She turns around and stretches up on tiptoe and nips him on the cheek with her teeth, and his knees buckle. He’s biggest and strongest pretty much everywhere he goes, but no matter what other people might think, he knows that if the children were on the other side of a fire, she’d be quicker than him. She’s complicated and unruly and argumentative and really not very easy to please, but he loves her most of all for her brutally uncompromising protective instinct.
