Emins’ Mate(6)
She cocked her head to one side and trained her unblinking eyes on him as he came back to sit on the steps of his porch, his feet bare, his breath puffing in little white clouds as the temperature dropped.
He said something in a language she didn’t understand but it sounded a little like what her grandmother used to speak. A little but not quite.
“There you are,” he muttered in English. “Finally.”
He reached out a hand to her and Glory moved instantly forward, wanting nothing more than to be touched after so long alone. He didn’t pet her the way a human might have. As a shifter himself, she was sure he understood that she wouldn’t want to be treated like a house cat. Instead, he just simply laid his hand behind her ear, on her neck. She pressed into the warmth of it.
“Magnificent,” he muttered. “Breathtaking.”
Glory purred in the back of her throat.
“You understand English?” he asked in a thick accent.
She blinked at him, unwilling to pantomime while in her cat form. She wasn’t a cartoon character. He waited for a signal and got none. “Okay, you are shifter. I can smell you are not regular tiger.”
The man watched her and Glory got the feeling that he could see everything, all of her. She liked it.
“You are safe with me,” he said. “I will not hurt you ever.”
He cocked his head to one side then and rose. He went to his front door and looked back over his shoulder. “Come in.”
Glory padded up the stairs of the porch without hesitating, and into the man’s home. It was small, a single room with a little kitchen on one side and what she assumed was the closed door to a bathroom on the other. There was a rumpled bed in one corner, under an open window that let the night air in.
And almost every other inch was covered in canvasses. Some of them were half-covered in paint, others were blank, and others were, to her eye, complete. Glory felt something move in her chest. The deep colors. The sight of them all together, leaning against one another, they were like one giant, gorgeous organism. Her breath caught in her tiger chest.
She hadn’t spent a ton of time in her human form. Maybe an hour or so every day. She much preferred her tiger form. But there were some things that had to be seen with human eyes. Touched with human skin.
CHAPTER THREE
“Do you know how to shift?” Emin asked as he put a kettle of water on the stove to boil. He peered out at the night from the small window over the stove. Velvety black, just as he liked it. And finally he’d seen the tiger. She was here. No more chasing. He’d be able to help her, finally. She seemed so wild. So at home in the wilderness. He wondered if she even knew she was a shifter.
He pulled a mug from his cabinet and thought about that electric, pulse-pounding moment when he’d realized that the tiger was right there, next to him. And then the tussle that had turned so naturally to play. She wasn’t aggressive or scared. In fact, he got the impression that she was sweet. An odd thing to feel about a tiger.
He plunked a tea bag into his mug. She was here. No more hiding in the woods on her own. A feeling of deep calm and satisfaction curled through him.
And that feeling dried up like a drop of water on a hot pan as he turned back around, mug in hand.
“Christos,” he choked out as his eyes skated over the utterly gorgeous, completely naked woman who now stood in the middle of his cabin.
She was long, like a lazy, sunlit river. But, careful now, those curves must have been put on this earth to kill him. Her heavy breasts and round ass looked like they were made to be palmed in his hand. A messy cascade of long, orange-crimson hair whispered against the curve of her ass.
Well. She definitely knew how to shift.
She looked up at him with eyes so green they made him think of springtime. And there was joy there. Absolute, pure, unadulterated delight.
Emin dragged his eyes up from her delicious body and made himself stare at her in the eyes. He was pinned in place by her beauty.
“Art!” she exclaimed, holding up one of his canvasses. “You’re an artist.”
Emin nodded, let out a little choked sound as she bent over to pick up another one. What was wrong with him? Naked women didn’t stop him in his tracks. He was extremely comfortable with naked women. It was his favorite kind of woman, in fact. But for some reason this woman was sucking all the air out of the room. Maybe it was the combination of the sweet expression on her face and her sex bomb body.
He needed clothes for her. And fast.
Emin skirted around the kitchen, putting a healthy amount of space between the two of them. He needed to get ahold of himself.
He flipped open a drawer and selected a shirt of his without looking. Emin strode across the room and held the shirt out to her, staring pointedly at the canvas in her hands and not at her body, so creamy and soft.