Riley's Mate

by Kathryn Kelly

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Whether it’s true or not, it’s one thing I do believe in, and it’s quite simple. The mates are drawn to each other. How do you think I met your mother? Why in the world would I go to Bhutan of all places? I was drawn to it even when I was a kid. I’d spin the little globe my dad kept in his study and stare at that part of the world, wondering what it would be like; wondering what people over there were doing. Since your mother died, I don’t have that pull anymore. I’m content to stay here.”

  “So you’re saying they just find each other?”

  “Yeah,” he shrugged. “It’s simple.”

  “Nothing can be that simple.”

  “Riley.” He waited until she looked at him. “Why haven’t you had a boyfriend with one of those millions of single men in New York?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve had boyfriends.”

  “No. A real boyfriend. One that sticks around. One that keeps you up at night that you can’t stop thinking about.”

  An image of Tyler shot through her mind. “Oh God.” She set down her mug, her hands trembling. “Oh no.” She put her hands over her face. It was true then? The thing that she had suspected, but her mind hadn’t accepted.

  When she lowered her hands, her father was grinning at her. “Sometimes you get lucky and find him in your own backyard.”

  “No.” She stood up, walked to the door, turned, and came back to sit back down. “It’s only because he was my first boyfriend.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  Unable to sit still, she got up and went to the window. There was something she needed to do. Something she’d needed to do for a long time. She went back, kissed her father on the cheek. “I’m going for a walk. I’ll be back later.”

  Riley went to her room, put her cell phone on charge, and put on an old pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She tugged on some boots and left her hair long and flowing. She went out the back door and headed up a path toward the mountains. Once she was in the trees, she veered off the path used by the tourists and scampered behind some rocks.

  After a careful look around, she pulled off her clothes, closed her eyes, and stretched her arms high. She thought of shifting as sort of like an orgasm, though it didn’t feel quite as good. It was satisfying though. Once the urge struck, she couldn’t think of anything else until she’d taken her tiger for a spin.

  Yesterday, when she’d gone after the boy, had been different. She’d been on a mission – pulled toward him. This was different. This was for her.

  For the next few seconds, she felt nothing. It was as if she ceased to exist. Then she was standing on all four feet. She shook her coat out and tested her footing.

  She was a tiger now.

  A white Bengal tiger. There were a few things she knew about being a tiger from her experiments in her apartment and the few trips she’d taken upstate. One was that she couldn’t talk. Another was that the human Riley receded into the background, but was still there if needed. For example, she could hear the phone ringing and understand people talking.

  But even more significant, her already-heightened senses were even more heightened. She could smell a deer a mile away. And though she’d never killed anything, she had a taste for raw meat.

  Fortunately, she’d just eaten, so she was able to ignore the scent of the deer a few yards away. She headed up into the mountains, not following any particular path. She instinctively knew that she could find her way back to where she’d left her clothes.

  As she went higher into the mountains, stretching her legs, and adjusting to the movements of the tiger, her human mind merged with her tiger mind, and she could finally think clearly. With her whole being.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tyler stood back and watched as Riley undressed. He was surprised she didn’t know he’d followed her. Even from this distance, even though he knew she was about to shift, watching her undress had him hard.

  She was beautiful. She was tall and toned. Not skinny, but not big. Her stomach was mostly flat, but her round bottom was a man’s fantasy.

  It had been mere hours since he’d been inside her, yet already he wanted to take her again.

  He’d seen the Hunter brothers shift into bears, but Riley was different. Exotic. Maybe because her mother was from Bhutan, but probably because she was his mate.

  As he watched, she transformed from the beautiful woman he loved into a beautiful white tiger. His breath hitched as he watched the transformation. The first time he’d seen her do it, he’d been shocked. He knew about the bear shifters and even the wolves, but never a tiger, and he never suspected that the girl he’d just made love to would suddenly be a shapeshifter. Without telling him in the two years they’d dated. Without warning him.

  But that was ancient history. Now he accepted it.

  Shifters mated for life. And, it turned out, so did their mates.

  Riley, the tiger, took off up the mountainside, and Tyler went back toward the lodge. He had things to do, and Riley needed time to herself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “We’ve decided to take our chances and have a baby.” The woman, Emily, smiled at her husband, Ben.

  Riley’s stomach flipped with a little thrill of excitement. She’d been working with this couple for just over six months.

  They’d gone over the genetic test results, and the discussion had moved into counseling after that. She’d had a feeling from the outset that they were going to do it. They seemed to be looking for permission more than anything else. Something Riley couldn’t give them.

  “We want to thank you so much for everything.” Emily reached out to take Riley’s hand and blinked back tears.

  “I didn’t do anything. You two did it. You worked through it and made the decision.”

  “But you listened,” Ben said. “That couldn’t have been easy.”

  Riley smiled. “It was my pleasure.” She walked them out the door and went back to sit at her desk to write her session notes before the next client.

  Instead, she found her thoughts wandering. Emily and Ben knew the genetic risks to having a baby. Ben was fifty-six years old, and Emily was forty-five. It would be Emily’s first baby. They’d been married for only a year, but they’d been together for four.

  They’d left her office excited about their future. They were having a baby together in spite of the high chances of Down Syndrome as indicated by their risk factors.

  Her thoughts wound automatically back to Tyler. She reminded herself that she’d made the right decision.

  Tyler was a good man. He deserved to be with someone who was genetically normal, whatever that meant, but it definitely meant not a shifter.

  She sighed. Their baby could be human or could be a shifter. Tyler wouldn’t think about the implications. Riley had to be the voice of reason. She was the one with the degree in genetic counseling. She had to be the responsible one.

  Emily and Ben had made that decision together.

  She sighed. It didn’t matter. She’d rejected him and gone back to life as she knew it. Again.

  She stood up, stretched, and looked down at the crowded sidewalk below. So many people.

  So many people in one place, yet she had never felt lonelier.

  So many people and the only person she wanted to be with was Tyler Vargas.

  She went next door and tapped on Benson’s door.

  “Hey.” Benson looked up from his computer. He was an attractive man with gray hair and a disarming smile. He could have retired three years ago, but claimed he loved his job too much to leave it. “Ready to get a martini?”

  “You read my mind.”

  “You look like something’s bothering you. Let’s duck out early.”

  She gathered up her things and met him in the hallway. They walked outside and down the street to their favorite bar and found their favorite table by the window empty.

  By the time they’d settled in, the server had their dr
inks on the table. Martinis with extra olives for Riley. “Your bruschetta will be right out.” She said as she left them.

  There was something to be said for having a usual drink in a usual bar in the middle Manhattan.

  “So what’s on your mind?” Benson ate one olive off the toothpick and put the other in her drink. He’d often accused her of ordering martinis just so she could have olives. He wasn’t far off-base.

  “I ran into my high school boyfriend while I was Colorado.”

  Benson knew enough about her past that she didn’t have to fill in the gaps. “The one you left after graduation.”

  “The same.”

  “It’s been, what, ten years? How did that go?”

  “Turns out we still have a connection.”

  “Was that a surprise?”

  “Yeah.” She took a sip of her drink. “We don’t exactly have that much in common. A counselor from New York and a pro baseball player.”

  Benson sat back in his chair and waited until she looked at him. “Except that you’re both from Hunter County, Colorado.”

  “Do your clients ever get freaked out by how good your memory is?”

  He laughed. “You and I have been talking about this for years.”

  She grimaced. “Has it been that bad?”

  “We listen to each other. That’s kind of how it works. So you said that you don’t have much in common, but you still have a connection. Is it… mostly physical?”

  She sipped her martini. This was Benson she was talking to. If she couldn’t tell him, who could she tell? “It’s a lot of physical, but there’s the shared history, and we talk, too.”

  “So, what’s the problem?”

  I’m a shifter, and I don’t think it’s fair to cause someone I love to have children that could turn into tiger cubs. “It’s complicated. But he’s happy there on the ranch, and I’m happy here in the city. One of us would have to give up a way of life for the other.”

  “I guess it comes down to what you want.”

  “Yeah. I’ve already decided it won’t work. We’re too different. It’s silly to believe in soul mates anyway.”

  Benson set his glass down and stared at Riley. “How many couples have you worked with who weren’t right for each other? On paper?”

  “A lot.” She frowned and ate another olive off the toothpick.

  “How many of them are happy?”

  She glanced around at the single people filing in for an after-work drink and the hope that they would meet someone to connect with. “Most of them.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because despite all the odds against them, they chose to take a chance and have children anyway.”

  “So part of this is about having children.”

  She scowled at him. “Stop it.”

  He laughed. “It’s okay Riley. I’m not judging. What you’re saying is that even though you really like this guy – maybe even are in love with him and the feelings are reciprocated, there’s some reason why you’re reluctant to get together with him for fear of having children with him.”

  “Wow. That’s a really long way around to say I’m screwed up.”

  “Now you’re turning my words around.”

  “It’s what we do.” She grinned at him.

  Benson nodded. “It makes perfect sense. You find someone you have a shared history with that you like physically and can talk to. But you’d rather be here in this city knowing that it’s almost impossible to meet someone that you can have that same kind of connection with. Yeah. I would definitely stay here and dedicate my life to work if that happened to me.”

  Riley glared at him now. “I don’t like you very much right now.”

  “It’s okay. Most people feel that way at one time or another.”

  “But it’s not like that. It’s far more complicated.”

  “What’s so complicated about two people falling in love and finding a way to be together? It seems a lot more complicated to find a reason to stay apart. But I’m just saying.”

  He signaled for the server to bring him another drink.

  “You never drink more than one.”

  “I’ve never had to deal with such a complicated issue for a colleague.”

  Riley chewed on an olive. Benson was the one person she could tell anything to. It would be so easy to tell him about her being a shifter. Then he would understand.

  “I had a new couple today.” Benson leaned back, and Riley prepared herself for a long story. She never minded talking shop with Benson. It was just that today her heart wasn’t in it. “The man is a regular guy. Has a decent job at a hotel. He’ll probably never have much more of a career. The woman is an attorney who is moving up in her career and just made partner. They dated in high school, and they’ve been married for two years now. He’s very supportive of her career, so that’s not the issue. They just found out they’re pregnant. According to her history, the mother is a carrier for Huntington’s Disease.”

  Riley nodded. She ran a finger around the rim of her glass. The story was actually quite common.

  “What’s different about their case is that she’s thirty-five, and he’s thirty-six. When she found out she was a carrier, she left him. They stayed in touch occasionally. So now, fifteen years later, they’re just now getting around to having their first child.”

  “You said they’d only been married for two years.”

  “Yes. She decided that she didn’t want to pass along her genes to their child.”

  “She didn’t ask him.”

  “Nope. Two years ago, he found out he’s got cancer.”

  “So they got married.”

  “He wants to have a child with her no matter what the odds of it having Huntington’s. He waited all these years for her. Now he doesn’t have much time left.”

  “That’s a really sad story.”

  “For fifteen years, neither one of them ever got married. They loved each other, but she stayed away because she didn’t want to risk any children they might have having a disease. But he didn’t care. He was willing to take the risk.”

  “Why did you tell me this story Benson?”

  “I just thought it was an interesting case.”

  “Why did they come see you? Are they going to have the baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “The mother is kind of a mess. She just found out that she’s adopted.”

  “Oh no!”

  “Yep. So all these years, she thought she was a carrier, but she wasn’t.”

  “Benson?”

  “What is it Riley?”

  “I really wish you hadn’t told me this story.”

  “It was too complicated for me to not tell you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  A week later, Riley was flat on her back, still thinking about Benson’s story. It had haunted her thoughts for a week now. At the moment, though, it was a welcome distraction from her annual exam.

  That was one thing about working in the hospital – all employees were required to keep their medical care up to date.

  The P.A. was frowning. Not a good sign. “You have a cyst.”

  “What kind of cyst?”

  “I’ll write the order for you to go down the hall for an MRI.”

  “Today?”

  The P.A. nodded as she picked up her iPad and began typing.

  “Is it that serious?” Her breath was coming quickly now. Did being a shifter make her more susceptible to disease?

  The P.A. shook her head. “Not likely. But getting you in quickly is one of your perks for working here. We still won’t know the results until tomorrow though.”

  Riley laced her hands together. She’d never had an MRI. What if it picked up an abnormality in her body? Something related to being a shifter? But more importantly, what if the cyst was something more serious?

  The P.A. had been right. She’d walked her down the hall and her MRI had been done with barely a wait at all.

  Riley managed t
o get through the rest of her afternoon by focusing on the couple sitting in front of her. After they left, Benson stopped by to let her know he couldn’t meet for a drink today. Something about his daughter being in town.

  She worked late, catching up on some paperwork before trudging home, the streets crowded now with tourists visiting for the weekend. There were more couples and families on the streets than during the usual rush hour. She stopped at the local take-out place for a big salad before turning down her street.

  She let herself into her apartment and curled up on her sofa. She didn’t even bother to turn on the television. As she ate her salad, her mind swirled with anxiety about the results of her MRI. She had asked the tech three times, but he’d refused to tell her anything about the results. She had no one to talk to about it. Benson hadn’t been available. She wouldn’t call and worry her father.

  She was alone. Alone with her thoughts about Benson’s story about the couple who stayed apart all those years because of the woman’s fear about something that might happen. Alone with her fears about her inability to have children or worse… her own mortality. Her mother had died young – younger than Riley was now. Riley believed in nothing if not the power of genetics. And alone with thoughts of Tyler.

  She’d always loved Tyler as long as she could remember. She was comfortable with him. But now, for the second time, she’d walked away from him. Last time, she had just been young and afraid of rejection. This time her own fears about having shifter children kept her from him. It was possible she couldn’t even have children.

  So she sat there alone in her apartment. Surrounded by people in other parts of the building. On the streets below. People she didn’t know. Thousands of miles away from family. In a city with just one friend.

  She could be in the peaceful forest of Colorado, free to let her inner tiger roam, with Tyler there to make to make love to her. Just thinking about him had her restless with the memory of his hands on her, their bodies locked together in passion.

  She groaned, got up, and paced around her apartment. She stopped at the window. She had a clear view of the traffic below. Hundreds of people were trying to get somewhere fast. If she stood to the right of the widow, she had a glimpse of Central Park. She walked there almost every weekend to enjoy the fresh air and trees. It was sort of like teasing her inner tiger who longed to run along the paths. But there were too many people.