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I considered Will’s early life and said, “You grew up with real food.”

“Yep. Fake crap tasted fake from the start for me. I was entitled to a free lunch when I started elementary school, but other than pizza day, I took my lunch from home because the stuff they fed us didn’t even taste like food.” He shrugged. “I’m still partial to pizza. It’s one of the few meals I eat that doesn’t come from a farm-to-table place.”

Well, that was convenient. My bear refuses to stay docile when I eat chemical crap for more than two meals in a row, and sometimes for just one meal if it’s completely chemical-laden.

“How about you?” he asked. “Not many people understand the deceit around fluoride. When did you figure it out?”

“Matty has always been conscious of his weight, and somewhere along the way he decided anything he put in his body had to be as clean and healthy as possible. He has cheat days where he piles empty calories in, but most days, he behaves, and since we lived together, I shopped with him in mind. Plus, I’m a scientist, and a lot of what they put in our food supply is criminal. Back in the seventies, they discovered red food dye caused cancer, and five years later — fiveyears— they stopped making red M&Ms. Eventually, they found red dye the FDA didn’t have a problem with it, but it’s a problem, too. I mean, it’s the bodies of crushed red bugs, for crying out loud!”

Okay, so maybe that was too much answer for his question, because the truth is, even though I knew all this, I still wasn’t eating completely clean until I became a bear who can smell the shit and chemicals in commercial food.

“Sorry for the rant. Long story short, I still get fast food fries sometimes despite the fact they’re fried in poison they call vegetable oil, but mostly, I stick to food I cook at home these days.”

“Don’t apologize. It’s just one more way you fit here. Hailey and Ghost won’t eat most processed foods, either. Silver doesn’t eat much most days, but then other days he eats half his body weight, but he mostly sticks to quality proteins grown in fields and not factories. Mikey drinks a lot of craft beer and eats a lot of steaks, and he likes them from the bikers just because they taste better. It isn’t that he’s trying to eat clean, but he mostly does.”

Bran’s house is huge even if you think it’s just the above-ground portions, but once you understand there are multiple levels underground, it becomes massive. I’m guessing probably thirty-thousand square feet at a minimum, but he has a lot of people who live there. He’s a vampire, and he has a flock of around fifteen people, plus a cook, a driver, a security team, housecleaners, and an ever-present butler.Everyonelives on the premises full-time. Some of the flock also have on-site jobs, like yard maintenance and taking care of the pool. Most are college kids, getting tuition and a free place to live in exchange for being sex-and-a-meal to a vampire, and they get a paycheck if they do extra work. They’re required to eat the foods his cook prepares for them, and must get special permission to eat at restaurants. He likes their blood to be flavored a certain way, after all.

But his house is formal. It’s a mansion more than a home. A showplace perched high on a mountain, with huge windows and fantastic views of the city and river below.

Will’s mansion was a welcominghome. There were still views of the city from the upper floors, but it was an entirely different feel.

Also, I was guessing twelve thousand square feet, which is still quite big, but I thought I’d be able to find my way around this house after a few days. I’d been at Bran’s house formonthsand had never been able to find my way around beyond the main paths I took daily. I swear it felt like Hogwarts sometimes, with moving hallways that took you to a different place the day before. I was assured that wasn’t the case, but it sure felt like it.

I seared the steaks in a cast iron pan while Will started homemade biscuits from scratch. The biscuits went into the oven shortly after the steaks, about the time Davy arrived, naked, while Will and I were in matching robes. “Break a dozen eggs and beat them, boy. You put the plug in?”

“I did, Master, and I washed my hands.”

“Can we do two dozen eggs?” I asked. “I’m pretty hungry.”

I’d asked for two steaks as well. My appetite was going to be hard to explain to strangers who don’t know about shifters.

“Of course, Sir,” Davy said. “We cook three or sometimes four dozen when we have a full house. Angie keeps us well stocked on breakfast food.”

“Micca likes honey, so get it out when you finish,” Will told Davy. “Along with whatever you want on your biscuits. Do you want me to make gravy?”

“No thank you, Master. The peach preserves you had delivered from the Amish farm sounds perfect this morning.”

We had a wonderful breakfast, a relaxing swim, and then I watched the two of them work out while I floated in the pool. Will was a demanding physical trainer, pushing Davy’s core reps until he was clearly in pain, insisting his form be perfect throughout, but Will did more reps than he required of Davy, so I just watched and observed.

It wouldn’t do for me to exercise in front of them. I can lift well over a thousand pounds over my head in my bear form, and around eight hundred pounds in my human form.

“Davy and I need to have a conversation about how and when we first go out in public together,” Will told me when he joined me in the pool after their workout. “My publicist and media manager will be here in a few hours for that conversation. Probably a few other people, too. My first question to you is whether you want to be part of that? Do we all three go out together? Or just me and Davy? How public are you going to be in the future, with the issues around your job?”

“Aaron and Nathan came up with a solution,” I reminded him. “It means I have to be all decked out anytime I’m seen out with you, but I’d probably want to be anyway, if people might take pictures they’ll post online.” But that only answered part of his question. “I like both of you, and every hour I spend with the two of you, I find more reasons to think this might work. So, yeah, I think maybe I’d like it to be the three of us.”

“Then it will be.”

We watched Davy go into the house, and Will said, “He has to write three hundred lines a day. We had an issue where he held something emotional back from me because he thought it was his problem, and he didn’t want to bother me with it. He spent a week and a half writing lines stating anything that affects him is my business. Now, his line is ‘I follow Master’s rules,’ and since one of my rules is that anything affecting him is my business…” He sighed. “It’s a short sentence, but it took him two and a half hours yesterday. We’ll see how he does with it today. I’d originally planned to make him keep at it every day while he’s off work, and then reduce the number when he returns to his job, but I haven’t told him my plans, which means I’m free to change them. We’ll see how it goes.”

I didn’t ask any questions, figuring I wasn’t close enough to them to know what had bothered Davy that he’d kept from his Master, but then a few minutes later, Will explained the whole situation with Davy’s history, and his grandparents, and my heart broke for Davy. I’d known some of his history, the part about learning upholstery in prison because a former Master had made him transport drugs, but none of the rest.

“Thanks for telling me. He’s come a long way.”

“He has, and it’s important you know where he’s coming from.”

Chapter 16

Davy