by Selena Scott
She stepped lithely out of her pants and tossed them in the hamper as well. When she turned to face him, Matt’s eyes sliced down her body and narrowed in on the V between her legs.
“Come here,” he growled.
She played coy, because it wound him up and made her happy. “But don’t we have to get going for dinner?” Her head cocked to the side.
“Come here and bring the clothes,” he amended.
Inka was amazed when his eyes didn’t lift from her pussy as she walked across the room toward him. Not a thin woman, Inka knew that she had exceptionally pretty breasts, and an ass that probably deserved a top 40 song. But Matt’s eyes did not deviate from that little triangle of yellow satin between her legs.
When she was standing directly in front of him, so close that their knees brushed, he dragged his eyes up to hers. That slice of electric blue had her pressing her thighs together against the insistent heat there.
Matt adjusted himself against his pants and Inka’s eyes grew a size as she stared at the outline of his cock. She hadn’t really gotten a good look last night. But that was… really something. Let’s just say the six-and-a-half foot man was built in stunning proportion.
He held his hand out and she stared at it, suddenly feeling a little hot and a little dazed.
“Your stockings,” he said, his voice gravelly.
She placed them in his hands and he shifted back so there was just a touch more room between their legs. Taking her hand and placing it on his shoulder for balance, he bent down and slid her foot into one of the stockings, hooking his thumbs and dragging it all the way up her leg.
Inka held her breath as his warm fingers touched her in a long delicious line. When he’d gotten them up to her mid-thigh, he ran his finger around the hem of the stocking, flattening it against her skin and then making her gasp.
He did the same with the next one.
“These?” he asked, motioning toward the black heeled boots that were kicked off by the side of the couch.
She nodded, unable to say anything and held still while he guided one foot into the boot and then the next.
She stood before him in her yellow underwear and thigh highs and boots.
They both gulped.
“Dress,” he rasped, holding out one hand. She handed it over and held her breath while he guided one arm and then the next into the sleeves. He held the dress bunched up in one hand so that it didn’t fall all at once as he pulled it over her head. He gently slid her hair from the neck. The dress was the tiniest bit low cut and he adjusted the neckline against her breasts, one finger tracing the hem of the dress against her skin.
He cleared his throat and slowly dragged the rest of the dress over her stomach. She expected him to let the fabric fall when he reached her hips, but instead he held it up for just a second, so that her bottom half was still exposed.
In a quick move, so fast Inka didn’t even have time to lose her balance, Matt had one of her legs thrown over his shoulder. She was bared to him then, the only thing between them a scrap of yellow satin. She tightened, expecting to be ravished, but instead she felt only a single, almost chaste kiss on her pussy. He kissed the fabric, warm and firm, right over where she was wettest for him. And then he pulled his mouth away, his tongue tracing his own lips. He put her leg back down on the ground and let the dress fall the rest of the way, adjusting it just a little bit.
“Ready?” he asked, taking her hands in his.
“I thought I was,” she breathed. She shook her head. “When did you get so sexy, Matt Woods?”
He grinned and shrugged. “Probably about the time I started trying to have sex with you.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
Her question stopped him cold, one hand on the doorway of the apartment, about to tug her into the hall and into the elevator. But there’d been something in her tone, some small search for answers that pulled him up short.
“Well, yeah.” He tucked her hair back over her shoulder. “Amongst many, many other things.”
She smiled then and grabbed her coat off a hook. “Fair enough.”
She reached into the pockets of her coat and pulled out those same knitted mittens from before. She automatically handed them to Matt to wear.
“For me?” he asked, following her out into the hallway.
“Of course,” she nodded. “I don’t want your hands to get cold.”
No one had ever said anything like that to him before.
***
“Don’t go,” Matt murmured against Inka’s lips come Friday afternoon. She’d just gotten out of work and had popped by to say goodbye for the weekend.
“I have to,” she whispered back, her fingers tangled in his hair. They’d spent every evening together that week, most of it tangled up in some pretty heavy makeout sessions.
Matt had been thrilled with the way things were going but now she was leaving for the weekend, the way she always did, and everything felt so very fragile. He should have taken her on another date instead of just eating in the way they had last night.
The tapas date had been incredible. Flirty and hilarious and they’d been near to bursting by the time they’d gotten back to his apartment. They’d slept on his couch again. And again the following night. He always meant to get her into the bed, but they just never quite made it there.
Now he was kicking himself for that, too. They definitely should have slept in his bed last night. Girlfriends slept in beds, college hookups slept on couches. And even though they hadn’t defined their relationship at all, Matt definitely didn’t want Inka to doubt her place in his life.
“You’re sure you’re comfortable driving at night?”
She laughed. “Yes. I have excellent night vision.”
“And you know how to get there?”
“I’ve done it a hundred times.”
“Well,” he wracked his brain. “What will you do for dinner?”
She laughed again. “It’s not a very long drive, Matt. I’ll be there in three hours if I can beat traffic. Plus you already made me a road snack.” She held up the sandwich and chips that he had, in fact, packed for her. Matt tried valiantly not to feel like a total tool for that one.
“Alright.” He couldn’t think of anything else to object to. So he just squeezed her instead.
“I’ll be back pretty late on Sunday.”
“I don’t care how late it is, just come see me. It doesn’t matter.” He pressed his forehead to hers and attempted to absorb every bit of sunshine from that smile of hers.
“Deal.” She gave him one more hug and then stepped back.
There was some sort of alarm bell going off in Matt’s brain. Something was telling him not to let her go. She loved being home because of her family, that was clear as day. But it was also undeniable that something scared her there, too.
“Inka,” he started. But she went up for one more kiss that jumbled his brains.
“Bye, Matty. See you on Sunday.”
And then she was gone.
***
Inka took a deep breath as she drove into Green Mills. This was her town. Her home. Where her family lived. The woods were more of a home to her than her actual house. But she loved that, too. The old cabin up on the far side of the mountain. All of her siblings lived scattered around the mountains, places of seclusion and peace, where they could be alone. Where they could be themselves.
Every Friday that she drove here was the same feeling. Immense joy at being home, where she was supposed to live, and a strange creeping fear.
She forced herself to drive to her little cabin instead of Ansel’s house, where she knew her family would be. She could drop her bag off, shift, and then go in bear form to Ansel’s. That was the normal thing to do. And so that’s what she would do.
But the second she pulled up to her house, fear gripped her yet again. She rolled down the window and scanned the dark woods all around her house, searching for some sign of him. Of it. But there was nothi
ng.
Still. She couldn’t stop the bite of fear that had her reversing away from her little cabin and toward Ansel’s house. When she got there, she saw Milla’s car and Kain’s, too. She turned the car off and immediately scented Griff. He stepped out of the shadows on the front porch and came right to her.
“Inks,” he held his arms out to her and she strode right into the 21-year-old’s arms. He felt like a little brother to her and she hoped that he felt the same about her. The two of them definitely got along. Always had. Griff stiffened and held her away. “What’s wrong?”
She said nothing, because she didn’t want to lie and didn’t know how to tell the truth either.
“Inks,” he tried again and then he leaned forward and scented the air around her. “You smell like fear. A lot of it.”
Inka sighed. It wasn’t half a second before her scent had drawn Milla out onto the porch as well.
“Inka? What happened? Come in out of the cold.”
There would be no hiding it from her siblings tonight. Though she’d successfully done it for months. But it was time. She was too tired to hide it anymore.
She let Milla lead her inside, Griff slamming the door shut behind them. And then she sat with her family, in front of a warm fireplace. Ansel and Ruby sharing a chair, John Alec stretched out on the floor next to Milla, Griff and Kain standing and pacing around with each word she spoke. She told them everything.
They were chilled. They argued about what to do next, they consoled her, fought a little bit. Worried. And then, when there was nothing else that they could do tonight, they did what the Ketos always did. They shifted.
Inka had the fastest and smoothest shift of all of them. For her, shifting was like stepping into a warm bath. She could fall into a shift, sprint into one, backflip into one. You name it. But tonight, with her family beside her, Inka merely stepped into her shift. She felt herself grow, stretch. And then she was a humongous, golden bear. And it was her true form.
Inka sprinted through the dark forest alongside her sister. Kain and Ansel rolled and fought about a half mile back. The two dark gold bears spoke in what could only be described as a language of grunts and chuffs.
“I want to bring Matt here next weekend.”
Milla stumbled. And she never stumbled. “For what?”
“To meet the family.”
Milla shifted her weight and bumped hard into her sister on purpose. Girl was holding out on her. “Explain. Now. All of it.”
Inka, tiring faster than Milla was, downshifted into a slower run and then stopped altogether to sniff at the air. There was more snow coming. She wondered if Matt would get any in the city. “He has feelings for me. He told me all about them. And now he calls me Mariposa.”
“What’s that mean?” Milla asked, flopping down in a pile of pine needles.
“Butterfly.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Yeah,” Inka breathed dreamily. As dreamily as a full-grown grizzly bear could breathe.
“Have you slept together yet?”
“Not yet. But we’ve been spending every night together. You should see what he looks like when he sleeps, Mills. It’s the cutest. He’s so dang big.”
“I’ll take your word for it. So you changed your mind, then? About having feelings for him?”
Inka sniffed along the ground, found some raccoon tracks and sniffed harder, interested. “I might have had feelings for him the whole time. I’m not sure. It was hard to tell at first. Because he’s not my type.”
“You keep saying that.”
“But then I saw him with his shirt off and I realized that having a type is extremely limiting.”
Milla’s bear chuffed out a laugh. “So now you want to bring him home to meet your family full of bear shifters?”
Inka sat her bear butt onto the pine needles and let her eyes wander up to the patch of perfect, clear sky that she could see. “He can handle it. I think. He already knows about the gates to Herta.”
“WHAT?”
Inka suddenly found herself trapped on the ground underneath all thousand pounds of Milla’s bear. She would have fought, but she’d been here before. Fighting Milla was an exercise in futility. Milla won. Always.
“What? He’s a scientist. He studies the gates. But he calls them windows. And he doesn’t know they lead to Herta. And he doesn’t know that you need to be a shifter to get through. And he doesn’t know that I’m a shifter.”
“Up,” Milla barked as she rolled back onto her haunches. “We’re going home and you’re telling everyone what you just told me.”
CHAPTER SIX
Matt fell back into the swivel chair with a heavy thunk. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Something he’d waited almost a decade to see. He held the heavy steel cylinder to his mouth and blew again. A trembly, low note burst forth for just a second before the echo chamber he’d designed caught the sound, augmented it, and sent it back out in the world un-hearable.
He couldn’t hear it, but his computer sure could. When he blew into the end of the prototype, the computer program that was designed to track the frequency went wild. He’d been dreaming of the day he’d get these kinds of readings from the program. It wasn’t perfect. But it was sure as hell the closest he’d ever come before.
A whippy, thrilling energy zipped through him like the opposite of the chills. He was so close. He was so close. Matt held the flute in his hand and rose up. He paced from one end of the room to the other. He needed to go on a run. He felt like he could have run the marathon. He carefully set the prototype down on his table and then smacked his hands together. Whooping and raising his arms in victory, he did a quick lap around the lab.
Matt couldn’t believe the progress he was making. He was working at an incredible clip. The prototype wasn’t perfect. But perfecting something was fun. It was the whole starting-from-scratch thing that he was happy to kiss goodbye. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d come this far in just a weekend.
He was super proud of himself.
Yeah. And he was losing his mind.
He’d barely slept that weekend. Half because he was so close to perfecting the prototype and half because Inka was gone.
He hadn’t been able to shake the feeling that something had been wrong, really wrong, right before she left. He hadn’t liked her going off alone, even if it was straight into her family’s arms. He would have felt a lot better if he could have gone with her. He knew that was ridiculous. He did. They hadn’t even been making out for a week, they hadn’t even slept together yet.
But he couldn’t help it. Something hadn’t seemed right, and he’d really, really wanted to be next to her.
It was 8 pm and he decided to quit for the night. He’d eat a quick dinner, jump in the shower and wait around for Inka. He probably should take a run, he knew, but he didn’t want to risk missing her when she got back. Even though she’d said she’d be late. He didn’t care.
By 10 pm, Matt’s hair had dried and one of his knees jumped against the leg of his chair as he stared blankly down at the game of solitaire before him. He hadn’t made a move in five minutes.
Why? Because he was currently caught up in a daydream about Inka. He imagined her holding cards in her hand. Frowning down at them, realizing that she’d lost again. This time it would be her bra that she had to remove. He pictured the slow slide of that yellow satin down her arms, the pretty pink flush of those lush breasts.
His hands tightened on the cards. Even imaginary Inka had him hard enough to pound nails. He knew now that he’d never wanted someone more than he wanted her in this moment. He more than wanted her. He needed her.
***
The weekend hadn’t turned out anything like Inka might have thought it would. She’d never loved her family more. They’d supported her and risen to her defense when she’d finally told them the truth about why she’d moved to New York. And they’d hemmed and hawed over what to do about Matt. Ultimately, they’d landed on the side of he
r telling him. Everything.
Even Ansel had had to admit that he seemed like a pretty good guy. And if his research did what he said it did, then he could drastically improve all of their lives.
Inka’s stomach jumped as she carefully navigated her Jeep through the streets of Manhattan. She couldn’t believe that she was going to invite Matt back to Green Mills. Matt was going to know everything.
She gripped the wheel and shifted in the driver’s seat as she pictured him sitting next to her in the car. She wondered if he’d be a serious passenger or if he’d lean over and kiss along her neck at a stop light. Her legs parted of their own accord and Inka pictured Matt’s large hand sneaking underneath the dress she wore. She imagined him leaning over the console and stroking one of those big fingers right into her.
A little noise came out of her throat as she pulled into the underground lot of the building. There was heat in her cheeks and barely any breath left in her body. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to get to him. It was almost midnight, but he’d said that no time was too late. Even if it had been unspeakably rude, she would still go over there. Honestly, she didn’t even feel like she had a choice.
Her body was going to make her go to him now.
She was off the elevator before the doors had even opened fully. And she was at his door less than a second later. She considered going to Milla’s and tossing her overnight bag down, but her self-control snapped and she slipped through Matt’s unlocked door instead.
“Hi!” She was shocked to see him awake. She’d expected to slip into bed with him and drift off alongside him. But no, he sat at the kitchen counter in flannel pants and an undershirt. And then he stood.
His sharp blue eyes were smoldering and he was breathing hard. A few days of growth lined his jaw. And he grinned at her.
“Inka.”
He was across the kitchen and Inka barely had time to toss her jacket over her bag before he had her up in his arms, pressed against the door, her legs around his waist.
Her heart turned over in her chest as she slid her hands into his hair.