Page 20 of Overbooked at Dragon's Landing

As it turned out, my mate did not have the sink fixed the way it needed to be. But he had all the parts I needed, and I wasable to get it done right. It was counterintuitive because it wasn’t meant to go straight down, but we got it.

Lion came in with us, standing outside the bathroom door. It was then I pieced together that he probably had gotten wet from the sink, and that’s why he was outside in the sun. Smart cat. The rest of the time, he was following my mate.

By the time we were ready to go to bed, the house was in really good shape. Our items were unpacked, with a few exceptions, and those were unloaded from the car waiting for a place to go. The guest rooms still needed to be worked on, but for the most part, the house was ready for us to make it a home. And that’s exactly what I planned to do.

“Hey.” Ralph plopped into the middle of the bed. “I call the middle today.”

“And how did you decide that it was your turn to call anything?” Trace teased.

“Because I’m the cutest.”

Trace and I both shook our heads.

“I’m the funniest?”

“Definitely not.” I threw a pillow at him.

“How about because you’re a blanket hog, Craig, and I don’t want to end up with a cold ass?” He gave me some serious side-eye.

“Fine. That one’s fair.” I did enjoy being in a little cocoon of warmth.

“Hey, wait. Does that mean I have the cold ass?” Trace asked.

“Possibly.” I shrugged. I couldn’t guarantee anything. It wasn’t an active choice I made. It wasn’t my fault my sleeping self got cover greedy.

“That’s okay. I’ll just have to scootch closer to my mates.”

He was getting no complaints from me there.

Chapter Fifteen

Ralph

It had been a couple of weeks since we moved in, and our life here was wonderful. It took me but a second to get used to not being in the city. Sure, I missed some of my friends, but I was already making new ones here, and I’d never been quite the social butterfly that Craig had.

We divided up the different chores around the house, and I got lawn mowing. At the time, we had a riding mower, and I thought that would be cool. And it had been—the first and only time it worked. Now, I had a little push mower, and I was an hour or two into mowing for the day. I didn’t mind the physical exertion of it or the time that it took to do, but the noise was starting to drive me mad. I was grateful to be nearly done for the week.

I put noise-canceling headphones on my mental list of things to pick up in town.

Tonight was my turn to cook, and I’d gone to the market and gotten the ingredients for chili. Craig had been wanting it lately, and who was I to deny him? He always loved my chili. It was pretty good, and even though I called it my chili, it had been my aunt’s—the thing she brought to every single family event we ever had. It was always the first dish gone.

I took a shower to get cleaned up from the sweaty, grassy mess I was and went into the kitchen to get started. I cheated, using canned beans instead of dried. I didn’t find a large enough difference between the two-day process to get the beans ready to cook and the cans. And yeah, there were faster ways to get the beans the way you wanted them, but I always followed my aunt’s method. When I started from dried beans and did them the way she taught me, that was a long-ass process.

My mates were out in town, grabbing some cat food and a cat condo from the pet store. It was fair to say that Lion was a little bit spoiled. And by a little bit, I meant a whole lot.

It was funny because when I was home and Trace wasn’t, the cat was nowhere to be seen. The second Trace walked in the door—if not the second he pulled into the driveway—that little cat was by his side. It was all kinds of adorable.

With the chili put together and simmering, I was setting the table as they pulled in. They didn’t get a cat condo. They got a cat condo complex. The thing was huge.

“Where should we put it?” Trace asked Lion, as if the cat was going to be able to answer him. “It’s gonna be pretty big.”

He then gave the cat the dimensions. Even if he were a shifter, which he wasn’t, most people didn’t understand the kind of dimensionality he was reading off the box—not in a real way, anyway.

“What do you think?” He turned to our mate, who was trying to get the feather on the string for part of the condo.

I wasn’t sure exactly where it would go, but Lion would either ignore it or destroy it in 2.5 milliseconds. It could go either way.

“I think—I think—” He dropped what he was working on and bolted into the bathroom, his hand in front of his mouth.

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