A Mate For Raphael (Forbidden Shifters Book 2)

by Selena Scott

  “You’re wondering if you’re hot?”

  She shrugged.

  “Natalie,” Raphael said with a yawn. “You’re hot.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That was so convincing.”

  He squinched up his face at her. “Are you asking me to convince you?”

  “Ew. No. I’m just bummed, is all.” His head sleepily jerked down to his chest and she pushed at his shoulder. “See? I told you. You’re about to pass out. Just go to bed and we’ll talk in the morning.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right. You gonna watch a movie?”

  She nodded, making herself comfortable on Raph’s familiar couch. He had about a million channels on his disgustingly large television, so there was always something to watch. He gestured toward the clean laundry pile. “There’s pajamas in there. See you in the morning.”

  “Night,” she called. And settled in for a movie.

  ***

  “Are you asking me to convince you?” Raphael asked Natalie, only this time, he wasn’t sleepy-eyed and yawning. This time his eyes were half lidded and his voice was gravelly.

  She wasn’t dreaming. But she wasn’t far from dreaming either. She was laying in the bed in Raphael’s guest bedroom wearing an old T-shirt and sweatpants of his.

  This was something that Natalie had done a hundred times before. But she’d never done it while having a funny sort of half-dream about Raphael attempting to seduce her.

  She’d had a grand total of one sex dream about Raphael in her life and it had good and truly freaked her out. She’d even Googled it to make sure that she wasn’t secretly in love with her best friend. Google had reassured her that for the most part, sex dreams were random and perfectly natural. Nothing needed to be read into it. That had been almost nine years ago and since then, Raphael hadn’t even been a blip on her sexual radar.

  Except for tonight, in the witching hour, while Natalie lay curled on her side ten feet from Raphael, separated by a thin bedroom wall. In her sleepy mind, the space between them was obliterated and they lay in the same bed, in the same room. In her mind, he was propped up on one elbow, and she could feel his heat even though they didn’t touch.

  He was asking her if she needed convincing that he thought she was hot and in her mind Natalie was saying yes. She was saying yes and he was leaning over her.

  But as he leaned, her mind leaned as well, a full tilt into sleep and the dream went wobbly and strange, the bed was replaced with sand and Raphael became a kid she’d known in undergrad. And just like that, the whole thing slipped away.

  When she woke up in the morning. She didn’t remember it.

  ***

  When Raphael woke up that morning he was freaking horny. He rolled and groaned and buried his face in his pillow. He needed to get a move on with this friend-making endeavor before his dick fell off from disuse.

  He knew it had only been about a week since he’d had sex, but staring into the vacuous space of the unknown made him anxious about when the next time was going to be. God. What if it was a month from now? Three months? How long did it take to make a friend?

  Ten minutes later, his teeth brushed and his face still glitteringly wet with water he hadn’t bothered toweling off, he clumped his ass down onto the couch next to Natalie. She sat crunching cereal from a bowl she had balanced on her knee and sipping piping hot coffee from her favorite mug of his. It was literally the size of her head.

  “Careful!” she hissed as his unexpected weight made the couch sag and she almost overturned all of the precarious liquids that were balanced on her.

  Raph effortlessly shot out an arm and steadied the cereal, then used his foot to shove away some books on the coffee table to make room for her coffee.

  He intercepted it as she went to put it down and drank a solid inch of it before he resurfaced and passed it back to her.

  “How long does it take to make a friend?”

  She looked up from whatever she’d been reading on her phone. “You mean the kind of friend we were talking about before? A friend with sexy potential?”

  He nodded, a kicked puppy look in his eyes that made Natalie laugh. She handed over her cereal and he started eating it as she re-situated herself under the afghan to get more comfortable.

  “I dunno. Six months? A year?”

  Raphael choked. He straight up choked on cereal. Eyes watering, he hunched over and Natalie hurriedly took the bowl of cereal from him, tossing it onto the table. Next came the hard, thwacking thumps of her hand on his back.

  “I’m good. I’m good.” He waved her away and then scrubbed a hand down his face, his rough palm catching on the quarter inch of stubble he’d yet to do anything about that morning.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Natalie asked, eyes wide, crowding him with an arm around his shoulder.

  “A year?”

  “Yeah,” she shrugged. “These things take time. Why is that such a shocker to you?”

  “You expect me to be celibate for a year?”

  Nat laughed and pulled back from him, her arm slipping away as she resettled herself against the other side of the couch. “That’s what this is about?”

  “I mean, I think your plan is a good one. Friends first. And I really want to find someone I could really be with, you know? But a year of celibacy? I mean… Jesus. Is that even healthy?”

  Natalie laughed again and shoved his leg with one of her freezing cold bare feet. Raphael automatically leaned forward and dug through the clothes basket that still sat on the floor. He resurfaced with two mismatched athletic socks and tossed them over to her. She ignored the socks and just tucked her feet under the afghan instead.

  “Raph, celibacy doesn’t affect your health. Your physical health, at least. And some people go without sex for much longer than a year.”

  “You? What’s the longest you’ve ever gone?”

  Natalie grimaced. “I’m in a pretty terrible stretch myself right now. I guess, like, fourteen months?”

  Raphael was surprised. He’d kind of thought she hadn’t been sleeping with anyone the whole time she’d had a crush on Paul. But now that he did the math, she’d had feelings for Paul for almost two years and that was an insane amount of time to go without nookie.

  “Really? Who’d you sleep with fourteen months ago?”

  “I went to that concert at Red Rocks. Ran into that guy I took my first real estate course with a couple years ago? I think I told you about that.”

  “Oh, right.” It dimly rang a bell. “Somehow I think I had it in my head that you weren’t sleeping with anyone while you were waiting for Paul.”

  He immediately regretted saying the P word the second Nat’s light dimmed. It was like someone had promptly dialed down her brightness by fifty percent. She shrugged and started playing with a loose thread on the afghan. “Sleeping with Jake had nothing to do with Paul. I’d barely even talked to Paul at that point. I was still crushing on him from afar.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They were both quiet for a second. “Wait…” Nat said. “Why do you have to be celibate?”

  He lazily rolled his head to look at her. “Because I’m going to be friending it up with my future wife, remember?”

  “No, yeah, of course I remember. Obviously you won’t be sleeping with her, but why can’t you sleep with other people? Take the edge off?”

  Raphael frowned. “I’m… not built that way. Sleeping with someone is messy. There’s always feelings and entanglements. She always ends up wanting more from me. And then suddenly I’m dating her and then we’re breaking up, and nah. It’s too much mess. If I’m really taking this relationship thing seriously, then I need to stop fucking around with girls. And I literally have no clue how to fuck and not… fuck around. If that makes any sense.”

  Natalie tipped her head to one side, a little smile on her face. “Oh, to be Raphael Durant.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I just mean that it must be nice to be y
ou sometimes. You and I pretty much have the opposite problem.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Well, everyone wants you so much that you can’t even hook up without planting dreams of forever in their heads. Whereas Paul wants me so little that I can’t even hook up, period.”

  Raphael groaned and leaned forward for the cereal again. “I hate that that jerk screwed with your self-esteem so much, Nat. It’s like he stole your machismo.”

  “Girls don’t have machismo.”

  “All right. Then he stole your va-chismo.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s like machismo except with your vagin—”

  “You know, I think I got it.” She interrupted him with a huge smile on her face. “No need to bring my vagina into the conversation.”

  “I just really don’t want you to internalize his reaction to you. He’s just one guy, you know? You can’t let him hold the keys to your sex drive.”

  “I just really like him.” She looked down and frowned in a very un-Nat way. “And I guess it just freaked me out when he said that we didn’t have any spark because it made me wonder about the last time I even felt a spark…”

  “Do you even want to have a spark with Paul the walking office supply?”

  Nat laughed. “He’s not that boring, okay?”

  Raphael chose not to comment on that. “So, when was the last time you felt a spark with someone?”

  Nat shrugged. “I dunno. When I was younger. Hotter.”

  “Not this again,” Raph groaned. “Being in a sexual slump doesn’t have anything to do with hotness, Nat. You’re just as hot as you used to be. Hotter even!”

  She waved his words away and the movement exposed her little pink toes again. Just looking at them made him cold. He tucked the blanket over them again since she apparently refused to wear the socks.

  “I think it’s about feeling hot, Raph. I don’t feel sexy. I feel like a lump these days. Undesirable and spark-less.”

  Raphael went quiet. Next time he saw Paul the Stapler he was gonna sock him in the nuts. How could someone so mediocre decimate Natalie’s self-esteem like this? Nat was the actual best. And beautiful and fun and… For a moment, he allowed himself to really ponder a question.

  It was a thought experiment.

  Was there any possible way that Paul was right? Was Nat actually not sexy? As prudently as he could, he let his eyes slide across the couch to observe her as she fiddled with the afghan. Her glossy hair was up in a messy bun that was halfway sliding down her head. Her face was clean and makeup-less. His roomy T-shirt that she wore was large enough to expose most of one slender shoulder. He knew that if she were to look up at him right then, humongous green eyes would fill her face, white teeth would flash invitingly at him.

  He let his eyes drop to her hands where she wore a smattering of thin gold rings. He’d always thought she had nice hands. Slender, delicate fingers, neat fingernails. And he knew what she looked like in all states of dress and undress. They’d been friends for twenty years. He’d never seen her buck naked, but he knew what her body looked like in a tiny two-piece. In a prom dress. In a pencil skirt. In his own clothes, like she wore right now.

  Was she sexy?

  “Paul is a fucking imbecile,” Raph muttered to himself, looking away from her before she caught him staring.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m thinking that you just need someone to help you get your groove back.”

  She scoffed.

  “No, I’m serious. You need some dude who’s gonna treat you like the hot piece of ass you are. While being respectful enough not to string you along or play games with you for a year and a half,” he glowered at the bowl of cereal, pretending it was Stapler Paul’s boring-ass face.

  “And where the hell am I going to find this magical man?” Natalie asked, stretching her arms out above her head.

  Her toes were peeking out again and Raph had finally had enough. He drained the rest of the cereal into his mouth, tossed the bowl aside and grabbed the socks from where they’d fallen on the floor. He grabbed Natalie’s feet and drew them into his lap, slipping a sock on one of her feet and then the next. Her little feet swam in his large socks so he took a minute to straighten them out.

  He pressed her socked toes between his two warm palms and gave her a little friction to warm them up.

  For a moment, the world changed. Not drastically. But just for a second, his life tipped four degrees to the side. It was like stepping into a very familiar room to find all the furniture had been moved six inches in one direction. Everything was the same, but also, everything was different.

  Natalie’s feet were on his lap, and that was fine, normal, usual, even. But then… also Natalie’s feet were on his lap, and she was a woman who’d slept over, who wore his clothes to sleep in, who smelled really good, like a mixture of herself and his laundry detergent.

  Where the hell am I going to find this magical man?

  Her words echoed in his head and Raphael just kind of… went still.

  It was almost imperceptible, but he was almost positive that she’d just stiffened in his lap.

  Over the years, they’d often laughed about how they knew each other so well that one another’s thoughts almost seemed to be written above their heads, like thought bubbles in cartoons.

  They glanced at one another and then away, very quickly, and that in itself was almost a dead giveaway. Since when did they have trouble maintaining eye contact?

  Raph’s heart started beating very, very fast. There was no way that she was possibly thinking the same thing that he was. This was Natalie he was talking about here. Nat Chalk. Best friend extraordinaire. His constant companion. Uncomplicated wingman. A person he knew as well as he knew his identical twin.

  Her feet slid off of his lap and she sat cross-legged. They both faced awkwardly forward.

  “So…” she said after a minute. “Sounds like you need to find a woman who you can sleep with without falling in love while you look for a real relationship.”

  He nodded. “And it sounds like you need someone who really knows what they’re doing in bed to, ah, light your fire again.”

  “Right.”

  “Right,” he echoed.

  They sat in silence for another ten beating, horrible seconds.

  “I’m gonna go,” Natalie said suddenly, jumping up from the couch and knocking some more books off the table in her haste. “Whoops. Sorry. Um, yeah. I’ve got that course I’m teaching. It starts in about an hour, so I better get across town and get cleaned up.”

  “Right,” he said again. Then he cleared his throat and stood up as well. “Yeah. Okay.”

  They still weren’t really looking at one another.

  She ducked out of the room at Mach speed and came back less than a minute later in the dress she’d worn last night.

  “Okay, thanks for the heart-to-heart!” She waved at him on her way to the front door, but she still wasn’t really looking at him.

  This was ridiculous. He knew it was ridiculous, but he also couldn’t really stop what had already been set in motion. He was uncomfortable and so was she and it was all because of one little traitorous thought that was apparently zinging back and forth between them.

  “Bye, Nat,” he called even as his front door was closing behind her.

  He scratched his head and stood in his messy living room for a long time after she left.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Nat kicked ass in class that day. She was funny, sympathetic, witty, and just generally on her game.

  But the whole time, a thought percolated in the back of her mind, whispering alarming things in her ear.

  She wasn’t going to do herself the disservice of convincing herself that nothing had happened that morning. Because she was smart enough and observant enough to know that, in fact, something had absolutely happened between her and Raph.

  It had been subtle. And had she known him any less, she might have been abl
e to dismiss it as nothing. But the fact was, she knew him as well as she knew herself, and she’d been able to feel the very second it had occurred to him that they might just be the solution to one another’s problem.

  She’d felt him go still, his hands on her feet, her feet in his lap, his clothes on her body and her body on his couch. And she’d felt the moment things had, well, not really changed, but sort of altered.

  She knew that Raph was suddenly aware of her as a woman because she was suddenly aware of him as a man.

  Which was weird. Because they really didn’t do that. With or to one another.

  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t do that with and to one another.

  …right?

  Natalie occupied her mind as well as she could, staying after to discuss a few concepts with some of the people who were taking the licensure class. And then running in to the office to field some phone calls and go over paperwork with one of her clients.

  She left her boxy, boring office that day with the rare sensation of having absolutely killed it at work. She’d gotten three steps closer to closing a deal she’d never dreamed she’d have been able to close. She’d plowed her way through a mountain of paperwork that she usually would have let fester in her inbox until it was almost late. And she’d actually returned every single voicemail that had blinked on her office phone.

  The thought of picking up takeout never even occurred to her. She was driving home from the grocery store with a back seat filled with ingredients before she barely had time to think twice about it.

  She unloaded her groceries and cleaned out her fridge at the same time, taking out her trash and wiping down every surface in the kitchen while she was at it.

  She actually made a mean pasta sauce, when she put her mind to it, so she put it on to simmer. And while she waited for her dinner to be ready, she found her way into her cluttered living room and gave it a quick clean up. Nothing special, just reordering her shelves and dusting and vacuuming. She gave her room the same treatment and then treated her bathroom to a fifteen minute insanely thorough scrub-down that ended with a shower for her.