by Selena Scott
"I have question," he said, his dark eyes reserved.
"Okay," Dora said, leaning against the door jamb. "Shoot."
Emin rubbed a hand over his dark crop of hair. "When you investigated, and you realized that shifters were real, you believed it?"
Dora nodded slowly. "Maybe not at first. But the evidence I found in the abandoned labs was all pretty irrefutable."
"And you found evidence of other bear shifter families?”
“Well,” she shrugged, thinking hard. “Nothing that suggested families. But yeah, the evidence suggests that there are lots of other bear shifters in the world besides the Malashoviks if that’s what you’re asking.”
Emin nodded, thinking hard. His eyes flashed up to hers and Dora realized that he was nervous to ask what came next. “And there are other kinds of shifters as well?”
A small smile caught at Dora but she swallowed it down. “Harder to say. The labs have all seemed to deal mostly with bear shifters.”
Emin nodded again, looking down.
“But-” Dora said and had Emin’s head snapping back up. “I saw something outside of the last lab, the one that I got arrested at, that made me think otherwise.”
“What did you see?”
“You’re not going to believe me,” she said, remembering the night that she’d fled the lab, scared of the animal she thought she’d seen in the woods.
“I already do,” he replied, his eyes intense.
“I thought I saw a tiger in the woods. Like a real deal orange and black and white tiger. And the way it was hanging around the lab. It was like it maybe had a tie to it. I didn’t get the sense that it was wild.”
Emin rose, and paced to the window. “I knew it,” he muttered.
He would shift again tonight. Scour the woods. Search again for the creature that had been haunting his dreams. The flashing tiger that had left her scent all over his forest. The one who he knew was more woman than tiger. He would find her if it killed him.
When he turned back around, it was to see Dora studying him with eyes like ice blue lasers.
“You see too much, sister,” he said with a smile designed to scramble a woman’s brains.
It wasn’t the smile that had her standing up straight. It was the endearment. “Sister?” she echoed.
“Ah, yes. You have not thought of this yet?” he said, charmed by her dumbfounded look. “You wed tomorrow. And get yourself three brothers along with husband.”
Dora’s mouth fell flat open. She hadn’t thought of it. She turned at Danil’s hand on her shoulder.
Her head found his chest instantly and she’d never know the way the simple movement constricted his heart.
“You gave me a family,” she whispered up to him.
Danil reached up and slammed the bedroom door closed on Emin, giving them a bit of privacy in the hallway. “If you let me, I’ll give you all the family you can handle.”
She smiled up at him in a kiss so passionate, so filled with love, she barely recognized it. This kind of love was just something she was going to have to get used to.
She broke the kiss, still smiling. Knowing that no matter what happened, Danil would be there, bossing her around.
The End
Emin’s Mate
PROLOGUE
Twenty Years Ago
The little tiger lazed in a patch of sun, her tail ticking back and forth. She watched ice melt from the rock ledge in front of her. Drip, drip, drip. Rolling onto her back she opened her mouth and stretched out her leathery pink tongue to catch a drip. But she’d miscalculated and the drip landed right in her snout, making her chuff in sneezy delight.
She rolled away and let her eyes wander to the light through the leaves. Autumn, her favorite time of year, when the leaves matched the burning orange of her fur. She saw the blue sky winking through the patches of the leaves and she winked her eyes back, delighted with the world.
She never saw it coming. What had watched her in the shadows of the woods. Waited for the opportunity. When the little tiger was fully entranced with the world around her, completely vulnerable, the beast pounced, easily closing jaws around the little tiger’s throat.
“Glory,” the mother said to her child as she released the little tiger’s throat from her teeth. She gave her a loving nudge with her nose. “You’ve gotten distracted again.”
They didn’t speak with words, but rather with thoughts in one another’s heads.
The little tiger rolled up and fell into a crouch. “I’m not distracted now, Mom.” Glory lunged and her mother allowed herself to be forced backward.
The two tigers, the mother and her young, tossed each other a little ways down the mountain, snarling and laughing and pouncing.
Serena knew she was going to have to get more serious about teaching her daughter how to fight. How to defend herself. But Glory’s playful, curious nature made her a difficult student of combat.
Even now, in the middle of attempting to pin her mother down, Glory was distracted by two cardinals flirting in a nearby pine tree.
In less than the blink of an eye, Glory had leapt, alighted onto the branch below the birds to study them. The two creatures shot immediately into the air, ripped from their romantic haze by the presence of a tiger less than a foot from them. They could not have known that this little tiger would never have done them harm in a million years.
Well, it was something, Serena thought as she watched her daughter zip further up the tree with the dexterity of a monkey and the speed of a hawk. The girl was quick, hard to catch, agile. These, too, were tools in battle. Serena would do her best to teach her daughter how to fight hand to hand. Or paw to paw. But she wouldn’t change the girl’s nature.
No. A heart like that had to be protected at every cost.
CHAPTER ONE
Emin Malashovik frowned into his beer as he leaned over the dark wood bar. Normally he enjoyed a night out with one of his brothers. But tonight, Maxim’s firefighter friends were a bit too loud, a bit too rowdy, and Emin was nursing a headache.
Actually he’d been nursing a headache for damn near six months at this point and he was starting to get sick of it.
Emin was good with women. Always had been. He liked them. Always had. He liked the way they moved. The way they smelled. The curious things they chose to do with their hair, their fingernails. He liked their warmth.
And they liked him back.
He wasn’t accustomed to chasing a woman. Even if that woman was a tiger.
He knew there was a female tiger living in the woods outside of Spokane. His woods. He’d been tracking her for over six months and she’d evaded him at every turn. He was beginning to feel like the butt of a joke.
He wasn’t a hunter. He didn’t wish the tiger harm. In fact, he wanted to offer the tiger companionship, safety, freedom from fear. He knew that inside that tiger lived a human. Just like inside of him, right now sitting at that bar sipping a pilsner, lived a bear.
Emin turned and looked out onto the dance floor where Maxim twirled a tight little blonde. The bass of the music ground out and Maxim rearranged her, her back to his front. Maxim ground against her, bending his knees so he could whisper something into her ear.
The sight made Emin smile for a moment. Maxim was a good dancer. All three of Emin’s brothers were. And that pretty little number in Maxim’s arms had no idea that her ass was currently getting ground on by a bear shifter.
Speaking of shifting, Emin felt like he was just about to come out of his skin if he didn’t shift in a minute here. He loved being a man, his human form. In his human form he could enjoy the silk of a woman’s hair between his fingers. He could hold a paintbrush, savor that first sip of cold beer.
But every day, at least once every day, Emin needed to feel the sharp snap of twigs, the russet undergrowth of the forest floor; he needed to swallow the mountain air into lungs the size of barrel kegs as he galloped up the mountain in bear form. He needed fur, fang, and claw.
&nb
sp; The oldest and the youngest brothers in his family, Maxim and Danil, respectively, didn’t feel exactly the same way. They had melted into American civilization much more easily when their bear shifter family had immigrated to America from Belarus a decade ago. Maxim and Danil only needed to shift once a week or so. They held jobs with the humans and interacted every day.
Emin and Anton, the two middle brothers, needed the wilderness every day. They needed their bear out and wild and quiet as they wanted to be. The bustle of the city got to them both.
He figured there was no need to fight the inevitable. He needed his bear. So Emin finished his final sip of beer and tossed some bills on the bar for Charlie, the bartender. He turned to catch Maxim’s eye to say goodbye when a hand grabbed his shoulder.
“You aren’t leaving now, are you, handsome?” Charlie asked, leaning over the bar, her milk chocolate hair tumbling over one shoulder as she batted her dark blue eyes at Emin.
She was a nice girl, truly. And easy on the eyes. But they hadn’t been together in over a year, not after she’d started turning down other dates just to be with Emin. He’d explained, as gently as he could, that that wasn’t in the cards for them and stopped seeing her. He wasn’t cruel. And maybe he’d loved her a little. He just wasn’t looking for a wife.
Emin bit back a sigh. She still wanted to change that.
“I am tired. I go home,” Emin replied in his thick Belarusian accent, Slavic and blunt. His youngest brother, Danil, who was a lawyer, could speak English without the hint of an accent whenever he wanted, almost the same with Maxim. But Emin and Anton had never quite picked up the skill. Emin supposed that he got by just fine.
“You could sleep at my place, you know,” Charlie said, leaning further over the bar. “It’s closer than your cabin. And the company is infinitely better.”
Emin put his face into a friendly look and kissed her cheek. “I am no good for company tonight. No matter how pretty.”
He turned away from the disappointment in her eyes, knowing without a doubt that cutting the cord was kinder than dragging her along.
He grabbed his coat from off a hook in the corner of the bar and turned at a familiar voice.
“A guy sure can’t get any play with all you fucking Malashoviks around here,” muttered Russ, a stocky redheaded man that had been fighting fires alongside Maxim for almost a decade. Even if Russ hadn’t been a good friend, which he was, the fact that he covered Maxim’s back every day was enough for Emin to consider the man a certain kind of family.
Emin looked out on the dance floor to where Maxim was grinning, crouching in front of the wiggling blonde and nipping playfully at her collarbone while she giggled and rode the beat.
“You are interested in Tinker Bell over there?” he asked Russ.
“No,” Russ said pointedly, and halfheartedly sipped at his beer, eyes firmly planted over the bar.
“Ah,” Emin said, following Russ’s eyes to Charlie, who was popping the tops off a few beers and sliding them down the bar. “You want the bartender.”
“You don’t mind?” Russ asked. “I know she was yours for a while.”
Emin slapped Charlie on the back affectionately. “She was never mine. You know I don’t keep them.”
Russ quirked a funny little smile, like he thought Emin’s comment was funny, just not when it applied to Charlie.
“I know you guys haven’t been… hanging out for about a year and I just thought,” Russ shrugged like he didn’t care one way or another.
Ah. So this was not passing for Russ. He truly wanted Charlie. Emin felt a small stab of remorse that he hadn’t seen his friend’s suffering earlier. He realized that it had been a year since he’d told Charlie he wouldn’t be coming through her door again. A year almost exactly. Emin’s dark brown eyes rested on Russ’s light brown ones for a second and he wondered if his friend had been counting the days.
Not liking that he hadn’t seen any of this earlier, Emin decided to make amends. “She likes a man to-” Emin searched for the English words for a second and Russ snapped his attention away from Charlie and onto Emin, realizing he was about to get some free advice. “Shoot straight. No muss.”
Russ nodded, taking the advice solemnly. Emin saw a moment of nerves pass in his friend’s eyes. He kept going. “She does not like a man to drink too much.” Emin tried not to smile as Russ immediately unhanded his half-drunk beer and shoved it a few inches away from him like it was poison. “She… responds to confidence.”
Russ passed a hand over his eyes for a second. “Christ. How the fuck am I supposed to follow up a Malashovik?” he muttered to himself. “And Emin fucking Malashovik no less.” Russ shot him a frank and irritated look. “A world renowned artist trapped in the body of a fucking action star.”
Emin frowned at Russ. He didn’t like Russ saying that.
All of it was true. But still.
Russ was using it as proof of why he couldn’t get Charlie and that wasn’t true.
Emin thought for a moment. “She also likes dates. Real ones. With-” Emin waved his hands through the air searching for the word again. “Carnival. A tucked-in shirt.” He plucked at Russ’s firehouse T. “Flowers and kiss on doorstep. This, I never gave her.”
Well, except for the kiss on the doorstep, but he didn’t think Russ needed to hear about that part right now.
Russ nodded, planting his elbows on the bar. He tried not to resent Emin for having gotten there first, and so effortlessly. And then for tossing Charlie over. She’d been sad for weeks. But Emin was a good friend. Always had been. And now he was trying to help Russ out. So, he supposed that counted.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Russ said, absentmindedly reaching for his beer again.
Emin raised an eyebrow and Russ put the beer down again.
“Tomorrow you’ll tell me how it goes,” Emin said, clapping a hand on Russ’s back and walking away, knowing when a friend needed space. He took it philosophically. It wouldn’t be the first time that the company Emin kept had created prickly feelings between him and a friend. Occasionally between him and a brother.
Emin grinned as he crossed the dance floor toward Maxim. “Remember the night you caught me with Polina Petrakova?” he asked his brother in Belarusian when they were close enough to speak over the music.
Maxim scowled. “She still had my love letter in the pocket of the jeans you peeled off of her, you son of a bitch.”
Emin bit back his smile. “How could I have known?”
Maxim shifted the dancing blonde to one side and reached out to cuff his brother. Emin allowed himself to be wrapped up in his brother’s massive grip. A little too tight to be called a hug. This was halfway between punishment and affection.
“We left that night in the field where I beat the shit out of you,” Maxim said, planting a kiss on his brother’s cheek, as they often did. They were not just Belarusian in name, but in custom as well.
“Seemed only fair I let you win that one,” Emin shrugged, still grinning.
Maxim chuffed out a disbelieving laugh, but the blonde was bending down further than she had before and he was losing interest in his brother.
“I’m going,” Emin said, sliding his coat on.
Maxim nodded, knowing that Emin needed his bear. This loud bar didn’t hold much for him tonight. “See you tomorrow.”
Emin turned, spotted Charlie talking to some guy at the far end of the bar and turned back to Maxim. Still speaking in Belarusian, “Make sure Charlie doesn’t go home with anyone else tonight.”
Maxim’s brow immediately furrowed. It wasn’t like Emin to bookmark a woman he didn’t want for himself. And Maxim knew that Emin didn’t want her for himself.
“I don’t think Russ’s heart could take it,” Emin clarified and watched as Maxim’s eyes scanned the bar, and lit on the discouraged look on Russ’s face as Charlie flirted at the other end of the bar.
Maxim nodded in understanding, giving Emin a little surprised look. Russ had hidd
en it well. But then the music crescendoed and there was no more time for brothers. Maxim’s massive hands easily lifted the little blonde and suddenly the beat wasn’t the only thing she rode.
Grinning to himself, Emin strolled off the dance floor, stopping for just a second to twirl a little brunette in his arms, feel her warmth through her thin dress. She beamed up at the handsome stranger who was suddenly making lightning zip down her spine. But the song was ending, so he kissed her cheek and was gone, disappearing out of the bar and into the night.
He took his car up to his cabin but didn’t go inside. Emin stripped his clothes on the front porch, enjoying the zipping bite of chill in the October air. God, he loved the fall. Chilly with a kiss of summer still in the air. And the colors. He scanned the dark trees. The night had turned them all a silvery black, but in the morning, they would be every shade of crimson a man could imagine. And he could imagine quite a lot. He had a house full of painted canvasses to prove it.
On the drive home he’d considered coming inside and painting for a moment, but he knew there was really only one thing that would calm him right now. And that was looking for her. The tiger. The tiger he was sure was a shifter like him and his family.
The one whose scent tugged at him like a fish on a line. He couldn’t have said why. He needed to know why she stayed there, in the woods of Spokane.
And more than anything, he needed to see her. Even the barest peek would do him over.
“Just a glimpse,” he whispered to himself as he stepped off the porch of his cabin and shifted. He knew his shift was different from his brothers’. Maxim damn near exploded out of his human form, a volcano of bear, often growling like he couldn’t control it. Anton took his as if it were pain. And perhaps it was. Anton was the brother who’d endured the most pain over their lives. Emin’s thoughts dwelled there for a moment before he moved on. Danil’s shift was the most civilized, of course. He shifted as if he were trying on a new suit. He stretched and stepped right into it.
