Silver Fox (Silver Shifters 2)

She slapped her hand over her mouth, her eyes both horrified and crinkling with mirth. Doris looked so much like a teenager caught necking that Joey had to smother his own laughter.

“What are you doing up there?” Elva called plaintively. “Somebody has to make the salad, and Nicola dusted off in a huff—”

Sylvia cut in. “Mother, let’s take a step back, okay?”

Doris’s mother sounded confused, and a little upset. “But you were the one who—”

Doris turned to Joey, and when he let out a rueful laugh, her worry changed to a grin. “Joey and I are just tidying the attic,” she called down the stairwell.

The voices stopped.

“Rain check?” Joey asked.

“Yes,” Doris whispered.

Joey’s fox yipped in triumph as she gave him an endearingly lopsided grin and she almost ran down the stairs.

Joey followed more slowly, breathing to shed the heat she’d ignited in him. A sun, all right! He saw the sun in other people, but felt it most brightly in her. He’d always thought of himself as transparent as water. We find it in each other, he was thinking as he reached the bottom of the stairs.

Since the kitchen was the site of frantic lunch preparation, he bypassed it and stepped into the mud room, where he found the twins.

“ . . . Marrit’s a road that’ll lead to a cement wall,” Vanessa was saying.

“You don’t like her.” Vic put his fists on his hips and tipped his head.

“I don’t know her. It’s just that she’s . . .”

“She says we’re not real. How is that not a challenge?” Vic grinned.

“Oh, I get it. You see her as a dare?”

The two became aware of Joey.

“We need a run,” Vic said. “We’re going crazy cooped up inside.”

Joey said, “The two little kids saw Xi Yong and me. Somehow.”

The twins’ expressions sobered instantly.

“Okay, in that case we’ll take the night shift,” Vic muttered.

Which—Joey hoped—might give him and Doris a chance to be alone.

FOURTEEN

DORIS

He’d kissed her again.

In the light of day.

All the old worries started to crowd around the moment her foot hit the first step, but she was far too exhilarated to heed them. Joey Hu was not Phil the Philanderer—he had a far nicer house then she did. Not that he even knew that. He hadn’t asked where she lived, much less what she owned. Phil had weaseled that out of her in the first half-hour they talked, amid so much flattery she’d actually believed him.

Well, she’d wanted to believe him.

She relived the kiss all the way to the landing, her heart thrumming at the idea of more. But halfway down to the kitchen, she thought, consensus reality?

She had to laugh. Imagine explaining consensus reality to a seven-year-old and a three-year-old. He was clearly great with college kids, but he must not have experience with younger ones. Except he did have the teen niece and nephew, and it was clear he’d known them for a long time. And other than the big words and difficult concepts, he was so good with Pink and Lon.