products,” Novikov told her, scowling down at her like he might bite her head off at any second. “I had enough to clean the kitchen but that was it.” He glanced around. “Although you really need someone to clean the whole house. It’s kind of a sty.”

“Okay!” Blayne began to charge toward the front door, dragging Novikov behind her. “Anytime, Dez. You need me, you call, and I’ll be there! ’Night!”

“ ’Night, Blayne.”

The door slammed shut behind the couple and Mace headed to the kitchen, shaking his head. “I think our house is clean enough, thanks. What a freak.”

He disappeared behind the door.

“Let me put Marcus to bed,” Dez said, “and then we can—”

The kitchen door slammed open again, Mace standing there, his eyes wide. “Dez, you have to see this kitchen. It’s like something from a freakin’ Lysol ad.” Cella disconnected her call with her boss and tossed the phone onto the old kitchen table. It was one of the few things her mother hadn’t replaced as she’d done with almost all the other furniture in the Malone Long Island family home Cella had grown up in.

She knew that now she was back in New York, she’d have to get her own place. Probably a place in the city, but at the moment she was enjoying living with her family. One of the rare tiger families that had a male involved who wasn’t a son. Most She-tigers couldn’t stand having a tiger male around once they’d gotten pregnant, but her parents had met each other in grade school and had been together ever since. That was her parents, though. Cella had gone about things a little differently.

“You just getting home?” her seventeen-year-old daughter asked, closing the door to the basement thathad been her bedroom since her mother had joined the Marines and left her in her grandparents’ care.

“Yep. Busy night.”

“Busy couple of days. There’s some leftover lasagna from dinner. You want me to put some in the microwave?” Her daughter always phrased such things as a question even while she was already cutting up the leftover lasagna, putting it on a plate, and dropping it into the microwave.

“Sure. Thanks, baby.”

“No problem.”

Cella stood, heading toward the stairs to her room. “I’m going to change clothes. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay. But Uncle Kevin spent the night so—”

Before her daughter could even finish, Cella was tackled from behind, her younger-by-four-years brother slamming her to the floor.

“Your skills are weak!” he told her like he told her every time he did this. “As always, I am the stronger sib—owww! Damn, Cella! Why do you always hit so hard? I’m telling Ma!” Dee’s naked body collided with the wall, Ric buried deep inside her, his face pressed against her neck. He slid his hand under her thigh and lifted her leg, his condom-covered cock tapping some delicious new angle that had her panting hard and gripping his shoulders.

“I thought you’d never get home,” he gasped, nipping the tendons along her neck.

“Working,” she said, yipping when his fingers tugged at her nipples, his hips grinding against her.

“I have to give you better hours.”

“Ric—” But he kissed her before she could finish, his tongue plunging into her mouth. She kissed him back, unable not to. He had the sweetest-tasting mouth.

His body kept her pinned to the wall, his hands moving off her breasts so that he could force her arms against the wall.

“We have to talk,” she tried again when their mouths separated.

“Later,” he told her, now fucking her with powerful strokes. “Tell me all about it later.”

“Okay,” she squeaked.

Mace Llewellyn pushed the dark chocolate ice cream he’d scooped out for himself and Dez away, shaking his head at her words. “That can’t be right. They’re lying.”

“They have no reason to lie.”

He paced away from the stainless-steel kitchen counter and back again, the dog he’d made his own right by his side, sensing her master’s mood.

“The information has to be wrong, Dez.”

She came out from behind the counter and put her arms around his waist, understanding how hard this was for him. “But it’s not. You know it’s not.”

Dez held Mace tight, relieved when she felt his arms wrap around her body and hold her.