Chapter 25
TRISTAN
Cooking with Haisley was inexplicably comfortable.
She took complete charge of the task, giving him very specific decisions to make, and otherwise she ran the show.
They measured and mixed and shaped and kneaded.
At first, Haisley stayed carefully out of his reach, and Tristan was equally careful to not reach for her, but after a few batches of dough and a pan of hot cookies that nearly fell to floor when they both flinched back from contact, Haisley was touching his shoulder to direct him and they were brushing against each other a little more than was strictly necessary in the roomy kitchen.
“Tell me more about being a shapeshifter,” Haisley said, when they finally hit a natural break in the cooking. “Were you bitten by a panda at a zoo?” She had a bowl of chocolate batter and was using her finger to clean it. “Mad scientist experiments?”
“Nothing so dramatic,” Tristan said. He had a stirring paddle from the same batch and was trying to figure out how to lick the sweet batter from between the vanes without getting it on his nose. “My dad was a panda bear shifter. My mom was a squirrel.”
“It’s hereditary, then? Is it a dominant gene?”
“It seems to be, yes. There aren’t many textbooks on it, of course.”
“Well, are there a lot of you? I mean, for all I know, there’s a whole underground civilization of shifters with their own shifter universities and academic publishing. You said the resort was exclusive, what else is there? How blind have I been all my life?”
“You haven’t been blind at all,” Tristan assured her. “It’s a very closely-guarded secret.”
“You’ve got chocolate on your nose,” Haisley pointed out.
Tristan’s efforts to lick the paddle without getting on his face had been in vain. He went to the sink to wash his hands and nose. “You’re taking this very well,” he said, too soon.