Emins’ 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.