Gizelle paused in the doorway, peering around the doorjam.

Scarlet was angry.

Scarlet was often angry when she got the thick envelopes from the lawyer who didn’t live on the island.

Everyone else avoided Scarlet as much as they could when those envelopes came in the mail, going about their day-to-day jobs at the resort.

But Gizelle actually liked it when Scarlet was angry. The prickly feeling made her feel safe, like Scarlet’s energy was a shield that kept other bad things away.

The red-haired woman looked up when Gizelle padded into her office, and she pushed the paperwork away to force a smile.

“Gizelle,” Scarlet said, carefully gentle.

Everyone was carefully gentle with Gizelle.

Gizelle trailed around the room, touching the potted plants and the spines of the old books.

“My head was quiet this morning,” she said, coming to stand beside Scarlet and look down at the paperwork spread out in front of her. “Can we read that?”

“This isn’t very interesting,” Scarlet lied with a dry, humorless chuckle. She put it into a pile, tapping it briskly into order. “Let’s read another chapter of The Secret Garden and practice some of your letters.”

Gizelle fidgeted as Scarlet put the papers back in their dread-steeped envelope and stood up. “Ally says she learned to read as a little kid,” she said dejectedly.

“Most people do,” Scarlet said. She gave Gizelle a searching look. “You don’t have to feel bad, though. I didn’t learn to read until I was grown up, either.”

Gizelle felt brighter. “You didn’t?”

Scarlet shook her vivid head.

“Who taught you?” Gizelle asked.

“A dear friend,” Scarlet said softly. “A dear friend who knew that reading would give me what I needed to understand people”

“I’d like to understand people,” Gizelle said wistfully.

They walked together out to the open lawn behind Scarlet’s room and settled into the grass to read. Other people seemed to prefer chairs, but Scarlet liked to sit on the ground like Gizelle did. Gizelle tucked her skirt neatly under her knees, imitating Scarlet’s pose.

“Did you grow up in a zoo, too?”

Gizelle didn’t remember the zoo she’d been rescued from, but she had heard enough stories to piece together where people thought she came from. A bad man had collected shifters in a prison where he did awful things to them.

No one would tell her what the awful things were.

Scarlet, opening the book in her lap, gave Gizelle an amused look under her eyelashes. Scarlet never talked about her life, not to anyone, not just not to Gizelle, which made Gizelle feel less odd.

Scarlet’s reading voice was low and calm, and there were pictures that Gizelle could look at over her shoulder. When the chapter ended, too soon, the world came back.

“Can’t I learn to read without learning to write?” Gizelle asked, frowning over the disappointing mess she made copying Scarlet’s tidy handwriting.

“It has to do with how you learn,” Scarlet assured her. “How everyone learns. When you make your hands do it, it gets into your brain better.”

“Why doesn’t it look like it does in a book?” Gizelle chewed on her lip, trying to make herself finish out the page, but the letters slithered away from how she wanted them to look, and she couldn’t concentrate over the sound of feathers crowding her head.

“Scarlet?” She pushed away the noise.

“Yes, dear?” Scarlet was thinking about the lawyer’s letter again. Gizelle could tell because of the prickles around her.

“Do you think I could ever have a mate?”

That earned her all of Scarlet’s attention, prickles changing to little rays of surprise. “A mate?”

Gizelle picked at the edge of her paper. “Jenny and Laura and Bastian and Wrench all have mates. And Neal.” She missed Neal. Her gazelle missed Neal.

“Do you want a mate?” Scarlet asked pointedly.

“Don’t you?” Gizelle countered.

Scarlet was silent with surprise, as if no one had ever asked her that before.

“They seem really happy,” Gizelle said wistfully. “Like something they didn’t know was missing was found. I’ve got a lot of missing parts, would a mate fix them?”

“I don’t know if a mate could bring your memories back,” Scarlet said frankly, but slowly, like she was thinking carefully about her answer. “And I don’t know if you’d want them to. And there are… other parts to being mated.”

“Sex,” Gizelle said impatiently. “I know about that.”

“What do you know about it?” Scarlet asked suspiciously.

“I’ve seen the pictures in the magazines at The Den,” Gizelle said defensively, referring to the staff house where most of the bachelors lived. A few of them had mates that lived there now, and the magazines had gotten more scarce. “And Breck told me all about it.”

Scarlet made a funny face. “Breck?”

“He’s an authority on the subject,” Gizelle said confidently, repeating what the leopard shifter waiter had told her. “And he wanted to make sure that I could make up my own mind about it when I was ready. So I wouldn’t be surprised or let someone take advantage of me.”

“That’s... wise,” Scarlet conceded. She didn’t sound particularly happy about it, though.

“I’m not a child,” Gizelle insisted.

“I know,” Scarlet said, almost mournfully.

That reminded Gizelle of something else. “Travis said he was decorating for Christmas today, but he didn’t have time to explain it to me. And Ally keeps talking about it, but she doesn’t make any sense.”

“Christmas? Christmas doesn’t have to make sense,” Scarlet said warmly, following Gizelle’s change of topic without hesitation. “Christmas is a holiday we celebrate near the end of the year. People give each other presents, and there is singing, and Chef will make special food.”

That sounded nice. “What kind of food?” Gizelle asked. “What are presents? Will Saina sing?”

Scarlet grinned at her, all warm and fuzzy with memories. “I had forgotten that this would be your first Christmas. You’ll get to try figgy pudding and sugar cookies.”

Figgy pudding sounded questionable, but Gizelle knew she liked cookies and sugar.

Scarlet continued, “Presents are special gifts that friends and family give each other. Usually little things, like books or clothing or candy. They get wrapped in special paper and tied with bows and we all open them together on Christmas Day.”

That sounded… baffling, but Scarlet was looking at her with an encouraging smile, clearly expecting some kind of reaction.

“I don’t have anything to give as a present,” Gizelle said hesitantly. If it was a reciprocal thing, Christmas probably wasn’t for her.

“I could help you make something,” Scarlet promised warmly. “It’s not really about what the present is as much as it is about the giving. It reminds people that we’re thinking about them.”

“Alright,” Gizelle agreed. She thought about people a lot.

They were interrupted by the beep of the resort van at the entrance that announced a new group of guests was arriving. Gizelle leaped to her feet, scattering her lesson papers.

“I should go,” Gizelle said swiftly. New people were always unnerving and Scarlet would be busy.

She was concentrating so hard on remembering not to shift, not to be afraid, not to be weird that she got all the way down the path to the bar before she realized that she’d left her papers all over the lawn.

Tropical Christmas Stag will be out Christmas 2018… be sure to to get an alert when it comes out! And be sure to scroll one more page for another special sneak preview involving Gizelle.