“Are you listening to me, Sally-mine?” Costin’s voice pulled her from her parenting pat on the back.
“Yep, right here with you, um…”—her brow rose—“…and I totally agree.”
Costin stopped pacing and turned to look at her. “You agree we should go spend Christmas with your parents?”
“What? No. Are you crazy? Jen would skin us alive. Besides, my parents will probably come here on Christmas Day. They’ll want to see Titus open his presents.”
“I thought you were with me and totally agreed,” he said with a knowing smirk.
“Fine,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I wasn’t listening, I was thinking about what awesome parents we are.”
“And humble, too,” he added, his dimples making an appearance when he grinned at her. Man, did she love those dimples.
“Just wear an ugly Christmas sweater, daddy,” Titus offered. “Aunt Jen can’t stand to look at them. She’ll tell you to leave the room when she sees it. She said it was an insult to the awesomeness of Christmas.” He said this with so much glee that both Sally and Costin laughed.
Sally’s phone buzzed in her back pocket. She pulled it out and saw a text from Jen. Celebration committee meeting in five minutes. Don’t be late. “There’s a celebration committee?” Sally said as she looked up from her phone.
“Yep.” Titus nodded. “And squads. There’s the light squad, the tree squad, the wreath squad, and some other kind of squad that I don’t think I’m allowed to say.”
“How do you know this and I don’t?” Sally motioned for him to follow her.
“Because Uncle Gavril has been teaching me how to hunt.” Titus puffed his chest out proudly. “He says a good hunter scouts his territory and gathers information before deciding when to strike. So, he told me to practice by being quiet and seeing if I could go undetected by my prey.”
“And let me guess,” Sally said, trying really hard not to smile. “You set your sights on Aunt Jen as your first practice prey?”
He nodded proudly.
“I think me and Uncle Gavril are going to have to have a talk about his teaching methods,” Sally muttered under her breath. She shuddered to think what other things her son might have heard while spying on his Aunt Jen. “You coming down, babe?” she asked Costin.
Just as he was about to answer, his phone beeped. He growled a second after reading the text. “I’ve been informed by the head of the celebration committee that if I don’t come down, she will drag me down by my tail.” Costin’s eyes were glowing by the time he finished talking.
“Want me to tell her you’re sick?”
“We don’t get sick,” he replied.
“There’s an exception to every rule. We’ve learned that by now,” Sally pointed out.
Costin stalked toward her and Titus. He swung their little boy into his arms, causing Titus to giggle. “I’m not afraid of the big, bad Jen,” he said before marching out the door.
“We could put a sleeping potion in her eggnog,” Titus offered. “Uncle Gavril said sometimes predators have to trick their prey. I bet Aunt Rachel would make us some.”
“Holy troll butts.” Sally groaned. “Costin, I think it’s time you had a come-to-Jesus meeting with Uncle Gavril.”
“Why?” Costin grinned at Titus. “I think that’s a brilliant idea.”
Okay, we can just make up for this poor parenting skill by teaching him to help old ladies cross the street and to eat his vegetables. Is it okay to weigh bad parenting tactics against good as long as the good came out on top? She mentally shrugged. Hell if she knew. She was just trying to survive the holidays without Jen permanently maiming Fane and Costin and without her son slipping roofies into people’s drinks. Just another day in the Romania pack.
*****
“Maybe you’re taking this celebration thing a little too seriously.” Decebel sat Thia in her highchair and poured some cereal on the tray. Jen stood across from him in the main kitchen of the pack mansion. She grunted and muttered but didn’t look up from the pad upon which she was scribbling. She paused to tap the pen on her teeth, then went back to work on her notes. Decebel tried to frame his words as carefully as he could. “Babe, this can be a … laid back … casual thing, and everyone will still have a good time. The important thing is that we are all together.”
“Of course everyone is going to have a good time,” she practically growled, still without looking at him. “Obviously they are going to have a good time. Any idiot can throw a celebration where guests have a good time. I want them to have a great time. No, I want them to have a stupendous, colossal, rocking-out-party-of-the-century time. I want this to be—”
Decebel put the sippie-cup down he’d been filling with milk and grabbed Jen’s shoulders. She sucked in a breath and finally looked up, her beautiful blue eyes meeting his. For an instant, he thought she was going to growl some more. Then her face softened, and her shoulders slumped. “I just want it to be special,” she admitted softly. “This year has been complete crap.” She laughed and then shook her head. “Who am I kidding? The last few years have been crap.”
“Ouch, Jennifer. I’m trying not to take that personally considering we met, mated, and had a child together during those complete crap times.”
“There have been moments of awesomeness.” She set the pen down and wrapped her arms around him. “I didn’t mean that all of it’s been crap. I just mean—”
“I know what you mean,” he interrupted. “Since Fane met Jacque, we’ve all been trying to survive from one bad guy to the next.”
“Exactly.” She nodded. “There’s barely been time to breathe, let alone celebrate the amazing things that have happened while the crap was literally falling on our heads.”
“I’m proud of you for saying crap and not the other word,” he teased as he nuzzled her hair. He treasured the moments when she let herself be vulnerable. They were few and far between, and when they happened, like now, Decebel soaked them up like they were the first rays of sunshine in months.
She snorted. “Yeah, well, turns out mini-me likes potty words as much as her momma. For some reason, she never repeats things I say like ‘that’s adorable’, but”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“if I slip up and say, ‘life’s a bitch,’ she’s suddenly all miss vocabulary and throwing that shit around like it’s confetti.”
Decebel had to agree. It was as though Thia specifically listened for words she knew she wasn’t supposed to say and then latched onto them like her favorite toy. “Maybe we should tell her not to say a regular word, and then she’d want to say it all the time instead of her current favorites.”
“Reverse psychology?” Jen narrowed her eyes and looked over at their daughter, who was currently holding up a circular piece of cereal and staring at them through the middle of it. “I don’t know. I think she’s too smart for that. And she’s creeping me out with the non-blinking stare. Thia, blink your eyes, child. You’re being weird.”