Emin's Mate

by Selena Scott

  But for tonight, like so many nights since he’d first caught her scent, just the smell of her had to be enough. So Emin curled his bear into the pile of leaves and breathed her in, the night air like a lover’s touch through his fur as his eyes drifted closed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Glory’s tail flicked back and forth as she sat in the pines above the bear who slept where she’d just lain, watching ants march through a fallen pine cone. He was here again. Close enough to touch. But why?

  Every night he was so close to her. Sniffing for her. Searching for her, she was sure. But she didn’t know why. He didn’t seem like the bad men. And he certainly didn’t smell like the bad men. So why did he hunt her? She didn’t think she would mind being found by him. He was a very handsome bear. And she was fairly sure he would be kind to her. But she’d been wrong before. That’s how she’d gotten captured by the bad men in the first place. Torn from her mother’s side.

  Glory ached as she thought about her mother. Somewhere a million miles away. She hoped so much that her mother had gotten away. That the bad men hadn’t gotten her, too. Glory had waited six months to make contact with the bear because she knew her mother would have wanted her to be cautious.

  But she was just so dang curious. Who was he? What did his fur feel like? What did his voice sound like? Was he as lonely as she was?

  She followed him just about as often as he hunted for her. So she knew he lived in a cabin and when he shifted back to his human form he was golden and muscular, compact and long at the same time. Glory shifted on her branch. And she knew that he had very interesting man parts. She’d never seen man parts before. But his seemed particularly well put together, if she said so.

  She crept down the tree. As silent as the night around them. She just wanted to get a little closer. His steady heartbeats and deep, even breaths soothed her. They made the night less lonely. Each rhythmic noise was like a little friend. She wanted to curl up with her little friends, let them tell her that she was going to be okay. That the bad men were gone for good and that she would see her mother again.

  She could feel the warmth of the bear whipping off his big body as if he were a campfire. The nights were starting to get so chilly and it had been so long since Glory had anything but her own warmth. She crept even further down the tree, just over him.

  Part of her, the playful part, wanted to see what would happen if she just pounced on him right then and there. But Glory could hear her mother’s voice in her head, so she didn’t.

  Instead, she crept down to the ground, right next to the bear, and studied him. She could see traces of his human in his bear face. The dark brow, the natural scowl, and all that hair in his face. And his build, like a wrestler but longer. She knew he was quick, but how, she had no idea. He had too many muscles to be quick.

  And warm. He was just so warm. A finger of chilly October breeze flicked over Glory’s haunch, and though she had plenty of fur herself, she wanted his warmth. Needed it. She’d been so lonely for so many months and he seemed like such a nice grizzly, running in all those funny circles for her for months. Never seeing her where she perched high in the trees.

  Glory laid her head on her paws not six inches from the bear’s face. Her tail ticked like a grandfather clock. The wind pushed a cloud from the face of the moon like a lover shifting a lock of hair. The light became silvery, glittery, her favorite kind of nighttime.

  Glory could smell all the little animals that were giving them a wide berth. She could smell the slow, delicious ooze of sap down the pine tree to her left. She could hear the last desperate zing of a few summer mosquitoes bothering a raccoon about fifty feet away. And she could smell the musk of this bear, his heart beating like rhythmic thunder.

  So, she did what she wanted. And she crept forward, nudging her head gently under one of his great paws. So heavy! He really was a big bear. She moved slowly and gently until she was flush up against him. Orange and brown fur mixing where they touched. His heat was delicious and a little shiver ran through her.

  Her eyes were heavy with the lazy pleasure of safety and warmth. This was it, the happiest moment of the last six months.

  She felt the exact moment that the bear woke up, realized there was a tiger snuggled up to his belly.

  His heart went from the sweet ka-thunk ka-thunk to stomp-stomp-stomp as his muscles bunched.

  The two animals sprang to their feet and Glory lunged forward defensively. She didn’t think he was going to hurt her, but those teeth were rather long, even longer than hers! So she swiped out with her paw to put him off his balance before anything happened by accident.

  But the bear was lowering his head and tossing her off her back feet and to the ground. Glory sprang back up and onto the bear’s back where she would be safe from his claws and teeth. She could run from him, she was faster than he was, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to stay close. She just didn’t want to get scratched.

  The bear reared up with a roar that shook the trees and easily dislodged Glory, as she didn't want to use her claws to hang on. She wasn’t sure how thick a bear’s hide was and she didn’t want to hurt him.

  So once again they were on their feet together, circling and eyeing one another. Glory flicked her tail, hoping it would show how friendly she was. But the bear stepped toward her again and she reacted instinctively.

  Rearing up, she batted him to one side and lunged to the other. She put the bear off balance and sent them both tumbling backwards. They naturally rolled down the mountain and Glory realized that the bear was making sure that his weight didn’t land on her as they spiraled downward. See! She knew he was a nice bear.

  Now that that had been all cleared up, Glory decided to have a little fun. She quickly regained her footing and slipped away from the bear. Crouching on the lower branch of a pine tree, she waited for him to find her with his eyes before she pounced again and sent them rolling.

  And roll they did. She performed the maneuver again and this time the bear stopped resisting at all. He was playing with her! Swatting as she tried to get away and letting her toss and plow into him.

  Glory was breathless with joy. She hadn’t had any contact in six months. And the three months before that had been scary and filled with bad people and bad smelling pain. But this was crisp and clean and musky with the bear’s natural scent. She was filled up like a balloon as they rolled and she lightly bit into his haunch.

  The bear twisted and reaching back with one paw, anchored her to his back. He took a few rolling, galloping steps, and Glory realized he was giving her a ride.

  She tightened her claws on his shoulders, to hang on, and after a moment the bear stilled. Whoops. Too much claw. She retracted them a tiny bit and the bear kept going. Galloping very fast for a bear with a tiger on his back.

  Glory knew exactly where they were going and in her excitement, she jumped right off his back. She didn’t need a ride, she wanted to run! She loved running. Besides, she was curious about racing this bear.

  She pulled ahead of him as she raced toward his cabin but she could hear him at her flank. Glory was able to whip through trees that he couldn’t fit through but he was fast. And as they neared the cabin, her wind started to fail. She never could run for very long, so as they raced up the grassy hill in front of his front porch, they were neck and neck.

  Glory executed a graceful little hopping roll through the grass before she sat right down, eyeing the bear. He ambled up beside her and, to her complete delight, shifted on the move. He was stepping up the stairs of his porch as a man in less than a second, but even the moonlight couldn’t turn his golden skin silver. He glinted there, like treasure at the bottom of the ocean as the night threw shadows over his muscles.

  Glory watched in rapt curiosity as he leaped up the steps and tugged some pants on that he must have left there earlier.

  She cocked her head to one side and trained her unblinking eyes on him as he came back to sit on the steps of his porch, his feet bare, his brea
th puffing in little white clouds as the temperature dropped.

  He said something in a language she didn’t understand but it sounded a little like what her grandmother used to speak. A little but not quite.

  “There you are,” he muttered in English. “Finally.”

  He reached out a hand to her and Glory moved instantly forward, wanting nothing more than to be touched after so long alone. He didn’t pet her the way a human might have. As a shifter himself, she was sure he understood that she wouldn’t want to be treated like a house cat. Instead, he just simply laid his hand behind her ear, on her neck. She pressed into the warmth of it.

  “Magnificent,” he muttered. “Breathtaking.”

  Glory purred in the back of her throat.

  “You understand English?” he asked in a thick accent.

  She blinked at him, unwilling to pantomime while in her cat form. She wasn’t a cartoon character. He waited for a signal and got none. “Okay, you are shifter. I can smell you are not regular tiger.”

  The man watched her and Glory got the feeling that he could see everything, all of her. She liked it.

  “You are safe with me,” he said. “I will not hurt you ever.”

  He cocked his head to one side then and rose. He went to his front door and looked back over his shoulder. “Come in.”

  Glory padded up the stairs of the porch without hesitating, and into the man’s home. It was small, a single room with a little kitchen on one side and what she assumed was the closed door to a bathroom on the other. There was a rumpled bed in one corner, under an open window that let the night air in.

  And almost every other inch was covered in canvasses. Some of them were half-covered in paint, others were blank, and others were, to her eye, complete. Glory felt something move in her chest. The deep colors. The sight of them all together, leaning against one another, they were like one giant, gorgeous organism. Her breath caught in her tiger chest.

  She hadn’t spent a ton of time in her human form. Maybe an hour or so every day. She much preferred her tiger form. But there were some things that had to be seen with human eyes. Touched with human skin.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Do you know how to shift?” Emin asked as he put a kettle of water on the stove to boil. He peered out at the night from the small window over the stove. Velvety black, just as he liked it. And finally he’d seen the tiger. She was here. No more chasing. He’d be able to help her, finally. She seemed so wild. So at home in the wilderness. He wondered if she even knew she was a shifter.

  He pulled a mug from his cabinet and thought about that electric, pulse-pounding moment when he’d realized that the tiger was right there, next to him. And then the tussle that had turned so naturally to play. She wasn’t aggressive or scared. In fact, he got the impression that she was sweet. An odd thing to feel about a tiger.

  He plunked a tea bag into his mug. She was here. No more hiding in the woods on her own. A feeling of deep calm and satisfaction curled through him.

  And that feeling dried up like a drop of water on a hot pan as he turned back around, mug in hand.

  “Christos,” he choked out as his eyes skated over the utterly gorgeous, completely naked woman who now stood in the middle of his cabin.

  She was long, like a lazy, sunlit river. But, careful now, those curves must have been put on this earth to kill him. Her heavy breasts and round ass looked like they were made to be palmed in his hand. A messy cascade of long, orange-crimson hair whispered against the curve of her ass.

  Well. She definitely knew how to shift.

  She looked up at him with eyes so green they made him think of springtime. And there was joy there. Absolute, pure, unadulterated delight.

  Emin dragged his eyes up from her delicious body and made himself stare at her in the eyes. He was pinned in place by her beauty.

  “Art!” she exclaimed, holding up one of his canvasses. “You’re an artist.”

  Emin nodded, let out a little choked sound as she bent over to pick up another one. What was wrong with him? Naked women didn’t stop him in his tracks. He was extremely comfortable with naked women. It was his favorite kind of woman, in fact. But for some reason this woman was sucking all the air out of the room. Maybe it was the combination of the sweet expression on her face and her sex bomb body.

  He needed clothes for her. And fast.

  Emin skirted around the kitchen, putting a healthy amount of space between the two of them. He needed to get ahold of himself.

  He flipped open a drawer and selected a shirt of his without looking. Emin strode across the room and held the shirt out to her, staring pointedly at the canvas in her hands and not at her body, so creamy and soft.

  The woman stared at the shirt, frowning in confusion. She looked down at her own body. “You want me to be covered?”

  Emin swallowed hard. Refused to cough. “Let’s wear clothes,” he answered as best as he could, carefully avoiding the question she’d asked.

  She shrugged, took the shirt from his hand. Emin was absurdly grateful that their skin hadn’t touched. He felt so strange. Like he was trying to run across a patch of ice. An unusual feeling for a man like Emin. He had lived his entire life on solid ground.

  The woman shrugged into the shirt and it was long enough to hit her mid-thigh. Emin took a deep breath and again tried to look directly at her. But - gah - it was like staring directly into the sun. Somehow, seeing her in one of his old soft t-shirts was even worse than seeing her completely naked.

  Pants. She needed pants.

  Emin turned and went back to the dresser, taking the opportunity to put himself together while he rummaged for something that would fit her.

  “Your name,” he said, selecting some flannel pajama pants. “What is it?”

  “Glory,” she replied and he slammed his eyes shut against the tightening in his chest. Of course. Of course the sunnybeautifulrevelation behind him was named Glory.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. He could hear her padding softly around his cabin. Picking her way through his things.

  He took a breath and turned back to her, sliding a shirt over his own head and then handing the pants to her.

  “Emin Malashovik,” he said firmly, taking the opportunity to remind himself of who he was. A man who didn’t act like a schoolboy when faced with a pretty girl.

  “Emin,” she said, trying out the name as she wiggled into his pajama pants.

  Emin couldn’t fight the growl that rolled out of his chest, unbidden. How much was a man expected to take in one ten-minute span?

  She didn’t notice it as she turned back around toward his canvasses. “I’ve never seen real art before.”

  He furrowed his brow. “You have never lived around humans?”

  She shook her crimson hair and it shone in the dim lamplight. “I have only ever lived in the forest. I’m only in my human form when I have to be. Or when I want to touch pretty things,” she said, trailing a finger over the corner of a painting.

  “You live alone?” he asked, something hot and sharp slicing through his gut at the thought of her living with a mate.

  She pulled her hand back from the canvas as if it had cut her. Turning to Emin with eyes large and sad, she nodded. “Now I do. I used to live with my mother. You’re actually one of the only other people I’ve ever spoken to. You know, a hiker here or there. But we mostly kept to ourselves. In the mountains. Where we were safe. Where we could be ourselves. But then everything got - got lost.” Her large green eyes filled with tears and Emin took an involuntary step toward her.

  They both jumped as the kettle on the stove began to sing.

  “You want tea,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  She shrugged. “I’ve never had it before.”

  Emin and his family were the only shifters that he had ever met in person before. They’d learned that more of them existed in the world, but he’d never seen proof. He realized for the first time that perhaps many shifters lived the way
that Glory and her mother did. More in their animal forms than not. Not bothering to blend into civilization at all.

  He poured out two cups of hibiscus tea. Jesus. She was an innocent. She’d barely ever spoken to another human besides her mother before? She’d lived in the wild? Wow. This was virgin territory. In every sense of the word.

  Emin cleared his throat and motioned for her to sit at his kitchen table that he almost never used for eating. He sat there for coffee in the morning, painting in the afternoon, and reading in the evening. Eating was something he did at his mother’s house. Or at his brothers’, in a pinch.

  And now he sat at that table with a cup of tea steaming in his hands, looking across at the most stunning beauty he’d ever seen.

  Her face was somehow round and long at once. Her cheeks soft and shadowed, curving down into a pointed chin. Her nose was just a little too small and angular, accented by her springtime green eyes, the size of half dollars. Her eyebrows, as orange as her hair, were unsculpted and in a soft arch that made him want to rub across them with the pad of his thumb. And then there were the lips.

  He decided not to think too closely about those lips right now. He already felt as if he were sliding down a very steep mountain. He needed a handhold. Not another shove.

  “So pretty!” Glory breathed in delight as she peered down into her cup of tea. Emin looked down into his own and watched the deep magenta curls in his glass as the hibiscus steeped.

  “Ah!”

  He looked up to see her holding one hand over her mouth, shocked, staring at the traitorous drink that had just burned her tongue.

  He cursed in Belarusian and jumped up to his fridge. He realized that if she really had only lived in the wild then she had probably never had a hot drink before.

  Emin cracked an ice cube out of the tray in his freezer and knelt next to her. Without thinking too hard on it, he gripped the back of her neck with one hand and drew her forward to the ice, pressing it to her lips. Glory obediently opened her lips and let Emin press the ice into her mouth.