“We’ll be down in a minute, ass**le!” Ephraim snapped, grabbing Madison by the ankles and pulling her back where she belonged.

“Are you crazy?” Madison hissed, slapping at his hands as she tried to crawl away from him, but he wasn’t having that.

He yanked her right back and leaned down, sliding his tongue through her wet slit. She let out a choked moan as her fingers threaded through his hair, alternating between pushing him away and pulling his mouth tightly against her.

“I’m still waiting!” Kale growled.

“Keep waiting!” Ephraim shot back, beyond annoyed with the pain in the ass shifter. Next time the bastard left for one of his trips, Ephraim was having all the locks and security codes changed.

The bastard had to go, Ephraim decided as Madison once again tried to shove him away as she attempted to crawl out of his reach. He’d waited all night to touch her and he wasn’t about to let that bastard wreck this.

“Just ignore him,” he hissed as he pulled Madison back towards him.

“Are you kidding me?” Madison hissed back, slapping at his hands.

“He’ll get bored and eventually leave,” Ephraim hissed back, managing to pull her closer.

“No, I really won’t,” Kale announced cheerfully, effectively ruining what had promised to be a very satisfying morning.

He wasn’t exactly surprised when everything suddenly took on shades of red as he watched Madison scramble off the bed and race for the bathroom. He practically shook with rage as he slowly got to his feet, his arousal a thing of the past as he focused all of his anger on the soon-to-be dead bastard on the other side of the bedroom door.

Killing the shifter would piss Izzy off, but he was pretty sure that she’d eventually forgive him if he kept her well supplied with sweets. It would probably take her a few years to forgive him, but tearing Kale apart with his bare hands would be worth her cute little glares. Then again, he could just simply lie to his daughter-in-law and tell her that he’d gone into bloodlust and “accidentally” torn the bastard apart.

At the moment it sounded like a reasonable plan, so he decided to go with it. He unlocked the bedroom door and yanked it open, smiling grimly as he spotted his prey leaning against the far wall.

“About f**king time,” Kale muttered in disgust as he pushed away from the wall and started heading down the hall, taking him by surprise.

The fact that the shifter hadn’t taunted him over the interrupted sex and goaded him into a fistfight caught him off-guard. Putting off his need to kill the bastard for the moment, he reluctantly followed.

“What’s the rush?” he asked, realizing that this was the first time since the shifter had invited himself to move in that he was not only willingly attending a meeting, but that he was in a rush to get to it.

“A member of the council is here,” Kale said, not bothering to slow his pace as he turned down the left hallway.

“Are you in a rush to beat the shit out of this one too?” Ephraim asked, catching up with the shifter as he descended the stairs to the main foyer.

“He shouldn’t have come between me and the last cupcake,” was all Kale said, lying his ass off and trying to downplay the real reason why he’d made a bloody and bruised Sentinel Council representative flee from the mansion as fast as his dislocated knee would carry him.

The representative had been sent to the mansion to check on their security, look in on the children, and to make sure that their newest inhabitants, a Pyte couple, were following the rules. Caine was still on probation for the destruction he’d caused years ago as well as for turning his mate, Danni, without the Council’s permission.

Not that they would have given him permission had he asked. From what he’d heard and knew about the Council, they didn’t trust Caine. The only reason that he wasn’t at this moment encased in cement and rotting for eternity in the bottom of the ocean or in a volcano somewhere was because his mate was the daughter of Sentinels and had been a well-respected member of their human squad. They also wanted to keep her now that she was a Pyte.

They all knew that the Sentinel Council had released Caine in the hopes to use his mate to control him and keep him working for the Council. As long as Danni depended on the Council to supply her with demon blood to keep the cancer that had followed her into immortality at bay, the couple didn’t have much of a choice. He hadn’t said anything, but he seriously doubted that the Council was in much of a rush to cure Danni and lose the only hold they had over the Pyte couple.

The representative the Council had sent last time had made it more than obvious that the Council didn’t trust Caine. The little bastard followed him around, taking notes on everything that Caine said or did until the Pyte finally had enough, grabbed his mate and took off for a few days. With his main reason for visiting gone, the representative had turned his attention on the rest of them.

When the little bastard had started to pay a little too much attention to his sons and made suggestions that he should talk to Madison and consider sending their young children to one of the Sentinel compounds in Europe for training, Ephraim had calmly listened to the man before he grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and hung him upside down from the second floor balcony.

After that, the representative had focused his attention elsewhere for the remainder of his stay, not that it had been very long once the dumb bastard had made the mistake of describing Izzy as a useless cripple in what he probably thought was a private phone conversation with one of his superiors. Then again, if the representative had known that the shifter had been standing behind him at the time, he probably would have waited until he was well away from the mansion before he called his superior to give his report.

“I don’t understand why you don’t believe me,” Izzy said with an adorable pout as Chris carried her into the hallway and joined them as they headed towards the large conference room in the basement. “It was him!” she said in exasperation as she pointed an accusing finger in Kale’s direction.

“Uh huh,” Chris sighed absently, obviously not believing the little sugar addict.

Ephraim didn’t need to ask to know what the two of them were fighting about. He’d caught part of the conversation going on in Kale’s room about an hour ago when he’d walked into the foyer. When he’d realized that Izzy had been caught binging again, he’d blocked out the rest of the conversation and focused on a hot shower and getting his mate to do all the naughty things that he’d been fantasizing about all night.

“I’m really hurt that you don’t believe me,” Izzy said softly, sounding upset as she looked up at his son with doe-like eyes as she allowed her little chin to tremble.

Ephraim had to turn his head and force a cough to hide his chuckle. He knew that she was lying. He could smell the chocolate and sugar smothering her scent. She was so damn adorable sometimes.

“You’re not getting cake for breakfast so just drop it,” Chris said firmly, probably hoping that his tone would be enough to put an end to the sugar addict’s pleas.

“But-”

“Drop it.”

“It wasn’t me, I sw-”

“Let it go.”

“If you would just ask him, he’d tell you!” she protested, gesturing wildly to the shifter who simply sighed and continued walking ahead of them towards the conference room.