A Mate For Raphael (Forbidden Shifters Book 2)

by Selena Scott

  It had been years since he’d dry-humped someone, and even longer since he’d come in his jeans, but that was looking like an ever-increasing possibility right now.

  Suddenly, she pressed her forehead against his. He was aware that her eyes were open, searching him, but he couldn’t surface out of the fog that had completely swamped him.

  “Are you cold?” she asked, her voice punctuated by panting breaths.

  “No,” he muttered gruffly against her lips.

  “But you’re shivering.”

  “I know.” His hands stroked down her back, over her bare thighs and quickly back to the safety of her clothing as if he’d been burned. “You’re—you’re doing something to me.”

  She pulled back immediately, far enough for him to really see the green in her eyes. “Something bad?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “Then what’s happening to you, Raph? You’re shaking like you have a fever.”

  He had no freaking clue, but he knew he didn’t want it to stop. “Who cares? Just more kissing now.”

  Yeah. That was barely coherent, but again, who cared?

  She didn’t need a ton more persuasion than that. She was back over top of him, kissing him silly. He kissed her back with everything he had. The floor squeaked beneath them while they rode hard against one another, groaning and cursing.

  “Raph, we gotta stop.”

  “Why? Because of the stupid shaking? It’s nothing. I swear. It’s like an allergic reaction, but in a good way. I’m allergic to stopping.”

  “No. We gotta stop because you’re gonna make me come.”

  His arms were all the way around her again, clasping her tightly to him and her heat was positioned right where he wanted it. He was breathing hard, like he had to fight for it.

  Normally, that reasoning would not encourage Raph to stop. But hearing those words in his friend’s voice, it stripped something in his stomach. There was a strange, swooping feeling, and add that to the shivers that had never quite stopped wracking him. Well.

  He let his head fall heavily back to the kitchen floor. It made a hollow thunking sound and he welcomed the brief jolt of pain.

  He looked up at her and had himself another Natalie Moment. Because yes, there was a very hot, willing, good-tasting, warm, wet woman sitting on top of him. But also, that hot, willing, good-tasting, warm, wet woman was Natalie Chalk. He inhaled long and slow, held it for a minute and let it out.

  Raphael took his first good look at Natalie’s face in a long time. He’d never seen her eyes so green or her lips so pink. She looked lazy and turned on and gorgeous. She also looked nervous.

  He knew, without question, that she was right.

  Kissing was one thing, but orgasms were probably another.

  You’re gonna make me come.

  Her words sounded in his head again and another set of shivers started in Raph’s body, raising the hairs on his arms and making him grip her even tighter.

  “Okay,” he said after a minute. “Okay.”

  Carefully, he removed Natalie from on top of him and dragged himself up to sitting. He scraped a hand down his face, over his messy hair and then briskly over his arms, trying to smooth the goosebumps away. When he turned to look at Natalie, she was watching him with big eyes, her delicate little fingertips pressed against her lips.

  It was only the second time he’d ever seen her look like this, the first being half an hour ago, after their first kiss, but already it looked familiar to him. Natural.

  He couldn’t help but grin at her, even though he was still painfully hard and partially freaked out. Apparently, she couldn’t help but grin back at him. She dropped her hand. They leaned forward at the same time, falling into a rough little side hug that had her shoulder jamming into his chest and his arm too heavy around her neck. It was the way they’d been hugging each other since grade school.

  “Wow,” she said after a minute.

  “Wow,” he agreed, pulling back from the hug and getting to his feet. In a detached, bemused sort of way, he noticed that his joints felt like jelly. He reached down and helped her to her feet next.

  She dusted herself off, yanking her skirt back down to its correct position and smoothing her hands down her blouse.

  “Wow,” she said again.

  “Definitely,” he couldn’t help but continue to agree with her.

  She looked up at him and he read the question in her eyes as easily as if she’d written it on a poster board and held it up in clear block letters.

  What do we do now?

  “I think we sleep on it, Nat.” He landed two firm hands on her shoulders and gave her a little squeeze. “I think I walk you to your car. And then you think about it at your house, I’ll think about it at my house. And tomorrow, at the rehearsal dinner, we can compare notes.”

  She nodded, her bottom lip sucked into her mouth and he, again, read her thoughts as clearly as if they were his own.

  “There won’t be any wrong answers, Nat. However you feel tomorrow is okay. If you never want to do it again, if you want to move forward, if you want to move forward but maybe not for a couple months… it’s all good. There’s no wrong answer.”

  Her lip popped out of her mouth. “But what about you? What if you want one thing and I want the other?”

  For the first time in this conversation, he couldn’t tell what she was thinking and he wished like hell that he could. He really, really wanted to know which ‘one thing’ it was that she was wanting. Because he really, really, really wanted to do this again.

  He sighed. “Nat, considering it’s you and me… well, I think we’d be able to handle that. Think about it. Can you think of any two people who better understand that life doesn’t always give you what you want?”

  Her eyebrows flared upward in understanding. It was true that neither of them had spent very much time getting what they wanted. “You’ve got a point.”

  He was about to make another one. One he really needed her to hear. “Nat… whatever happens tomorrow, or whatever you end up feeling, I don’t think we ruined anything. You’re still my best friend.”

  Something flickered across her face so fast that Raph couldn’t catch it. Before he could ask, she was nodding her head resolutely. “Right. I feel the same. Best friends.”

  Nat rocked back on her heels and then tipped her head toward the front door.

  “I should get going.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow night, right?”

  “Oh, right. For Seth’s rehearsal dinner. Yes. Kaya and I will be there. We’re bridesmaids, after all.”

  She sounded a little stilted, not quite normal, but Raphael didn’t think that was too weird, considering the fact that they’d just snogged one another’s brains out for the first time ever.

  After a sort of blank moment where it was clear that neither knew exactly what to say next, Raphael held out his hand to her.

  With a relieved, grateful sort of look on her face, Nat leaned forward and high-fived him before turning on her heel and heading for the front door.

  He blinked after her, looking down at his hand. He’d held it out meaning to hold her hand on the way to the car, but she’d automatically assumed he’d been going in for the high five? And she’d looked relieved about it?

  He walked after her, leaning against the wall and watching while she wiggled into one high heel and then the other.

  Raph followed her out to the car, holding the door open for her as she slid in. It never ceased to impress him that she was able to drive in those stilts.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Goodnight!” she said brightly at the exact same moment.

  “Goodnight, Nat.”

  He inwardly sighed. She was obviously needing to pretend that nothing was strange right now. She needed to pretend that everything was exactly the same as it had always been and they were still friends in the exact same way they’d been last week and the years before. Just because that wasn’t exactly how he fel
t about it didn’t mean that he needed to make her feel weird in the meantime.

  Then, to his complete surprise, she ducked halfway out of the car and planted a hard kiss on his mouth. It wasn’t soft and melting like the other kisses they’d shared. But it jolted through him just the same. Blushing, she ducked back into the car and closed the door.

  He waved as she drove away.

  So, maybe she wasn’t wanting to pretend anything. Maybe she was just as mixed up as he was.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It took Raphael about twenty minutes after Natalie left to realize that this shivering thing was actually a thing.

  He got into his car, feeling strange as hell, and drove over to his mother’s house.

  Growing up, it had always just been Seth, Raph, Jackson and Ma. The four of them were a unit. A team. Unbreakable. His mother had been their fierce protector, and perhaps she’d been all the fiercer because she was a single mother.

  After almost thirty years of turning exclusively toward his mother for help, it was strange to step into his mother’s house and call for Bauer.

  Bauer had been living there as his mother’s tenant for a year now. Of all the brothers, Raphael was the most used to the older man’s presence in his mother’s house, and he was deeply grateful for the hard work Bauer had taken on in training the brothers. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t strange to walk into his mother’s living room and see his mother reading a paperback on one end of the couch and Bauer waking up from a nap on the other end of the couch, a fire blazing in the hearth in front of them.

  A strange moment of intuition slithered down Raphael’s spine but he pushed it back. There was only room for one set of slithery, shivery feelings in his body right now and he needed to address the strongest ones.

  “Bauer,” he said again as the old man scrubbed at his eyes.

  “Raph,” Elizabeth said, setting her book aside. “What’s wrong?”

  It didn’t surprise Raphael that his mother knew something was amiss the second she saw his face. But also, it was just generally unusual for Raphael to show up unannounced at ten thirty on a weeknight.

  “I need to talk to Bauer.”

  “I’m up,” Bauer grumbled, rising up on joints that looked stiff. “Didn’t mean to fall asleep in front of the fire.”

  “I was going to wake you in a few minutes,” Elizabeth replied.

  That slithery feeling slithered again and Raphael pushed it down for the second time. He needed answers from Bauer and he needed them fast.

  “Something is happening to me. Look.” Raphael held up his arm for Bauer to observe the hairs that stood straight up.

  Bauer stopped scrubbing at his face and took a quick step over to Raphael. He observed the young man with his ice blue eyes. “You’re shivering.”

  “Yeah. Can’t stop.”

  “Are you sick?” Elizabeth stepped forward, but stopped when Bauer flung out an arm, keeping her from walking forward.

  Both Elizabeth and Raphael frowned at him.

  “Regardless of what’s happening to me right now, I’m not a danger to my mother,” Raph said with utter certainty.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, son. But I’m not taking any chances. Why don’t we head out to the yard?”

  Raphael’s stomach flipped. “You think—you think it’s finally happening?”

  “Why don’t we go see?”

  Raphael followed Bauer and his mother followed the two of them to the back door, but she didn’t come out. Raph turned to her.

  She read his mind. “It’s not that I’m scared you’ll hurt me, Raph. You’d never hurt me. It’s that you always do better when it’s just you and Bauer. I don’t want to mess anything up.”

  He frowned. She blew him a kiss and disappeared back inside. He didn’t want that to be the truth. But it was true.

  There was one thing that his amazing, protective, loving mother couldn’t do. And it was this.

  “You, too?” Raphael asked in surprise as he turned back around and saw that Bauer was stripping down to his underwear.

  Bauer shrugged. “Might as well. In case you take off into the woods like you do on a full moon.”

  The mention of the moon had Raphael searching the inky black sky for the moon. He spotted it, a waning half almost hidden behind the reaching fingers of a copse of trees. He felt the shivers wrack him again.

  “It’s strange to be out here doing this when I can see that the moon isn’t full.”

  “It’s about time.” Bauer’s voice was low and grumbly and irritated, as usual, but it also might have had to do with the fact that he was standing in his underwear in fifty-degree weather. “Seth can do it.”

  Raphael scowled. He didn’t need any reminders that his brother, who also happened to have found the love of his life, was way better at this than he was.

  “At least I’m better than Jackson,” Raph said as he toed off his shoes and yanked off his shirt.

  “Everyone is better at this than Jackson. Toddlers are better at this than Jackson.”

  Raph laughed and that helped a little. “At least once it happens I’m in control. That’s better than nothing.”

  “Raphael, that’s better than everything. You have extreme control over yourself. You’re the least dangerous of your brothers, regardless of how Seth responds to the moon.”

  Least dangerous.

  It was the best compliment he’d ever received. Raphael let it rock through him, riding on the backs of the shivers that were working their way through his body still.

  Least dangerous.

  Dangerous was a word he’d used against himself for years. It was the reason he and his brothers had always assumed they’d never find love, or partnership. In Raphael’s mind, dangerous was always hand in hand with lonely. It distanced him from every person but his family, well, besides Nat and Kaya, but they were pretty much like family.

  Nat flashed through Raphael’s head, the taste of her, the weight of her, the heat of her. She hadn’t been like family tonight. No, she’d been a new and intriguing flavor that Raphael couldn’t get enough of. He knew that if she hadn’t stopped things, he would have gladly still been tangled up with her on his kitchen floor.

  More shivers wracked him as he crouched down. He pressed a palm flat against the cold earth.

  “Bauer,” Raphael said in a gravelly voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “I was with a woman tonight.”

  “Son, if you need a lesson on the birds and the bees, you’re gonna have to ask your mother.”

  Raphael couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s not why I brought it up. I was with her when this started happening. I was kissing her.”

  “You’re asking me if the two things are related?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bauer was quiet for a long minute. “I don’t think so.”

  “But it was the first time with this woman. It was new. And then this started and—”

  “It’s probably a coincidence. Son, you’ve been training for a year to trigger this kind of reaction in your body. I’m willing to bet the woman didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Raphael nodded, his eyes on his hand that was still flat on the ground. He felt a strange mixture of disappointment and relief tunnel through his veins. He was disappointed that he still didn’t know what had triggered his reaction tonight and relief that it wasn’t Natalie. Because if any person was going to be triggering him into this reaction, it needed to be his future wife, not Natalie.

  “If you’re done waxing philosophical down there, maybe it’s time to get this show on the road. I’m freezing my cajones off.”

  Raphael glanced over his shoulder at the old, scowling man. “All right, all right.”

  A year ago, when he and his brothers had been completely untrained, he would have not had any idea what the old man meant by ‘get this show on the road’. But it had been a grueling year of training almost every day, and twelve full moons, and Raphael knew what to do.


  He planted both hands on the ground, took two deep breaths, and on the third, let his eyes fall closed.

  He felt the chilly air on his skin, scented the damp of the forest just beyond the borders of his mother’s backyard. He felt the blood expelled forcefully from his heart on each powerful beat. Shivers wracked him again and all the small hairs on his arms stood up again. He knew what they were doing. They were seeking the moon, they were asking to be fur.

  All he had to do right now was let it happen.

  Raphael’s mind was free of all doubt, all worry. In his mind, he sat on a rock next to a river. The river was filled with life, with concerns, and the river rushed those things away as he watched. And then, in his mind, he turned his head upward and saw there the full moon, bright and usually so feared, so hated in his household. But not tonight. No. Tonight, it was coveted.

  He kept that in his mind in an open, meditative state. The orb of a perfectly full moon, bone white and inviting, beckoning to him.

  He felt his hands go first.

  Heat enveloped him. Before Bauer had begun training, this process had burned, almost unbearably. But tonight, it was just a furious warmth. His hands retracted, rounded, grew claws. The shift raced up his arms and he felt the first cracking of his bones.

  Every time this had happened in all the years of his life, the realignment on his bones had been excruciatingly painful. But tonight, the feeling was like cracking his knuckles. An almost satisfying pop as his bones changed shape and his joints cracked to accommodate.

  The rest went quickly. His canines grew, his eyes squeezed shut and opened in an almond shape, his night vision on point. He felt his tail make itself known, stretching and balancing him. Fur sprouted up, rising up toward the moon. And last, his mind went. Human thoughts gave way to animal thoughts. He was still Raphael in there, but life was simpler and harder at the same time.

  Any low-level human worries he might have been grappling with disappeared. Thoughts of oil changes and bank deposits and first dates just dissolved into the night. In their place came the concerns of a red wolf. Warmth, survival, food, pack.