Page 56 of Beasts of Mine

Evie's face lit immediately.

“Thank you,” Evie told Luca, lifting the camera as she adjusted the settings with quick, practiced movements and shifted several feet sideways.

I watched her for roughly two seconds before walking directly into the frame.

Evie lowered the camera.

“Really?” Evie asked me, staring over the top of it while I sat neatly beside Luca and arranged my paws in front of me.

You're photographing leopards. I am a leopard, I reminded Evie, lifting my chin because the logic seemed perfectly sound.

“You have an attention problem,” Evie told me, raising the camera again while she visibly fought a smile.

I liked that description. Luca looked considerably less impressed. For the next several minutes, Evie moved quietly around us while sunlight shifted through the canopy. She photographed Luca from one angle, changed position, and took several more. When I adjusted my own position so I was visible again, she lowered the camera.

“Could you not?” Evie asked me, looking at me over the top of the camera while exasperation competed with amusement on her face.

The light is better here, I told Evie, sitting in the brighter patch I'd selected while Luca's ears slowly moved backward.

“You're ruining his picture,” Evie informed me, pointing toward Luca while he remained exactly where she'd asked him to stay.

Then photograph both of us, I told Evie, settling more comfortably beside my packmate as though I'd solved the problem for her.

Luca turned his head.

You don't have to be in every photograph, Luca told me, his patient tone carrying the warning he was too polite to state directly.

Why wouldn't I be? I asked Luca, genuinely curious while Evie's shoulders began to shake behind the camera.

She was laughing.

I liked that too. Eventually, Evie lowered the camera and looked toward Malek, her eyes moving from him to Luca and finally to me.

“Actually, can all three of you stay there?” Evie asked us, backing toward the creek while she adjusted the lens.

Malek stood, and Evie's camera immediately followed the movement.

Interesting.

He crossed the clearing and settled between Luca and me, larger through the shoulders than either of us even in this form. I bumped him with mine.

Malek shoved me hard enough to move me several inches.

I pushed back. Luca sat on Malek's other side and gave us both the exhausted stare he normally reserved for situations he considered beneath his involvement.

Evie's camera clicked repeatedly.

For the next few minutes, I stopped interfering long enough to watch her work, and that explained something else about Malek. Evie didn't simply enjoy photography. She became absorbed by it.

The woman who'd been laughing and arguing with us moments earlier narrowed down to the camera in her hands and whatever she saw through the lens. She crouched close enough to the creek that one knee darkened against the wet ground, shifted whenever the light changed, brushed loose hair away with the back of her wrist rather than lower the camera, and muttered quietly whenever something didn't work the way she wanted.

There was an intensity to her that I hadn't expected. I didn't care about cameras, but I cared that she cared that much.

I stood.

Evie's camera immediately dropped.

“Seriously, you are making this unnecessarily difficult,” Evie told me, staring while I circled once before resettling.