A Mate For Raphael (Forbidden Shifters Book 2)

by Selena Scott

  “Take your time!” she called, squeezing his hand and then tossing her arms over her head and two-stepping backward into a group of their friends.

  Damn, she was fun.

  “What is it?” Raph asked Jackson as his brother nearly tugged him off the dance floor.

  “There’s someone in the woods right now. A hunter. That hunter.”

  He didn’t need to elaborate. They all knew who ‘that hunter’ was.

  He was a man called Race and he was the unofficial head of the shifter hate club in town. They call themselves CTAARUS but Raph could never remember what the acronym stood for. Something about rounding up the shifters and registering them so that they could be thrown into internment camps. They were a group of regular peaches and Race was the peachiest of all.

  “He’s here? Right now?”

  “Keep your voice down. I just saw him at the edge of the property. He was staring at everyone and he had a gun strapped over his back.”

  Raph frowned. There was a dangerous hunter on his mother’s property in the middle of his twin brother’s wedding? Raph cracked his knuckles.

  “Let’s go find him, then.”

  “And do what?” Jackson demanded as they rounded the corner of the house, out of sight of the guests and away from where Jackson had seen the hunter. “Invite him in for a slice of cake? I don’t want to confront him, I just want to make sure he’s gone.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Raphael shrugged out of his suit coat and handed it to a befuddled Jackson. “It’ll be good practice for me anyhow.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Raphael looked blankly back at him. “Shifting.”

  “God, Jesus, no. You can’t shift right now!”

  “Watch me.”

  “Under no circumstances should you shift right now.”

  “Jacks, we need to know if he left our property. The only way we can know is if I track him. The only way I can track him is in wolf form. None of the guests are going to know. And then we can make sure nothing fucks up Seth’s wedding and that there isn’t this asshole guy lurking around, okay?”

  Jackson scowled. “Or the hunter is going to end up tracking you and you’ll get your ass shot during Seth’s wedding.”

  “He’s never going to even see me coming, okay? I have fifteen times the hearing that he does when I’m in wolf form. I can track him from a distance. I just want to make sure he’s gone.”

  “I never should have mentioned anything.” Jackson pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Jacks, it’s not that big of a deal. I’m going to go into that brush, shift, check things out and come back.”

  “And try not to get seen by a 150 wedding guests and try not to get shot and try not to attack anyone.”

  “I don’t attack in my wolf form, Jacks,” Raph said gently, as kindly as he could. “I’ve never even killed a rabbit. I—it’s not in me. I’m not aggressive. I’m peaceful and I’m quiet and of all three of us, I’m the one who actually stays in my own brain when I shift.”

  Jackson sagged. Raphael knew that all of that was bitter medicine. It just highlighted how much more dangerous Jackson was than Raph.

  “Jackson.” Raphael gripped his brother’s shoulders until Jackson looked up at him with bleak eyes. “I’ve got this. I swear. It’s all good.”

  Jackson nodded and then looked over his shoulder. “Do it now, then. While I can watch your back.”

  Raphael didn’t need more encouragement than that. Seconds later he was stripped down and naked, hopping out of his underwear. He stood there, looking up at the sky, but the moon wasn’t visible from where he stood. He didn’t want to step out from the shadows for fear of being seen, but he’d never shifted without the moon in his eye and suddenly all the bravado and certainty he’d had moments ago waned a bit.

  But no. He could do this. Raph closed his eyes and channeled Bauer. Channeled the meditative state. He thought of the metaphorical river. The full moon, watching him like an eye. He thought of his body wanting to shift, asking to be wolf. He cleared his mind and pictured fur, cold wind, pine, woods, instinct. And then, on a flashing wave, Raphael pictured Natalie. His skin goosebumped, a shiver started somewhere deep within him, and on a low growl, Raphael was shifted.

  “Jesus,” Jackson muttered, looking down at him. “You make it look freaking easy.”

  Though in his wolf form, Raph could understand English, he didn’t have any motivation to respond. He merely trotted off into the copse of trees that butted up against his mother’s house. He was unseen by any party guests.

  Raph slinked quietly through the woods, sticking to the shadows and careful not to make any noise. His nose alternated between being pressed to the ground and up in the air, attempting to catch the scent of the hunter.

  It was made harder by the thousands of human smells and noises that were thundering over from the wedding, but Raphael wasn’t more than thirty feet into the woods when he smelled the metallic scent of gunmetal, when he caught the familiar tang of sweat he’d smelled before. He’d encountered Race before in these very woods and the memory was burned into his wolfen brain. The scent was cooling, but he knew that Race had stood here, at this very spot. His eyes peeled and in his human mind just enough to look out for hidden deer blinds, Raphael carefully, slowly followed the scent. He’d made it half a mile out before he realized that Race must have circled their property and was now headed for their closest neighbor’s property two miles down the mountain.

  The man was obviously looking for something and casing the owned land on the mountain as he went. Raph’s heart beat cold metal for a moment. The man was a known shifter hunter. Was it possible that he was trespassing on people’s properties looking for clues as to the presence of shifters? Was it possible that he was starting to zero in on Elizabeth’s house as a potential housing place for shifters?

  Those human thoughts were soon displaced by more primitive thoughts as Raphael found himself at the edge of a tree line and looking down a rolling hill at a huge field of hip-height grass.

  Halfway across the field, about a quarter of a mile away, the moonlight glinted off the hunter’s shotgun slung across his back.

  The hunter paused and Raphael crouched down, out of his sight line, watching as Race turned and raked the tree line with his eyes, as if he knew he was being watched. But the hunter turned and made his way down toward the Lawrences’ land.

  Raph slinked away, falling into a trot and then into a flat-out run.

  The scent of the wedding accosted him as he got close to his mother’s property. He raised his head and sniffed the air. It was more than just the amalgamation of scents that was affecting him. It was one scent in particular.

  It was Natalie.

  He could scent her from here and it made him literally freeze in his tracks. In his wolf form, his sense of smell was drastically increased and he felt as if he could smell every thread of what made her her. He was having The Natalie Moment again, but this time in his wolf form, which made it all the more potent. She was a woman he wanted. But she was also his oldest friend. And those two things were not separate, they were deliciously mixed.

  Raphael took off at a trot again, careful to stay quiet and to stay out of the sight line of the party in the woods. He made a wide circle around the house and back to the place where he could see Jackson still waiting in the shadows.

  With Natalie in his mind, Raphael barely had to even think about his shift. Suddenly, he was just shifted, naked and hopping from the copse of trees and into the shadows at the edge of the house. He shoved one leg and then the other into his briefs.

  “Jesus! You scared me!” Jackson pressed a racing hand over his heart.

  Raphael nodded, though thoughts and emotions were pummeling him from every side, Natalie’s scent still strong in his nose, the memory of her taste on his tongue.

  “Call the Lawrences and tell them that you spotted someone trespassing on the western edge of their property. He was here and then there a
nd probably up at the Atwoods first.”

  “He’s circling the most western properties in Boulder?” Jackson frowned as he tried to understand.

  “I don’t know. I’ll talk about it tomorrow. I can’t think right now. Call the Lawrences. I have to go.” Raphael had just slammed his feet back into his shoes and he was already jogging away from his brother.

  He found Natalie on the dance floor where he’d left her. She was glistening with a light layer of perspiration, her hair sticking to her neck, and a huge smile on her face. Raphael ducked in between the other dancers and grabbed her hand.

  Her eyes widened when she saw him. “What the hell happened to you?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer, just tugged her off the dance floor and into the house. The two of them, still joined at the hand, jogged all the way upstairs, past his room and up to the small attic that his mother used as a sewing room. It was a little musty, but it was clean, there was a futon couch, and they definitely wouldn’t be disturbed up there.

  “Seriously, Raph, are you all right? Your clothes are all wrinkled and you have leaves in your hair. What happened?”

  He closed the door behind her. “I just shifted.”

  He locked the door.

  She looked from the locked door and then to him, her eyes wide. “You just shifted? Raph, it’s the middle of a moon cycle!”

  “I know.”

  “And then you shifted back? Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  Suddenly his arms were full of Natalie. Second only to Elizabeth, Natalie and Kaya had done the most worrying about the Durant brothers. She knew just as well as they did that unless they were able to get their shifts under complete and total control, they ran the risk of being found out. Of being hunted, of being tracked back to their human lives. If they were found out, it wouldn’t take long at all for some concerned citizen to call in the feds. And then their lives would be led behind the ten-foot-high walls of one of the many shifter internment camps that were scattered across the US, housing thousands of shifters.

  Her arms were around his neck and her face pressed hard into his. His arms were tight around her as she hitched her legs around his waist and then he had all of her weight and something just sort of settled into place within him.

  Tears in her eyes, Nat leaned back in his arms. “Look at you,” she whispered. “You look so proud of yourself. And… so wild.”

  “Wild?”

  He felt a little wild, as if his wolf was closer to the surface than usual.

  She nodded. “I’ve never told you this, but you and Seth have the exact same eyes except for one thing.”

  “What’s the one thing?” he cocked his head to one side.

  “I’ve never been able to describe it before. But I think I realize now. I think it’s your wolf. I think I’ve always been able to see your wolf, even when I couldn’t see Jackson’s or Seth’s.”

  Raph laughed a little as he pressed his mouth to hers, because he didn’t know what to do. This moment wasn’t funny, but he was so filled up with emotion that he had to let it out one way or another. He was elated, fired up, wanting her so badly he was shaking with it.

  He wanted to tell her why he shifted back so easily. He wanted to explain that the scent of her had called him back home. Had drawn him out of the woods and back into the land of the human beings. How even in his most instinctual, wildest mind, he’d recognized her, wanted her, been drawn straight to her.

  A small, tender sapling of an idea sprouted up in Raphael’s mind.

  It was just a thought. Something that hadn’t occurred to him before in all the time he’d known Natalie.

  It started with a what if…

  He turned away from the thought. He couldn’t have that thought right now. It was too big. It meant too much. But he knew that if he told her about his shift, about her role in it, it would be like undamming a river and everything he was thinking and feeling would come rushing out all around them. He knew that the little sapling would tumble along with everything else and get destroyed.

  He couldn’t do that. It was too young, too precious. It deserved to grow, to be protected. So instead of speaking, he just kissed her.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Natalie trembled against Raph and felt him tremble back against her. It was reassuring to know that he was feeling just as many things as she was right now. The music from the party drifted in through the high attic window and so did the moonlight.

  She loved this room. Always had. She and Raph used to play up here for hours. The room was far enough away from the rest of the house for them to have felt unsupervised and wild. In this room they’d spent hours and hours of their childhoods creating a world that had a population of two. Nat and Raph.

  She realized that this moment was no different. His eyes were open as he kissed her and she leaned into the newly familiar press of his mouth. Even though kissing him the other night had been otherworldly, Nat had been secretly tense about the moment of actually sleeping with him. She couldn’t even imagine the moment when they’d cross that line, that un-go-back-able line. Her brain hadn’t been able to create a scenario where it wasn’t nerve-wracking, where it wasn’t a little awkward.

  But this? In his arms, in his childhood attic, light and music and sound from a joyful wedding filling the room with a sort of comforting energy, this was easy. The party rolled on without them, leaving them both to feel as if this moment were stolen, exclusive. He was watching her face, asking her to create a world that was just the two of them. And although they’d never done this before, something in her heart recognized the moment.

  His eyes were on hers, asking an unspoken question.

  The same question he’d been asking her in one way or another their entire lives together. Will you go with me, Natalie? To this world that’s just for me and you? Here’s an open door, will you walk through with me? Will you?

  “Yes,” she said out loud, against his mouth, his arms banded so firmly around her, her ankles clasped at his back.

  His eyes instantly clouded with desire and happiness and emotion.

  “Yes,” she said again and he opened her mouth with his, slammed his eyes closed and walked them over to the futon.

  In a completely uncharacteristic moment of clumsiness, his foot caught on the edge of the futon and they tumbled down together, laughing and kissing. They were in a twisted pile when his tongue slicked over hers. She moaned into his mouth and twisted them up even further.

  It was a long minute before he reared back onto his knees and yanked his tie off. Next came the suit coat and Natalie scrambled up, wanting to make sure she had the perfect view for this.

  Raphael Durant was stripping for her, his eyes burning as they tracked her every tiny movement. He pushed up all the way to his feet, kicked his shoes off and slicked his belt out of the belt loops with a snap.

  He was in just an undershirt and his slacks.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a camera right now.”

  He froze, his fingers on the button of his slacks, a charmed smile on his face. “You want a picture of me?”

  “You look wall calendar hot right now.”

  He smiled, looking down at himself, apparently trying to see himself through her eyes. “Go ahead, then.”

  “Go ahead what?”

  “Take a photo.”

  She blinked at him. “On my phone?”

  He shrugged a yes.

  “You’re serious? You wouldn’t mind if I had a sexy picture of you on my phone?”

  “Mind? Nat, that’s super hot.”

  She yanked her phone out of the pocket of her jumpsuit and immediately took a picture. It was blurry, but unposed, a true candid. He was lit from the side by the light from the high window, every muscle shadowed and apparent.

  “Holy God,” she rolled to one side, staring at the photo, and he leaned down to roll her back.

  “Don’t get lost in the weeds here, the real thing is right in front of you.
”

  She tossed her phone to the side and sat back on her elbows to watch him strip the rest of the way. Next came his undershirt, revealing a chest she could barely make eye contact with. And then his slacks. Then he was just all that skin, a blond happy trail, muscles as far as she could see and some very tight boxer briefs.

  She had a feeling they weren’t always that tight. The enormous protrusion in between his legs might have had something to do with that.

  Natalie, spread out on the futon in front of him, kicked off her heels. Then she unhooked and unzipped her sleeveless jumpsuit so that it just sort of laid over her. “You’ll have to help me out.”

  She kicked her feet at him and he reached down to grab the ankles of the jumpsuit and in one great flourish, had pulled the entire garment off of her.

  The suddenness and grandeur of the movement made Natalie laugh and forget all about her nerves. She was in her bra and underwear for Raph and she wasn’t nervous. Her anxiety just kind of got tangled up in her clothing and tossed to the side. Because there was nothing scary about this.

  Raphael crouched at her feet and circled her ankles with his hands, as if he were trying to hold on to her at any cost.

  “I want one, too.” His voice was a low whisper.

  “One what?”

  “A photo.”

  She’d never before let a man take a sexy picture of her. The risk/reward ratio was way too screwy. And she’d always thought that idea didn’t turn her on. But now she understood. She’d never trusted a man enough to allow the idea to be sexy.

  But that wasn’t the case right now. Because she’d trust Raphael with her life. With her soul. With her heart on a platter. No matter what happened between them, he cared about her happiness, her future, her life. He would never, ever do anything to intentionally hurt her.

  “It’s okay if you don’t—” he started.

  “Go ahead.” She wasn’t quite sure how to do a sexy pose so she just stretched onto her back. She fought the urge to cover herself because that would only lead to more self-consciousness. She didn’t want that. She wanted to kick self-consciousness in the face on the way out the door. So instead she tossed her hands up, over her head, baring herself to him in her entirety, knowing that only her purple mesh panties and matching strapless bra were covering her from him.