Midnight Magic, page 117
He flopped back onto the bed, throwing his arm up over his eyes, “Oh, thank God! Whatever would I do if you said no?”
I poked him hard in the ribs. “Don’t think I won’t beat you up.”
He sat up. “If I show you to the shower and promise to go down on you forever, can we postpone the beating?”
This time I didn’t even pretend to hesitate. “Lead on, lion man. Lead on.”
I sort of anticipated a stark, messy bachelor type bathroom. I was stunned to see a modern, glamorous master bathroom. As we entered, Nate pressed his knee to a plate on the wall and the expansive shower in the middle of the room started, filling the room with steam.
“Why do you have a knee shower?” I asked.
“A knee shower?”
I gestured towards the plate that he had pressed earlier.
“I don’t always have opposable thumbs,” he said, as if that was a perfectly normal thing.
“Oh, my God! Do you take showers as a lion?”
He gave an uncomfortable shrug. “It’s not my preferred way to do things.”
I would deal with that non-answer of an answer later, I thought. Holding up a hand, I stopped him from wrapping his arms around me. “First, I need to get clean.”
“First?”
“Yes, and then second, I believe certain promises were made to postpone a well-deserved beating…”
“You drive a hard bargain.”
I glanced down at the bulge in his jeans. “Apparently so.”
Nate leaned over and growled into my ear, “Hurry up and get into that shower. I always keep my promises.”
I had just washed my hair when Nate apparently decided to get over his dislike of water. He strode in and dropped to his knees. With strong hands cradling my hips, he pressed a kiss against my inner thigh. I felt the warmth of his tongue, and my entire body relaxed.
My shoulders dropped, and I clutched his hair. I have never actually liked receiving oral sex all that much. I know you aren’t supposed to say that, but it’s never been all that awesome, and I find the whole thing embarrassing.
But not with Nate. I made noises I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of as I ground my core up against his eager lips. When he ran his thumb quickly over my clit, I shattered. If he hadn’t held me up, I would have fallen to the floor.
He didn’t just support me. He lifted me with his massive arms and pressed me against the shower wall. My legs twined around his hips, urging him even deeper into me. The thump of my heels against his ass as he pounded into me was the single sexiest thing I’ve ever heard. Like ever.
I buried my face in the crook of his shoulder and groaned and begged for more. He gave it to me, and I was a limp dishrag by the time we were finished. I was reaching for the tap to turn off the shower when he bumped his knee against the wall and the water stopped.
“So that’s why you need a knee shower! It’s nothing to do with shifter shiftiness. It’s all about sexy sexiness!” I exclaimed.
He gathered me up in his arms and said, “Guess I’m busted.” We both caught the double entendre, and I giggled the entire time he carried me to the bed. He dumped me unceremoniously from up high, and I bounced a bit before settling down.
“What else did my dad tell you about me?”
“Hmmm… lousy at Latin, calm in a crisis,” he ran a gentle finger down my throat and across my chest. “So far, terrible taste in men.”
“So far?”
“Let’s see. Dan was a cheater, Nick was a liar, and Ben couldn’t keep a job.”
I found myself somewhat offended, and sat up, suddenly yanking the covers higher over my breasts. “There wasn’t a Dan. It was Dave, and he fucked my college roommate,” I said with injured dignity.
“I only know about them because your dad was so sure you could do better.”
That helped a little, but not much.
“The second I saw you in Jim’s office, I knew your dad hadn’t exaggerated in all he told me about you. I just thought well, there she is. Big as life.”
“We don’t all have the metabolism of a shifter. Calling a girl 'big' will only get you thumped.”
“Maybe I like your metabolism just fine the way it is.”
“Maybe you do,” I shot back, and then realized that I wasn’t making any sense. “I wish my dad had told me about you.”
I realized then that my time with Dad was taken up entirely by my talking about me – my life, my hassles, my disappointments. I hadn’t given the man any room to tell me about things like Barbary lion shifters.
“So, how many colonies are there?”
“Don’t know for sure. We are one of the bigger ones, with about seventy-five families.”
“Wait. There are seventy-five families that have at least one Extraspecist member in Sweetwater, Wyoming? No fucking way.”
“Way. If you count the children, there are 130 of us, all apex predators.”
“Why Wyoming?”
“Space, privacy, wild game, and Zeb.”
“If both parents are shifters, how many of their kids are?”
“It varies. At least half, but sometimes more.”
“So why isn’t the world overrun with shifters?”
“Well, shifters don’t seem to happen in the wild anymore. Our numbers are all about offspring. We die younger than non-shifters, on average. And of course, the 130 of us are from nine species. So, none of our individual numbers are very high.”
“If you married a bear shifter, would you have some bear children and some lion children?”
He shuddered. “We don’t do that.”
“You don’t?”
“For one thing, bears stink. For another, it just wouldn’t work. Shifters sometimes cross subspecies. I know a polar bear who married a grizzly, but that would only be because there just aren’t that many of us, and we have to live together. It is really frowned upon. Part of why we formed colonies was so that it would be easier to find someone to mate with.” I would come back to the least romantic way to frame a relationship, ever, later.
“Well, Rome is clearly involved with the tigress he wants you to help rescue.”
Nate shook his head resolutely. “Nope. No way.”
“You are friends with Scott,” I pointed out.
“Friends, yes. Mate with? Absolutely not. It’s not natural.”
“Oh, well, we wouldn’t want anything weird to happen,” I teased him.
He curled around me and gathered me into his arms.
“Yeah, I hate weird,” he whispered, clearly ready to go to sleep.
CHATPER SEVENTEEN - THE BORIS BACKSTORY
Almost immediately I thought of a question. I rolled back over and propped myself up on one elbow. “Speaking of bears, why wasn’t Boris at the meeting?” I asked.
Nate did a double take. “Boris Petrov?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. All of the other Boris’s we both know who live here.”
Nate stills seemed confused. “Why would Boris come to a meeting here?”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
“Come on what?” he answered.
“The man is clearly a bear shifter.”
“Nope.”
“I am not stupid,” I declared hotly. “He’s Russian, he’s big, he rarely sleeps at night, and he is devoted to my dad.”
Nate sat up and stretched those magnificent shoulders. “Those things are true, but he is not a shifter. Other things can keep a person up at night.”
“Do you know what keeps Boris up at night?”
Nate glanced away. This was not a pleasant subject for him, I could tell. “Wait here,” he said, and climbed out of bed. I watched his long, muscular legs walk the rest of his muscular self out of the room. He returned almost immediately, holding a bottle of wine and two glasses. He handed me a glass, and I held it while he filled it up. Then he poured himself a glass too.
“Years ago, there was a shifter in the Soviet Union. Her name was Anastasia, and she shifted to a Eurasian snow leopard. We aren’t even sure exactly how old she was.”
“Those are incredibly rare. I’ve never even seen one in a zoo. I wrote a paper on them, though. Did you know they are so adapted to high altitudes that they utilize oxygen more efficiently than any other animal? Amazing species.”
“As shifters, too. Unfortunately, we think she might have been the last one.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“We don’t know much about her. She was pregnant and collapsed in her human form. We don’t know if the father of her baby was a mono or not. Someone must have found her, and she was taken to the ER. Anastasia must have shifted there because our friend Dr. Volchok heard about it. He sent a special team, and she was taken from the hospital to a research center in the middle of nowhere.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yeah. They were experimenting on her when your dad heard about it. He managed to convince Dr. Volchok that he wanted to come and join his team.”
My eyes narrowed. I was learning to give my dad the benefit of the doubt before I dismissed his behavior as simply nuts.
“Zeb flew to Russia and convinced the scientists there that he knew something that could not only save Anastasia but allow them to make more shifters. They took him out to the facility where she was. Somehow, he disabled their security systems. In the middle of the night, he was able to get her out,” Nate continued.
“He got her out. But she still died?”
“He didn’t know exactly what those fuckers had done to her in the weeks they had her. He tried, but he couldn’t save her. However, even though it was a terrible loss, and she was the last of her kind, we are all still grateful that she didn’t die alone in a lab. Her energy was too beautiful and rare to waste.”
We both sat while a wave of loss swirled around us.
“Your dad knew our ways pretty well by then and knew how we feel about life essence. He managed to get her up into the mountains, where there were some other shifters.” I tried not to think about the fact that the assembled mourners must have eaten her. Nature can be heartless.
My hand flew to my mouth. “Boris was her husband.” That would explain the mournful music.
Nate shook his head. “No. He was one of the soldiers sent to transport her.”
“Did he know what they were going to do to her?”
Nate shrugged. “He was a kid, a soldier given orders. He was told to go secure a dangerous person and he did.”
“How did my dad ever forgive him?”
“Your dad is capable of extraordinary things, but do you really think 160-pound, asthmatic Zeb could carry a fully-grown snow leopard up the side of a mountain in knee-deep snow under gunfire?”
“So, Boris helped him take her?”
“When he realized what was happening, he decided to help your dad escape with Anastasia. We shifters may not like him much, but the Russians want him very dead.”
“He didn’t know what they were going to do to her. You said so yourself,” I said, defending Boris.
Nate held up a hand, as if telling me to calm down. “Look, if we hadn’t forgiven him for his part in it, he wouldn’t be alive. We know that your dad gave him one of Anastasia’s claws, which we all hate. But he did put himself at risk so that her life essence would not get wasted. Doesn’t mean we want him at cookouts.”
“I’ve seen that claw! He has a yellow ribbon tied around it. It’s always in his pocket. Whenever he would pull his billfold out, the claw would clatter to the floor! How did he get here… into the U.S., I mean?”
“When the people who helped your dad sneak in went to get him out, he refused to come without Boris.”
“I’ve never understood his friendship with my dad. My dad convinced me that living with Boris would be nice, since he hasn’t ever been able to get a tenant he liked.”
For the first time in our short acquaintance, Nate Sands’ jaw hung open. “Is that what they told you?” he gave a derisive snort, as if even a child should have seen through this transparent ruse.
“What does that mean?”
He counted on his fingers, “The place is in a prime location, it’s in perfect condition, and it has a landlord who avoids everyone. You really think he couldn’t fill a vacancy there without appealing to the kids of his friends?”
“Are you saying I couldn’t get an apartment anywhere else?” My frayed nerves showed in my shrill tone.
He wrapped his arms around me. “No, baby, I’m saying that Boris has that house because the plan all along was to get you where someone who knew about your dad’s other world could keep an eye on you.”
“That’s ridiculous. They couldn’t have hatched some grand plan. It actually looked like I couldn’t even afford vet school until the summer before.”
“That is interesting. What happened then?”
“I got a full ride from a firm called Seismic... OH, MY GOD.” Nate was laughing, but in a good-natured way. He wasn’t making fun of me.
“Seismic Shift! So, did you pay for my vet school, or did my dad?”
“Zeb, but he couldn’t do it openly, since his cover is that he’s an impoverished, broken former genius. Chaya typed the letter and made sure the bills got paid.”
“I guess I totally owe you guys my expertise. As a vet," I hurried to add. “I still don’t buy the cryptozoology crap.”
Nate nestled up behind me. “Me neither. It’s ridiculous.” While the rain bounced off the roof, we fell asleep, a tangle of limbs, new hopes, and old baggage.
CHATPER EIGHTEEN - THE PLATE GLASS IMPRINTATION
I have never been a big fan of morning sex. I am a fiercely pro-minty girl and have never been sure of how to say, “Hold that thought; I’ll brush my teeth and then, hey… here’s a totally random thought, why don’t you too?”
Just how much I yearned for Nate before my eyes were anywhere near opening was astonishing. I pressed myself closer against him and reached my hand back. His cock eagerly sprang to attention. The warmth of his face pressing into the curve of my neck radiated through my body. His strong hands rolled me over and I opened for him like a flower in the sun. Tenderness radiated from him as we rocked together. He stroked my face and whispered my name, and we came together in a light-filled wave. He was still resting within me and I was getting my mind around the fact that the most beautiful sexual experience I had ever imagined had actually happened. He lifted his forehead off mine and, gazing deeply into my eyes, said, “I love you more than anything I have ever known.”
I gasped and started to stammer. God knows, some of the men who swore they loved me didn’t. I have certainly told men I loved them even when I probably had well and truly fallen out of love with their sorry asses. This time I couldn’t say it, though. He was too genuine, too true. I couldn’t cheapen it and say the words unless I was absolutely sure they were true, and there was nothing else I could say in that moment that wouldn’t make me an asshole.
The hurt in his eyes was immediate. “It’s OK,” he said.
“Look, “I stammered. “We have known each other for three days. I have never felt like this before, but… three days, “I muttered weakly.
He swung his strong legs over the side of the bed. “You have known me for three days. I have loved you for fifteen years.”
I sat straight and pulled the covers up. “Don’t be silly. Just because my dad talked about me…”
He looked over his shoulder, and the pain was etched into every feature of his face. “I’m going for a run.”
While I called after him to wait, he strode out of the room. He might be comfortable just sauntering around naked, but I fumbled into my jeans and a T-shirt and trotted after him.
“Nate! Come back! I’m sorry, it’s just that this is all so crazy.” He had left the door wide open and I stood hopelessly on the porch, unable to see him anywhere.
The rain from the night before had left the ground soft, and I could see footprints. I jogged along, trying to follow his trail, until it suddenly stopped. I looked further down the path. Had he gone deeper into the woods? There was something further ahead, but it wasn’t Nate’s footprint. Crouching down for a closer look, I realized that it was Nate’s print, only a paw and not a foot.
I didn’t relish wandering the woods braless while a heartbroken lion was roaming around. I turned and headed back towards the house.
While I was getting properly dressed, I heard the front door open.
“Oh, thank God!” I said and careened down the stairs. It was not the romantic reconciliation I had hoped for. I ran smack into Moses, Arielle, and a battalion of strong people carrying in file cabinets, computers, and my dad’s desk with the drawers taped shut.
Embarrassed, I said, “You guys might want to consider getting some security here.”
Moses laughed. “This is the safest place on earth for you. Nate had us bring your dad’s things over so you can work here.”
Arielle had her arms full of a seemingly healthy and very squirmy lion cub. “Solstice took out his IV, but said we needed to have you OK it before I take him home.”
“He looks amazing.” Sliding the phone, I was holding into my pocket, I reached out to take him, and she noticed that I was shaking.
“Are you OK?”
“Yeah,” I lied, totally unconvincingly. She looked over her shoulder at the people still unloading my dad’s things.
“We’re going into the kitchen so Clem can check out the baby,” she called to Moses.
It didn’t take even the most cursory of exams to know that little Victor the black lion cub was fine. I stroked his beautiful pelt and felt a tear spill out of my eye.
Arielle leaned close to me. “Tell me, what’s going on?”
The two questions that had been sort of rolling around in my head escaped my mouth clumsily. “Is Nate imprinted on me? Is that why Solstice hates me?”
She held up a finger. “One, yes, he is. But once a shifter is imprinted, no one else can imprint upon them. Everyone always figured they would imprint and have lots of little cubs, but it just didn’t happen.”
“I think you mean I happened. I don’t know what I did, though.”
