A Mate For Orion (Forbidden Shifters Series Book 5)

by Selena Scott

  Neither of them spoke while they ate, but she cuddled him plenty. Her hands on his chest and forearms, her forehead nuzzling into his shoulder, her fingers in his hair, her feet between his, her hips against his as she leaned against him.

  He was utterly befuddled by this sweetness, but he sure as hell wasn’t turning it away. If she was dishing out sweetness, he was gobbling it up.

  “We should probably clean up,” he said when they were finally done eating but still leaning against one another in the kitchen.

  She shrugged. “It’s late. We could do it in the morning.”

  He crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to be able to sleep with your shower rod halfway falling into the bathtub and your picture frames knocked onto the floor?”

  She laughed and shrugged, brushing her long hair back from her face and raising her lovely eyes to the ceiling as she searched for the right words. “Maybe I’m turning over a new leaf.”

  He hadn’t heard that phrase before and just cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that maybe, I’m trying to develop some new habits.”

  “What kind of habits?”

  “Option B kind of habits,” she said with a grin. “I’ll explain it some other time. I’m tired tonight. Wanna go to bed?”

  She stretched and his mouth literally watered. What they’d done just an hour previous had been by far the best sex of Orion’s life and they hadn’t even had sex. He had zero regrets about the speed or intensity of what they’d done together. Maybe it wasn’t the usual way that two grown people got down and dirty, but frankly he couldn’t wait to do it again.

  Yeah. Bed sounded good.

  “If you’re sure you don’t want to clean up…” He gave her one last shot.

  She shrugged again. “I told you, Orion, I’ve never done messy before. But you’re worth doing messy for.” She looked at the ground for a moment and then forced her eyes back up to his. “It’s… good for me, I think.”

  “It’s good for me too,” he said with a laugh. “Seriously.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He tugged her close to him, just because he was allowed to and it thrilled him. “You’re the kind of woman who makes a man want to get messy, Diana.” He turned his head toward her. “And I mean messy in every way. Loose ends, untucked corners, all that the good stuff. I don’t ever want things to be perfect with you. I just want you, any way I can get you. Spilled milk and all. Upturned cake facedown on the sidewalk. I don’t care. I just want you.”

  He caught her lips with his and his stomach flipped hard at that surprisingly soft flavor of her. Her appearance was so fiercely beautiful, so striking. But her flavor was sweet and quiet and soft. Go figure.

  “Remember when I offered to court you the right way?” he asked her.

  She lifted an eyebrow. “You mean an hour and a half ago? Yeah, I remember that.”

  “Well, as nice as it sounded, it felt wrong, didn’t it?”

  She cocked her head to one side, obviously considering his words. “I guess you’re right. Yeah, it felt wrong somehow.”

  “Because we’re not neat and tidy people, Diana. You’re neat and tidy at work, maybe. But you and me? When we’re together? We say we’re friends and then we wake up with my dick in your panties. That’s not neat and tidy.”

  She laughed brightly, relief and humor in every line of her face.

  He continued. “I’m just saying that a lot of people might need clear lines drawn about what we are and where we’re going and how we’re going to get there. But…” he took a deep breath, wanting so badly to communicate this in the right way. “We don’t really need that, do we? As long as we have each other, we’re on the right track.”

  She pursed her lips. “If you were any other man on the face of the planet I’d think you were trying to line me up to be in your fuck buddy rotation right now.”

  He clapped his mouth closed. He knew enough about human culture at this point, especially from Wren, to know what fuck buddies were. It had literally never occurred to him that Diana might possibly consider herself to be that for him. “I— no— you—“

  She laughed and clapped a hand over his mouth. “Orion, I’m saying that I understand what you’re saying. I know you’re not saying you want to keep this casual.”

  “Right,” he said, his voice muffled behind her palm.

  “You’re just saying that confusing is okay. And that you’re not going to press me for answers. And that you want whatever I know how to give.”

  “Yes,” he answered resolutely. Then a thought struck him and he pulled her palm away from his mouth, needing to be crystal clear on this point.

  “And,” she said, cutting him off with one eyebrow raised. “Let me guess, you also want to be exclusive.”

  “Yes,” he said with a sharp nod of his head. “We can be messy together. But not with other people. You want messy, you come to me. You want anything, you come to me. A hug at three in the morning. Dinner. Someone to turn you over and hit it from the back. You come to me.”

  Diana burst out laughing and he scowled at her, his hands on his hips.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just find it incredibly charming that you can say something like that to me even though we’ve never officially had sex.” She cocked her head to one side. “Also, you’ve never heard the phrase ‘turn over a new leaf’ yet you know what ‘hit it from the back’ means.” She shook her head with a smile on her face. “Such a man.”

  “You’re the one who gave me the phone with the internet connection,” he informed her, scooping her up in his arms and starting to walk her back down the hallway.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked and then went stiff in his arms, her mouth dropping open. “Hold the phone. Are you trying to tell me that you’ve been using center-issued property to watch porn on the internet?”

  He laughed at the incredulous look on her face. “I’ll never understand human culture,” he told her. “You just let me come on your stomach yet you’re shocked that I watch porn? Humans are so confusing.”

  “You can’t use your phone to watch porn! That phone is paid for by a federal grant that I had to bust my ass to get! You can’t waste the taxpayers’ money on money shots!”

  He laughed even harder. “Trust me. None of that money was wasted. It’s all gone to a very good cause.”

  “Orion!” she laughed, giving herself away. “This is very serious.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He tossed her onto her bed, rumpled sheets and exposed mattress and all, and dove in after her. He rolled and tangled them up deliciously in the blankets and in each other.

  “See?” she demanded. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. I gave it up in the bathtub and now you’ve lost all respect for my authority.”

  “Diana, let’s make a deal. When you’re the director of the center, kicking ass and dressed up in your fancy clothes and making everyone jump six inches in the air when you come into the room, well, I’ll treat you with nothing but professionalism. But here? In bed and naked and relaxed? I’m going to tease you.”

  She pursed her lips but he could see the happiness threatening to moonbeam right out of her. “Oh, fine.”

  He kissed her then. And they didn’t stop kissing. Even when the moon finally set and the sky darkened even further. Finally, when fatigue took them both, almost simultaneously, they fell asleep with their foreheads pressed together.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Across town, in the dead of the night, someone else was having a terrible time.

  Quill couldn’t sleep. He’d spoken with the Director tonight. He’d known that he couldn’t avoid him forever, and honestly, his training had been chafing at him. It went against all of his conditioning from the last decade to avoid the Director.

  The Director was the one who’d rescued Quill from the almost certain death in the internment camps. Quill had been young and al
one and sick. Separated from his family. Terrified. He’d stopped eating, opting to sleep deliriously whenever he could, he’d had a fever for what felt like weeks. He’d known that he wasn’t going to make it much longer. He’d watched as shifters all around him succumbed to illness and starvation. Some of them dying right there in the pens where they were kept and some of them being dragged off and never heard from again. He’d hoped against hope that he’d been thrown into the worst of the internment camps, that wherever the rest of his family had been distributed was better than this. But even then he’d known they were dead. There was a silence in his heart that he just knew was because there was no one else on this earth carrying his blood. He was alone in every sense of the word.

  That was when the Director had come. He’d visited the internment camp where Quill was being held and was drawn to Quill for some reason or another.

  “You’re a survivor,” he’d told Quill. Though the word had seemed strange and foreign to him. He hadn’t thought of himself as surviving. He’d thought of himself as dying. Just perhaps a little more slowly than the rest of the shifters around him.

  The Director had had Quill moved to a different part of the internment camp and seen to his recovery. Quill was given better food and a cot to sleep on. Medicine was administered in shockingly painful shots into the muscle of his thigh. Within weeks, he knew for sure that he was no longer dying. He wasn’t thriving, but death wasn’t imminent.

  He wasn’t sure he was grateful for that.

  But that was when the Director started working with Quill.

  That was when Quill realized that he didn’t have to be alone forever. He could be a part of something. He was never getting his family back. They were dead. He was never getting his old life back. That was dead too. But that didn’t mean that he had to shrivel up and roll over like so many of the other shifters in the camp. He came to see them as weak and pathetic. He refused to join their ranks. Quill’s single goal had become to survive. He was a survivor, just like the Director had told him. He held that word in his heart, above all others. It was the only thing that was important to him anymore.

  He almost didn’t care what it was that the Director asked him to do. For years, he never questioned his orders. Because those orders were the only structure in Quill’s life. The world was an ugly, unfair place. What did it matter if Quill added to the ugliness?

  But unfortunately for Quill, the ugliness had started to matter. At the worst possible time. In the Director’s time of need. A time when if Quill let him down, the Director would lose everything. The entire program that they’d been building together for a decade. It had been a hard five years since the internment camps had been shut down. Sure, Quill was relieved to be living free again. But the Director had run out of government money years ago. And now, with the cultural tide starting to accept shifters, the Director’s actions were starting to appear more and more extreme from the outside. Quill didn’t care. The man had kept him from dying in the internment camp. It wasn’t that Quill felt any sort of love for the man, but loyalty? Loyalty was something that still ran deep for him. And since his family had been killed, the only place for Quill to place that loyalty was at the feet of the Director. He couldn’t let him down.

  The problem was, now he knew the Director’s plan for the Wolf family. And he couldn’t un-know it. In fact, Quill himself was to be instrumental in pulling the whole thing off.

  He sat in his kitchen in the dead of night and tugged at his dark hair, the overhead light too bright against his scratchy eyes. There was a burning sensation in his throat. The backs of his eyes felt tight. He couldn’t believe he was about to cry.

  An image popped into his head, unbidden. Phoenix, Orion, and Dawn all tranquilized and cuffed in the back of a van, enough medicine pumping through their veins to keep them from shifting.

  He shook his head. “No,” he whispered to himself, as if that word alone could erase the image. As if his aversion to the thoughts that tortured him could make them evaporate.

  He couldn’t stop the turning wheel. It was going to happen whether he wanted it to or not. The Director would not be stopped. The only choice that Quill had was whether or not he remained loyal to the Director. There was nothing he could do for the Wolf siblings. He had to let it go.

  The image popped into his head again, only this time, Phoenix and Orion weren’t there. This time, for whatever twisted reason, his brain forced him to zero in on Dawn and Dawn alone. Even unconscious, she shivered against the metal floor of the van, the cuffs cutting into her wrists, her dark hair tangled, stuck to her lips, her eyes moving rapidly beneath her lavender eyelids.

  “No,” he said again, tugging even harder against his hair.

  A loud knock at his door rent the stillness of the night in two and had Quill jumping up from his chair as if he’d been electrocuted. He glanced at the clock over his stove. One AM. Who the hell was banging on his door in the middle of the night?

  The knock came again and Quill strode forward. If they knocked a third time, they were bound to wake his neighbors. He lived in an apartment complex and the walls were thin. The last thing he needed right now was a complaint from Ms. Murphy next door. Quill strode to the door and looked through the peephole. He frowned immediately and yanked open the door.

  “What the hell are you doing here at one in the morning?” he demanded of Dawn who was standing in his hallway, her humongous eyes filling up her face and her short black hair dusting her shoulders. She jumped at his tone and for a moment, looked just like the silent, meek woman he’d first met when he’d become her mentor last year. But then her eyes narrowed and a steely resolve seemed to wash over her. She put her hands on her hips and straightened up.

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  The position of her hands brought his attention down her body. She wore a fitted black pea coat, stylish jeans that hugged her legs, boots with a heel, and a librarian sweater to go with her librarian glasses.

  He felt something quiver deep in his gut and it was almost, almost, enough to have him sending her away without ever finding out why she was here in the first place.

  Life was already complicated enough without adding hot-ass librarian sweaters into the mix.

  He stepped back and waved her inside, only then realizing the mistake he was making, letting her into his home. He closed the door behind her and pinched the bridge of his nose. He was such a dumbass. He was never going to get the image of her in his kitchen out of his head.

  “Your house is… nice,” she said in mild surprise, turning a slow circle to take in the kitchen and the slice of his living room that she could see.

  “This surprises you?” His house was nice. Homey even. It was the loyalty thing rising up inside of him. Even though she’d been dead for over a decade, and even though Quill had been a mercenary for almost all of that time, dead inside and working for the Director, Quill’s mother would roll over in her grave if she ever caught him living in a bachelor pad. Homes should be welcoming, how many times had she said that to him in her life? A thousand? Every time she was shoving a laundry basket into his hands and making him tidy up his room. A person’s living space didn’t need to be trendy or stunning, but in his mother’s eyes, they needed to be welcoming.

  So, even though most of Quill’s life was depressing and bleak and duplicitous, his home was not. There were carefully folded afghans over the couch and recliners, packed bookshelves, plants on windowsills, coasters on the coffee table. His dishes matched, leftovers were stacked neatly in the fridge, the refrigerator magnets arranged in a pleasing sunburst of color.

  “I guess it surprises me a little,” Dawn said, pulling out a chair and sitting down, plopping her chin on her palm and turning those dark eyes to him. Dark eyes to match her dark hair and dark voice. She was a confusing contradiction of light and shadow. Somehow she was both the sunniest and the most midnight-ish woman that Quill had ever met. Maybe it was her voice that tipped her over the edge. She h
ad a voice like salted caramel, like a sip of black coffee while the sun was still rising, like black satin. Quill wasn’t sure if phone sex operators were still a thing, what with the internet offering all the free porn any depraved soul could ever possibly want, but if they were still a thing, Dawn could have worked for a year and retired young. She’d have made a killing.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged, looking mildly embarrassed. “Aren’t single men supposed to have pictures of sports teams and half-naked women on their walls?” She craned her head around. “Where’s the pyramid of beer cans?”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “Been in many single men’s houses lately?”

  She flushed, her eyes dropping and her bottom lip getting caught between her teeth. For a second Quill’s stomach absolutely bottomed out. As her center-issued mentor, he knew a lot about her life, but he certainly didn’t know everything. Was it at all possible that she had been spending time in single men’s houses? His eyes surveyed her again. Buttoned up and sexy and dark and sunny all at once.

  Shit.

  Yes. It was totally possible that there were dudes in her life that he knew nothing about. Shit.

  “No,” she said, her hands reaching up in a familiar gesture. She was reaching for the long hanks of her dark hair that had been lopped off a few weeks ago. She still wasn’t used to not being able to hide behind the impenetrable curtain of her locks. As soon as her fingertips encountered the blunt ends of her haircut, Dawn straightened, shaking her hair back, as if she were remembering who she was, all the ways she’d changed since she’d come to the human world. “I know about it the same way I’ve learned about everything.”

  Ah. The light came on in Quill’s brain. “You read about it.”