Emins’ Mate(20)

He turned his face from it. He could barely stand to look at what he’d painted. At the little river that led straight to the calm mountain lake.





CHAPTER EIGHT





Two weeks later Emin scowled into his beer, slouching over the bar. Well, he'd found the damn tiger and he was still as frustrated as he had been before. He hadn't been comfortable in his house since she'd gotten there.

She was still staying with him. Part of him had hoped that she’d change her mind and be more comfortable sleeping at Katya’s or AJ’s. But the other part of him knew it would have driven him insane to not see her, just see her, every day.

Their plan, as a family, was to figure out how to start looking for her mother. Dora and Danil were finishing the last touches on the investigative article on Navuka. And then after that, Dora had sworn that every last bit of her brains was going straight to tracking down Glory’s mother. And in the meantime, Glory was lounging around Emin's house, learning about the human world and driving him utterly insane.

Chatting at his elbow while he made coffee in the morning. Making little satisfied sounds as she washed her hair in his shower. And curling up next to him on the floor damn near every night.

They’d never talked about her dream about him. Her sex dream. Or whatever it was. Emin thought it wiser to take a healthy step back from it. She was so open, so guileless, that he was certain she would tell him every detail if he asked. But he needed reasons to hit the brakes. Not the gas.

It was enough to drive him out of his mind. In fact, he wasn't sure how much longer he could take it. He swore his skin had shrunk since he'd met her. Either that or he suddenly had too much blood. And it all seemed to be pooling in one place.

He slouched even further over the bar and refused to adjust himself. Not just from simply thinking about her. A man had to have standards.

Besides, all the little proximities weren't what was driving him nuts. It was what she did when she was away from him that was killing him slowly. Lately she was spending her time with Anton. Emin knew he’d been very grumpy with her, as if to warn her away. But he was irrationally irritated when it had started working.

Whether it was because of their common past experiences, or because Glory needed a break from Emin, she had started spending a few hours every day with Anton. In tiger form and bear form they wandered the wilderness together. And then they would come back, sit on Emin's front porch and talk in low voices. He knew he should be glad, deeply grateful even, that someone had opened up his little brother like this. Anton had been so deathly quiet for a decade. Never talking to anyone about his past traumas. And now he had someone to commiserate with.

Yes. Emin should be grateful.

He was miserably, horribly resentful.

He took a swig of his beer. Trying to reason with himself. Even if she wasn't interested in his brother, Emin still couldn't have her. No matter how fiercely his body insisted on it.

She was an innocent. He still stood by what he’d told her on the cliffs those weeks ago. She wasn’t ready for a mate. She sure as hell wasn’t ready for a casual sexual partner. Which was the only thing that Emin could offer her. It was the only thing he could offer any woman. If he’d had a smaller conscience, he would have told her that he could be her mate and then taken his fill of her. But he hadn’t.

She hadn’t given him any indication since that night that she had anything but sisterly feelings for him. No more dreams. No more questions. She treated him almost exactly the same as she treated his brothers. He imagined that if Maxim were sleeping every night in a nest of blankets on her floor, she would curl up to him for warmth.

And, oh, how those thoughts tortured him each night. It was such a maddening combination of knowing that he couldn’t touch her and not knowing whether or not she wanted him to.

Because for fuck sakes. She’d obviously never touched a man or been touched. Never kissed, even. Unless Anton had. Emin's knuckles whitened against his pint glass.

"What'd that glass ever do to you?" Dora asked over Emin's shoulder as she pulled up a bar stool and sat next to him. Danil cuffed Emin on the shoulders and went to the back of the bar to throw darts with Maxim.

"Okay. Not in a talky mood tonight," Dora supplied as she saw the look on Emin's face. He hadn’t been in a talky mood ever since Glorious Glory had come into their lives, but Dora wisely decided not to mention that. "Anything you want to talk about?"

"No," he replied tersely. And then, realizing how rude he was being to his sister in law, "How is article going?"

"Great! With Glory and Anton's interviews, we're really closing in on the final draft here. I'm gonna have to shop it around a little bit, but I'm hoping my buddy over at the Atlantic can pull some strings for me."