The Queen of Dauphine Street by Thea de Salle

Author:Thea de Salle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Star

When Maddy woke, the room looked dark, but the hour on the clock read past ten. She stretched beneath her sheets, her robe tangled around her torso and requiring immediate adjusting. An unmelodious duet of snores sounded from her left, and she cracked an eye. Not two feet away from her, Darren Sanders slept, his mouth open, a soft rumble gurgling from his throat. Behind him, her paw looped around his waist, her giant head carving a dent in the back end of Darren’s pillow, was Capulet. Their snores were point and counterpoint—Darren let loose, Cappy would echo it a second later.

That Maddy had slept through it was nigh miraculous.

It was adorable, and so Maddy did what any self-respecting asshole would do and grabbed her cell phone to capture it. She got a good thirty seconds of proof of Darren’s tiger tryst before she texted Richter to come collect the cat for her elevensies. He’d already grabbed her earlier to do the breakfast and morning pee routine, but soon it’d be feeding time two, and while Cappy didn’t pose a threat to anyone—well, beyond the fact that she was a tiger, which did come with certain undeniable dangers—she got awfully loud and obnoxious until meat was thrust into her maw.

Which Maddy liked to say she got from her mama. Maddy got awfully cranky when she’d been denied a proper serving of meat for too long; people could take that as they wished.

Richter responded with a thumbs-up, so Maddy crawled from bed to find some proper deck-side clothes. A T-shirt, a pair of yoga pants. She ran a comb through her hair and clipped it into a sloppy bun on top of her head. Behind her, Darren mumbled something unintelligible before rolling onto his other hip and cuddling up to the broadest, hairiest chest he’d probably ever encountered. Cappy was all too happy to have a new human teddy bear, so she licked his hair. As Maddy had discovered time and again, grooming was an appropriate sign of affection in the tiger world.

“Babe?” Darren called out. But it came out muffled because his face was mid–tiger chest. Maddy tittered, and then she giggled, and then she laughed. Darren surfaced, spitting out tiger fur. His sleepy gaze didn’t fix on Maddy, but on the beautiful black and orange face inches from his own. “You have got to brush those fangs, Cappy. You smell how I imagine sadness smells. Holy shit.”

“It’s a little coppery. You get used to it,” Maddy announced, perching in one of her chairs. Darren eyeballed her before running a hand down Cappy’s side. The cat responded with a stretch and a yawn wherein she unhinged her jaw and flashed a zillion white teeth.

“Whoa. My life just flashed before my eyes,” he said, but the actions—voracious pets and ear rubs to a cat groaning in rapture—didn’t match the sentiment.

“I see we’re playing hard to get. You, not the cat. She’s a slattern for being pet. You’re just too stubborn to admit you’re smitten with my kitten, dove.

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