My Panther Mate & Our Little Cub novel Chapter 120

Chapter 120 Visit

Taylor gripped Zachary’s hand and peeked out from behind him. “Can we really?”

Finished

“Of course.” Winge crouched down and ruffled Taylor’s curly hair, unable to help himself. “You’re absolutely adorable.”

Taylor ducked his head with a bashful little smile.

Winge’s gaze shifted to Jaden’s face, and he reached out, but Jaden stepped back two paces with immediate wariness.

Winge turned to Matthew instead and laughed. “Just as I thought. Even the personalities match.”

As they spoke, several more winged figures descended from above in quick succession, all of them with the same pale golden hair, grey–green wings, and light brown eyes.

The Goldfinch tribe chieftain led them. “Donald, are you heading to the merfolk tribe to trade for salt?”

Donald nodded. “Yes. The cold season might come early this year. You should plan to make your trip soon

too.”

“We’ll start getting ready shortly.”

Several of the Goldfinch folk noticed the woven vine baskets sitting on the ground and looked at them with open curiosity. “What are those?”

Ethan lifted one to show them. “Carrying vessels. For hauling things.”

“Those look incredibly convenient.”

“Where did you trade for them?”

Daniel straightened up with visible pride. “We made those ourselves.”

“You made them yourselves?” The Goldfinch folk were genuinely astonished, and one of them quickly asked, “Could we trade something for a few?”

Donald smiled. “Come to our settlement, and we can work something out.

“These ones are spoken for. They’re heading to the merfolk tribe with us.”

The Goldfinch folk exchanged eager looks with their chieftain..

The chieftain picked one up and tested the weight. It was impressively light.

His tribe’s therians had a hard time taking down large animals, which meant beast hide was always in short supply. They’d had to trade with other tribes for the material to make carrying pouches for years.

Vessels woven from plant matter might require far less to trade for than beast hide typically did.

That night, Matthew’s group made camp with the Goldfinch tribe.

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Finished

Their hosts brought fresh fruit and cool, sweet water from a mountain spring as a gesture of welcome/

Zachary’s attention was immediately pulled to a cluster of large pale–colored roots someone had set out. Turnips.

Matthew watched Zachary stare at them with complete absorption, then took one and placed it directly in his hands. “You want these?”

Zachary bit into it. It was crisp and sweet with a for.

He nodded and looked at Matthew. “When

clean, faint bite at the end, exactly what he’d been hoping

back,

“we trade them for some of these?”

have plenty of those in our settlement. Could we

and carriers”

The Goldfinch folk nearby perkedntly:

trade them for those things you called

at that.

Zachary glanced at Matthew.

“Come to Black Panther Tribe and ask for Zachary,” Matthew said simply.

It was a fair representation of things. At this point, Zachary’s standing within the tribe, especially when it came to anything food–related, exceeded nearly everyone else’s.

With the Goldfinch tribe’s cookware on loan, the group tasted their first hot broth in days out on the road.

Both cubs looked ready to bury their faces in their bowls.

The fragrance drifting from the pot reached the Goldfinch folk and pulled them in, one by one. It was a scent none of them had ever encountered before.

In return for the warm hospitality, the Black Panther therians shared the food with their hosts.

“This broth is extraordinary.”

“What is that?”

“How does anything taste this good?”

The Goldfinch folk’s eyes lit up with pure, astonished delight. The moment the flavor hit their tongues, the reaction was immediate and total. They pressed forward eagerly for more, and by the end, the bowls had been licked completely clean.

“What did you put in the soup?”

“We’ve never tasted anything like this.”

Within moments, a considerable crowd of Goldfinch folk had gathered in the space around them, and expressions of wonder rippled through the group in continuous waves.

Yael turned to Kyle. “Were we this bad when we first tried it?”

Kyle considered. “More or less.”

Daniel was characteristically candid. “Probably worse, honestly.”

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Seeing the crowd swell around them, Zachary quietly shifted further behind Matthew, trying to put something between himself and all those eyes.

Matthew straightened his posture without a word, more than happy to act as a barrier. He also reached back and took Zachary’s hand, quiet and unhurried about it.

Taylor held his head high and listened to the

were directed at him personally.

Jaden’s mood appeared to be equally excellent.

Sounds around them as though every compliment

When night fell, Matthew drew on the lesson from the evening before. He gripped both small black cubs by the scruff of their necks, carried them directly to Yael, and made clear that by whatever means necessary they were not to come back.

The price was that Yael would be the first person notified the next time Zachary prepared something new

Yael accepted the terms with great enthusiasm and immediately pulled Taylor and Jaden into an iron grip keeping them locked against him no matter how vigorously they squirmed.

Meanwhile, Zachary needed to use the facilities, and Matthew went with him.

Zachary didn’t let him get too close, but Matthew had a gift for drifting nearer without appearing to try, using his exceptional night vision to watch with a directness that was frankly shameless.

His own reaction to what he saw created a separate problem he had to take care of afterward.

When Zachary went to wash up at the stream nearby, Matthew accompanied him, staying close enough that their bodies nearly touched. He wrapped his arms around Zachary’s waist from behind and explained that the stones along the bank were slippery and he was simply being cautious.

Before bed, Zachary looked around and noticed the two cubs were missing. “Where are Jaden and Taylor?”

Matthew glanced at the two small captives currently pinned under Yael’s arm and said with complete calm, “They wanted to sleep with Yael tonight.”

“Oh.” Zachary sounded genuinely a little disappointed.

With the cubs absent and no possibility of interruption, Matthew was considerably bolder than usual with Zachary once they settled in. There was nuzzling, there was pressing close, and there was a great deal of warmth exchanged in the dark.

He’d gotten quite daring.

He’d noticed, after all, that in his black panther form, Zachary extended him a remarkable amount of patience and latitude that he otherwise might not have.

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