A Mate For Orion (Forbidden Shifters Series Book 5)

by Selena Scott

  Orion didn’t bother correcting Pete on his name, he’d found that people didn’t really ‘get it’ just like they didn’t really ‘get’ Phoenix’s name either. Dawn’s they did all right with. He watched Pete light another cigarette, this one for himself, and then he turned and jogged across the street toward Diana’s center.

  Worst came to worst this morning and at least he’d made a friend.

  ***

  Did she smell smoke?

  Diana allowed herself one huff of irritation before she took a long, cleansing breath and tried not to let the rage out of the cage.

  Because someone was smoking a cigarette directly under her open office window and she knew exactly who it was.

  He was not going to win this one. She didn’t care if he smoked a damn cigarette. She didn’t care if a carton of cigarettes fell from the sky and knocked him unconscious. She was completely capable of ignoring his childish efforts to get her attention. She was absolutely, one hundred percent, not going down there to tell him off.

  Of course, not two seconds later, she was striding across her office and tossing the door open, scaring the life out of two of her employees who happened to be passing by.

  “Everything all right, Diana?” Rose asked, her eyes wide at whatever expression Diana’s face was making.

  “Peachy,” Diana said with a smile she was certain made her look like a woman on the edge.

  Her expensive high heels clicked assertively as she swung her way through the main floor of the center and out the front door, rounding the corner toward the parking lot. She loved her sleek, fancy professional wear -always feeling a bit like catwoman when she got dressed in the mornings- but for once, she wished she were wearing sneakers and track pants instead of her tight pencil skirt and buttoned-up blouse. It would be a hell of a lot easier to kick Orion Wolf’s ass if she were in athletic wear.

  She stepped around the last corner and sure enough, there he was, leaning against the wall just under her office window, lazy smile on his face as if he’d been expecting her. The cigarette, incidentally, he was holding up above his head with his considerable wingspan, letting the breeze buffet the curling smoke directly into her office.

  He wasn’t even pretending to smoke it, the jackass.

  “Mr. Wolf,” Diana said, coming to stand five feet away from him, her hands on her hips. “There is a no smoking policy on this property.”

  He just continued to smile lazily at her. The way he always did. Like no matter how much she growled and glared and barked at him, he was always happy to see her. “Hi, Diana.”

  She ruthlessly ignored that bass note in his voice that -ok,ok- twanged something inside her chest like a violin string. She also ignored the fact that his shoulders were pretty much as wide as the double-paned window above him.

  So, he happened to be big and blunt and beautiful. It was annoying, she reminded herself, not alluring. She wasn’t attracted to him, she wasn’t, she wasn’t, she wasn’t!

  “Is there a reason you’re pretending to smoke a cigarette under my window?” Of course there was a reason. She knew the reason.

  He was fixated on her for some reason. She’d endured an entire year of him doing almost anything he could to get her attention.

  “You didn’t respond to my text this morning,” he said in that deep voice.

  She fought the urge to look around and see if there were any errant coworkers about who might have heard him say that. In a moment of weakness about six months ago, she’d given him one of the extra cellphones that the center allowed their mentors to use. She hadn’t wanted Orion to be out and about in the world with no connection to people who would be able to help him if he needed it. He was so clueless about life amongst humans that she hadn’t thought for a moment that he might use that phone to call her and text her. He’d done so almost immediately.

  And thus began the six month cold war. With him calling and texting just to say hi to her and her refusing to let herself be warmed by his attention.

  “Mr. Wolf—”

  “Orion,” he corrected her. Neither he nor his siblings took kindly to the last name that the state had provided them with last year.

  She took a deep breath. It always gave her an embarrassing shiver down her back to say his name aloud but she figured that was as unprofessional as the texting. Thus, it would have to be left behind. “Orion,” she said sternly. “I gave you that phone for emergencies. I didn’t respond because it’s unprofessional for you to text me at all hours.” At this point she’d lost track of how many times she’d informed him of this particular fact. It didn’t appear that he cared all that much about what was professional and what wasn’t.

  Not that texting was even really what they were doing. Orion, not having been a member of society until last year, was still in the beginning stages of learning how to read and write. Therefore he used the voice memo feature on the phone to send her messages. Which, speaking of shivers down her back, always just kind of killed her.

  She’d woken up this morning to an unopened message from him. Opening it, she’d heard his deep, coffee-whiskey voice wishing her a good morning. She’d pressed her eyes closed for a second, pretended he was there in bed with her, saying it to her face, not through her phone.

  And that’s how she knew this whole thing with him had gone too far.

  “‘Professional’ sure has a lot of rules,” he sighed. He was still learning how to be a member of society and Diana knew that was daunting for a lot of people in his position, but she also knew that he wasn’t trying to learn the rules so much as push them to the edge, at least as far as she was concerned.

  “That may be, Orion. But regardless, I’m the director of this center. You’re a client. It’s very important—”

  “How can I be considered a client of the center when I don’t even have a mentor?”

  Diana’s eyebrows snapped down and her scalp began to ache where her tightly drawn ponytail pulled at her skin. “What do you mean you don’t have a mentor? What happened with Carl?”

  “What do you think happened with Carl?” Orion asked with that infuriating smile still on his face.

  Diana pinched the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes shut for a second. This might be a real headache brewing, not just a ponytail-induced one. “That you scared him off just like you did the last fifteen mentors I’ve assigned you?”

  “Sixteen,” he corrected, with a proud sort of glee in his tone.

  She strode forward, slapped the still-smoking cigarette out of his hand and stomped it out with her shoe. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you enjoyed making my life difficult.”

  He frowned at her. “I don’t enjoy that. I want to make your life easier. Better. I want your life to be wonderful.”

  And there he went again. Just when she thought that she could actually write him off as selfish and self-serving, he went and said something so honest, so pure, so sincere that all her anger at him just sort of whistled away. She refused to sag.

  “If you want to make my life easier, then just work with a mentor already! Any mentor. Pick one and don’t cause trouble and just let me do my job!”

  He was quiet for a long minute. Long enough that she was forced to look up at him, his blunt face and trimmed beard and gray-blue eyes. “You know there’s only one person I want to be my mentor,” he said quietly.

  She threw her hands up. “I’m not a mentor!” It was useless. They’d already had this argument a hundred times. They were going in circles, apparently completely evenly matched in terms of stubbornness. “You can’t have me! I’m the director of the center not a mentor!”

  “Then,” he said, just as quietly as before, “maybe it’s time we talked about me quitting the center. If I can’t have you as a mentor then maybe I could have you in a different way.”

  Her eyes snapped to his but she didn’t see anything lascivious or leering in his expression, no matter how his words had sounded. Again, he was doing that transparently honest
thing. It was her fault if she was reading blatant sexuality into his statement. Well, not her fault exactly, considering he was pretty much the most sexual being on the planet -simply by existing. His wide shoulders and blunt mouth and all-seeing eyes and humongous body and earthy scent and deep voice, all of it added up to a pretty potent package.

  She was pretty much positive that when he’d voice-memoed her this morning, he hadn’t been trying to make her panties wet. But here they were. The man was walking sex. Sex personified. A living greek god.

  What had they been talking about? Him quitting the center? Crap! “No. No. We’re not going to talk about you quitting the center.”

  It was the last thing she wanted.

  Up until six or so years ago, being a shifter in the United States was basically illegal. The only way to not get arrested if you were found out was to turn yourself in. Which meant living in one of the government run internment facilities that dotted the nation. Basically, it meant agreeing to a lifetime of imprisonment, legal experimentation, zero autonomy, and almost certain separation from one’s loved ones. Not a whole lot of incentive for shifters to turn themselves in. An awful lot of incentive to stay hidden, usually on the outskirts of society.

  Orion, and his siblings Phoenix and Dawn, had done one better than outskirts. They’d simply never mixed with society before. Even after the Shifter Liberation Act, which made the internment camps illegal, and no longer required shifters to register with the government, Orion, Phoenix, and Dawn had lived in the mountains outside of Portland, Oregon, almost exclusively in their wolf forms. They’d been a tight pack and might have stayed that way, denying their human forms, if not for the wildfire that had almost killed Phoenix. Orion and Dawn had dragged their brother’s injured body in to town and straight to a hospital, where they’d all been registered in the blink of an eye.

  Their plan had always been to slip back into the wilderness and continue living as wolves, but for months after the accident, Phoenix hadn’t been able to shift out of his human form. And then, when he finally could shift, he’d fallen in love with a human, his mentor at the center, actually. And he hadn’t wanted to leave for the wilderness again. Which left Orion and Dawn in limbo, trying to figure out if they wanted to return on their own or stay and form a human version of their wolf pack. So far, they’d stayed.

  Needless to say, Diana did not want Orion to quit the center because he and his siblings were in more need of the services they provided to shifters than almost any other clients they’d ever had. Sending Orion out into the world with no safety net was basically begging him to spiral downhill. She’d seen it happen before. Shifters who had no support system easily fell into drug addiction, homelessness. They were exploited by opportunistic humans. She’d be damned if that happened to Orion Wolf. His enrollment at the center was deeply important to her. It was one of the only ways she could ensure that he remained safe and intact and, hopefully, happy.

  The other reason she really, really did not want him to quit the center was because his brother already had. Phoenix had signed himself out of the program only two weeks after entering it. She couldn’t exactly fault him for that, considering he did so because he’d fallen in love with Ida, his mentor, and it wasn’t ethical for them to be together if she was still his mentor. But it had caused Diana some grief. This center was run on both private donations and grant money. If she lost another shifter this year, she was in danger of losing the federal grant that funded damn near half the year for her. And she could only imagine how bad it would look if she lost two shifters from the same family. Talk about a red flag.

  So, no. Nope. “You’re not quitting the center.”

  There was a small tremor in her voice so she put her hands on her hips and pulled her face into a stern expression to cover her emotion.

  “Orion, the center is actually a pretty amazing place. Filled with resources and opportunities. If you just gave it a chance, I think you’d actually really like it here.”

  He squinted at her. “I do like it here.”

  She glowered. “You also like scaring off all the mentors I assign you. Which makes my job harder and means that you don’t actually get to take advantage of any of the services we offer here.”

  “Diana.”

  Both Orion and Diana looked up at the head that had just stuck itself out of her office window. It was her assistant, Teddy. His perfectly coiffed brown hair didn’t succumb to gravity even as he peered down at them. “I’ve got Kirby Wallace on the line for you.”

  “I’ll be right up.”

  Teddy disappeared back into her office but she would have bet a hundred dollars that he was crouched down and listening to the end of their conversation. Apparently Orion Wolf and his pursuit of Diana as a mentor was quite the office gossip. Yet another reason why she just wanted him to behave. Diana had absolutely no interest in being the topic of anyone’s water cooler convo.

  She turned to him. “I have to go take that. Don’t smoke on the property and no more texting.”

  She turned on her heel and strode away, her expensive shoes clicking authoritatively on the concrete. She could feel his eyes on her back, but she didn’t turn.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Hey, Rick?” Orion asked as he and his coworker heaved and hauled a dingy couch up two flights of stairs. “How’d you meet your wife?”

  “This is what you want to talk about right now?” Rick said through pained, tight breaths. He was red in the face and clearly straining under the weight of the furniture. It wasn’t the first time that Orion had wondered why Rick worked for the moving company. Orion worked for the moving company because apparently, with only a basic understanding of human culture, no ability to read or write, and a very large body, he was only qualified for what Diana had referred to as unskilled labor. He didn’t mind it though. There was something very satisfying about seeing the moving truck completely emptied at the end of the day. And as much as he didn’t really understand human culture’s obsession with money, it was nice to be able to feel like he was providing for his siblings.

  “Just curious.”

  “We met the usual way.” Rick made a pained groan as they finally set the couch down in the living room of the walk up. He tumbled down and parked his ass right in the middle cushion, breathing heavily, his face still red.

  “What way is that?” Instead of resting, Orion just crossed his arms as he stood tall in the middle of the room.

  Rick rolled his head to look at him. Orion knew his coworkers thought of him as weird. He also knew that they didn’t press him on it, whether it was because they knew he was a shifter or because they knew he was new to human culture he wasn’t sure.

  “The internet.”

  “Oh.” As someone who exclusively used the internet for occasional porn, this answer illuminated exactly nothing for Orion.

  “A dating site,” Rick clarified. He cocked his head to one side. “Have you seen one before?”

  Orion shook his head.

  “Well, they’re theses websites that you go on and post your picture, a few sentences about yourself and you see if you can catch any fish.”

  Now Orion was thoroughly confused. He’d never heard of anything like this. “You use it to catch fish? And then you attract women based on how many fish you were able to catch?”

  “No,” Rick said with a laugh. “The fish are the women.”

  “Oh.” Orion had never met Rick’s wife before, and he was fairly certain that she was a human and not a fish of some kind. But there was some pretty odd porn out there that had made Orion realize that there was a whole world of human sexuality that he might never understand. “Huh.”

  He made a note to ask Diana about this. Because as short as she was with him about him wanting to be her mentee, if he ever had a real question about human life, she always patiently and thoroughly answered him. Something about her calm demeanor never made Orion feel stupid.

  Rick cocked his head to one side, eyeing Orion as if he kne
w that Orion was confused about the information he’d just presented, but when he opened his mouth to speak, he was interrupted by a chirping sound coming from Orion’s phone.

  Orion pulled it out of his back pocket and couldn’t help but smile at the alarm that was going off. Instead of being labeled with words that he wouldn’t have been able to read, Diana had helped him program it with two little cartoons that she’d called emojis. One was of a round, yellow orb and the other was of a wolf.

  “Bruce is going to have to help you get the remaining boxes,” Orion told Rick, referring to their coworker who was on break downstairs.

  “What? You’re bailing? It’s not quitting time yet.” As weird as the guys considered Orion to be, he was also easily the strongest amongst them and they definitely didn’t mind having him there to run a blitz on the end of any moving day.

  “Gotta go,” Orion said, shaking the ringing phone at Rick. “Full moon rises in an hour, I already talked to the boss about it.”

  All the color slid out of Rick’s formerly ruddy face. He stood up quickly and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Right. Right, right. Cool, man. Yeah, cool. Whatever you need to do. Do your thing.”

  Sweat formed on Rick’s brow. Sweat which hadn’t even formed when he’d been red in the face and dragging a couch up multiple flights of stairs. But mention anything about a full moon and he was suddenly melting the collar of his t-shirt a darker shade of blue.

  Orion nearly sighed. He should be used to this by now, the raw fear that some humans felt when confronted with an in-the-flesh shifter. Rick, pretending to play it cool, was suddenly rocking on his heels and whistling an aimless tune, looking anywhere but at Orion.

  All because he, what?, thought that Orion might at any second shift into a vicious wolf that might tear his head off.

  What a joke. Having spent the vast majority of his life in his wolf form, he was easily more tame as a wolf than he was as a human. As a human, Orion was sometimes thrown off by the complicated emotions and instincts that rose up in him. He was often startled by his own strength. Didn’t Rick realize that if he was worried about anything, it would never have to be Orion’s wolf form?