“You think I don’t see it?” She poked him in the shoulder. “You, the way you look at my baby?”

Nobody dared attack Emmett. He wasn’t one of the more volatile leopards in DarkRiver, but he was beyond dangerous when riled. And wouldn’t all his trainees just love to see him now, not daring to lift a finger for fear of bruising Alex. “How do I look at her?”

Alex narrowed her eyes. “Like a big cat with its food.” She hooked her hands into claws and made as if she was shoving others aside. “Like that.”

“You have a problem with that?”

“I have a problem with every man who wants to date my daughter.” With that, Alex turned and walked back to the counter. “And her father, he has twice the problem.”

Emmett wondered if Alex expected that to scare him off. “I grew up in a pack.” He was used to nosy packmates, snarling fathers, ferally protective mothers.

Amber smiled when Alex sniffed and turned away. “They have problems with women, too,” she said in a mock-whisper. “When I started dating Jet, Alex told me if I broke his heart, she’d beat me with a rolling pin.”

Alex waved the very same implement in Amber’s direction. “Don’t you forget it.”

Laughing, Amber hugged Alex. “She’s okay, Mom. Ria will bounce back—better than you or I ever would.”

That was when Ria’s male relatives returned. Her father’s first question was, “Who the hell is he?”

TWO

Ria sat back in the bubble bath her grandmother had drawn and sighed.

A light knock came moments later.

“It’s okay, Popo.”

Her grandmother came in. Though tiny, with a face that bore the million marks of a life well-lived, her stride was steady and her eyes clear. Miaoling Olivier had a whole heap of decades left in her yet, as she liked to say. Now, she walked in and took a seat on the closed lid of the toilet as Ria’s father began yelling in the kitchen.