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self-controlled for that kind of nonsense. With a determined sigh, she tackled the first demanding email on her list, pushing aside all thoughts of wickedly teasing green eyes.
     
     
    ~~~
     
     
    Even though the sun had long set, the night air was still warm on this late-summer night. Tamsin had her head propped up on one hand as she read through a stack of petitions. With her other hand she scrawled her initials on each one, yay or nay as she saw fit. She'd spent the last several hours very carefully reading the details of each petition in the online files accessible only to her and the rest of the council members. The printed signature pages made up a stack nearly an inch thick. Trevor had left her with his decisive notes on each petition as to whether or not he thought it should be granted.
    Petitions were an extremely old-fashioned method of arguing a case for what someone wanted. But the system worked. Despite her somewhat bleary-eyed state, Tamsin plowed through. She wanted to finish them tonight, so she could bring them to the Council meeting in the morning as completed documents. Heaving a sigh, she got back to it.
    Another twenty minutes passed before she could finally set down her pen. Gently rolling her head about on her shoulders, she finally sat up and stretched. Her neck and back twinged at her, letting her know that sitting for so many hours bent over paperwork was not the ideal situation. Her stomach rumbled as well. Tamsin glanced at the clock on the wall above her desk. Nearly 2a.m. If she really wanted to, she could wake up one of the kitchen staff and have them bring her a snack. But that never had been Tamsin's style, not even in the premodern era when a household full of servants was de rigueur. Instead, she rolled her chair back from her desk and padded out of her office to head down the long hallway and then downstairs to the kitchen.
    The estate's main kitchen was an enormous, state-of-the-art affair filled with every kind of modern gizmo that struck the fancy of the chef and her staff, as well as several walk-in coolers and freezers, a temperature controlled wine room filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of the best vintages, and the fanciest commercial coffee and espresso maker available on the market, among other toys. This main kitchen always had a selection of quick food available to anyone who needed a snack, no matter the time of day or night. Werewolves had large appetites.
    Tamsin rifled around in one of the smaller refrigerators where easy snacks were kept for the taking. It was of course still filled with leftover sweets and treats from the wedding reception. Her eyes lit up as she spied a plate of one of the luscious devil's food chocolate type cakes she particularly enjoyed at the reception. Stomach rumbling even more, she pulled it out to cut herself a generous slice. Armed with that and a glass of ice water, she sat at the small table nestled into an out-of-the-way corner of the kitchen meant precisely for those who wanted to grab a quick snack while staying out of the way of any current preparations that might be going on in the place.
    Although Tamsin had the ability, just as any shifter did, to magically adjust her appearance to mimic the latest fashionable body type, she never did. Oh, she knew she was blessed with natural good looks. To be honest, the vast majority of werewolves were. They were a healthy bunch, and since they made up less than 10% of the human or at least somewhat human population of the planet, they kept tight control over their own genetics. Tamsin liked her food, and she never once enjoyed any of the ridiculous fads that swept many corners of the world with demands that women be stick-thin or caricatured as overly sexualized little children's dolls. While she wasn't nearly as curvy as her friend and now sister-in-law Cassie, and in fact Cassie considered her slim by comparison, Tamsin was considered more generously sized than most female