Emins’ Mate(3)

Emin frowned at Russ. He didn’t like Russ saying that.

All of it was true. But still.

Russ was using it as proof of why he couldn’t get Charlie and that wasn’t true.

Emin thought for a moment. “She also likes dates. Real ones. With-” Emin waved his hands through the air searching for the word again. “Carnival. A tucked-in shirt.” He plucked at Russ’s firehouse T. “Flowers and kiss on doorstep. This, I never gave her.”

Well, except for the kiss on the doorstep, but he didn’t think Russ needed to hear about that part right now.

Russ nodded, planting his elbows on the bar. He tried not to resent Emin for having gotten there first, and so effortlessly. And then for tossing Charlie over. She’d been sad for weeks. But Emin was a good friend. Always had been. And now he was trying to help Russ out. So, he supposed that counted.

“I’ll keep it in mind,” Russ said, absentmindedly reaching for his beer again.

Emin raised an eyebrow and Russ put the beer down again.

“Tomorrow you’ll tell me how it goes,” Emin said, clapping a hand on Russ’s back and walking away, knowing when a friend needed space. He took it philosophically. It wouldn’t be the first time that the company Emin kept had created prickly feelings between him and a friend. Occasionally between him and a brother.

Emin grinned as he crossed the dance floor toward Maxim. “Remember the night you caught me with Polina Petrakova?” he asked his brother in Belarusian when they were close enough to speak over the music.

Maxim scowled. “She still had my love letter in the pocket of the jeans you peeled off of her, you son of a bitch.”

Emin bit back his smile. “How could I have known?”

Maxim shifted the dancing blonde to one side and reached out to cuff his brother. Emin allowed himself to be wrapped up in his brother’s massive grip. A little too tight to be called a hug. This was halfway between punishment and affection.

“We left that night in the field where I beat the shit out of you,” Maxim said, planting a kiss on his brother’s cheek, as they often did. They were not just Belarusian in name, but in custom as well.

“Seemed only fair I let you win that one,” Emin shrugged, still grinning.

Maxim chuffed out a disbelieving laugh, but the blonde was bending down further than she had before and he was losing interest in his brother.

“I’m going,” Emin said, sliding his coat on.

Maxim nodded, knowing that Emin needed his bear. This loud bar didn’t hold much for him tonight. “See you tomorrow.”

Emin turned, spotted Charlie talking to some guy at the far end of the bar and turned back to Maxim. Still speaking in Belarusian, “Make sure Charlie doesn’t go home with anyone else tonight.”

Maxim’s brow immediately furrowed. It wasn’t like Emin to bookmark a woman he didn’t want for himself. And Maxim knew that Emin didn’t want her for himself.

“I don’t think Russ’s heart could take it,” Emin clarified and watched as Maxim’s eyes scanned the bar, and lit on the discouraged look on Russ’s face as Charlie flirted at the other end of the bar.

Maxim nodded in understanding, giving Emin a little surprised look. Russ had hidden it well. But then the music crescendoed and there was no more time for brothers. Maxim’s massive hands easily lifted the little blonde and suddenly the beat wasn’t the only thing she rode.

Grinning to himself, Emin strolled off the dance floor, stopping for just a second to twirl a little brunette in his arms, feel her warmth through her thin dress. She beamed up at the handsome stranger who was suddenly making lightning zip down her spine. But the song was ending, so he kissed her cheek and was gone, disappearing out of the bar and into the night.

He took his car up to his cabin but didn’t go inside. Emin stripped his clothes on the front porch, enjoying the zipping bite of chill in the October air. God, he loved the fall. Chilly with a kiss of summer still in the air. And the colors. He scanned the dark trees. The night had turned them all a silvery black, but in the morning, they would be every shade of crimson a man could imagine. And he could imagine quite a lot. He had a house full of painted canvasses to prove it.

On the drive home he’d considered coming inside and painting for a moment, but he knew there was really only one thing that would calm him right now. And that was looking for her. The tiger. The tiger he was sure was a shifter like him and his family.

The one whose scent tugged at him like a fish on a line. He couldn’t have said why. He needed to know why she stayed there, in the woods of Spokane.

And more than anything, he needed to see her. Even the barest peek would do him over.