by Chant, Zoe
Heat shot through him, and his breath huffed out. “Mork!”
“Just you lie still, Menace. There’s one more leg to go.”
And go she did, until his breathing was coming in short gasps. Only then she began kissing his cock as she gently squeezed and massaged his balls, working her way up until she licked all around the head.
He gasped. “Mindy . . .”
She chuckled, did another of those bewitching figure-eights with her hips, lifted and touched her folds to the tip of his ramrod cock. The heat mounted into urgency. His hips began to buck, but she rolled with him, sliding down inch by tantalizing, torturous inch, until they rocked together, riding hard as they worked up and up until he was losing it . . . He clenched hard, wanting her to go first.
And she seemed to sense it as she always did through the subtleties of muscles, which had their own language. She gasped and locked onto him as she came. The rapturous crescendo of her pulses shot him over the edge and it was his turn to come, long and hard.
She stayed with him as they drifted down together, then slid off to lie on his stomach, her wonderful breasts pillowed on his ribs, and her curly head resting on his chest below the edge of the bandage.
He stroked her hair, and caressed her face, tracing the shape of her ear, over her cheekbone to her jawline, and up to her lips. He felt her smile, then she kissed his finger—and sucked it into her mouth.
Heat jolted straight to his cock, and he groaned on a laugh. “Not yet.”
He felt her laugh, rather than heard it. “You say when ready.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too. Life mate. I like that. But . . . anyone will tell us we’ve only known one another a few days, and we should wait, and . . .” She shrugged.
“We can wait as long as you like,” he said. “But here’s the thing about shifters. Whatever kind of animal is inside us, they always seem to know their true mates. Even if the human is slow on the uptake. Like me.” His smile was rueful. Tender as he cuddled her close.
She turned her head and rested her chin on his chest as she studied him under puckered brows. “Do you think Agent Sloane believed me? About my tripping Hank into the pool when he wasn’t looking?”
“No,” Dennis admitted. “But I don’t think he’ll press, if it worries you. The job is done, and he has enough to do massaging the details like those ruined clothes and any other evidence of shifting. He’s been interfacing with the police for years, and he’ll find some way to make it look like Torvaldsen and company were starting some kinky games of torture. The blood all around and the glass certainly help. The city and state authorities don’t look for shifters and don’t recognize the signs, as long as there’s some other explanation. As for you, if I remember right, your papers are still sitting in your apartment, right?”
“I threw them away,” she said.
“Because of the shifter issue?”
Her gaze dropped. “Well, it’s related. And . . . well, let’s talk about shifters first. I didn’t know there were any. Besides me. I didn’t know there was a name for them.”
His neck was getting a crick in it from looking at her at that angle. “Tell you what. There’s that giant bathtub in there, with Jacuzzi jets. And I’m itchy with about three layers of sweat. We can talk in there.”
She sat up, her curls fluffing up around her head. “Good idea! I’ll draw a bath, and while that’s filling, make us some coffee.”
She did better than that. By the time he sank slowly into the hot water, she returned from the kitchen, carrying a tray with two mugs of coffee and rewarmed breakfast from the feast of the day before.
This much he understood: he had never known such intense, sustained happiness, so much a sense of rightness before he met her.
She hopped into the tub and fitted herself between his feet, and for a time the only sounds were the whoosh of the jets and the water still filling the tub. Dennis felt strength flowing into him intensifying the euphoria with ever sip and bite.
When he was done, he figured he’d better get at it. “You risked everything back there in order to save me, so I don’t think you owe me any explanations. I think I owe you some answers,” he said. “Especially as I grew up in a shifter community. I guess I should begin by saying that I’m no good at spotting other shifters, or I might have been able to make this easier by telling you about my tiger right away.”
“And I’ve spent a lifetime of hiding my secrets.” The smile faded from of her eyes.
“I wish I’d figured it out, just to make it easier on you,” he said. “But it’s a lifetime of habit, because it’s not just ourselves we risk exposing. My old buddy Mick is so high-profile—his film will be the first of next summer’s blockbusters, and he’s in the middle of a battle between HBO and Fox for his new pilot. JP is just as well known in the classical music world. The wrong person finds out about them, and they’d be ruined. My dad’s career, same deal. My whole town, because it was settled by shifters, though again, not everyone there knows about them. That’s how careful we’ve been—people in a small town living their entire lives without knowing their next door neighbor might be a hawk shifter. We’re raised to keep the secret.”
“I get it,” she said, still with that wistful look in her brown eyes. “I totally get it.”
He set his empty mug on the bathroom floor and nearly caused a tidal wave as he shifted so that he could reach her with his left hand. He slid his fingers under her chin and kissed her. “Do you? But I can see it, you’re still upset.”
She pressed a kiss against his wrist. “It’s only jealousy,” she said, in that small, high voice. “Those friends—your family—I’ve never dared be close to anyone. I never dared date a guy more than twice for a lot of reasons, the biggest one being, what if I turned into a dog? I didn’t dare ever sleep over with anyone. And I couldn’t talk to anyone. Not when I grew up hearing that Great-Granny was crazy—and here I was, something far worse.”
“Not worse,” he said, kissing her again. “We’re just different than the non-shifting part of humanity. I asked you before, do you think she might have been a shifter?”
“I don’t know. It was all so . . .”
“Tell me.”
Another searching gaze, and she said haltingly, “The first time it happened, I was asleep. I’d been having these wild dreams. This one was wilder than ever. I woke up tangled in the bed sheets and my pajamas, aching all over, the sheets smelling so strong. When I tried to throw the covers off, my arm didn’t work right. I was a dog!”
“You don’t remember shifting?”
“No. It just happened.”
He clasped her fingers. “Were you scared?”
“Not really. I think that might be my dog nature? Dogs tend to take things as they are, unless something really hurts them.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, all I remember is how different the world was. Full of smells. I jumped out the window, which I always kept open, and ran around all night. When I got thirsty I found a neighbor’s sprinklers and lapped up runoff, but I got all wet. So I skulked back to my room, burrowed into the bed, and when I woke up I was a naked teenager. At first I thought it was a really vivid dream until I saw the muddy paw prints all over my sheets. I washed them myself so no one would know, and, well, that’s how it started.”
“And you kept it to yourself.”
“How could I not?” She shook her head. “Both parents were in the middle of new divorces, and . . . things were tense. I did ask roundabout questions, like, Hey did you ever dream you’d turned into a dog, but the looks I got made it pretty clear I was on my own with this.”
“And you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”
“The only halves are on my dad’s side, from his third marriage. They’re grade school kids. Steps have come and gone. Mom never wanted to get pregnant again—said it ruined her figure.” Mindy looked away, her soulful brown eyes expressing the hurt she would have hidden wh
en she said, “I heard her say once she wasn’t going through that again just to get stuck with another clumsy fat kid.”
“I’m sorry to say this, but your mom sounds like an ass.”
“Well, she’s really into the whole fashion thing. Like my grandmother.” Mindy’s lip lifted in a smile, then she gave her easy shrug that—now that he could see it—expressed her poodle’s essentially sunny nature. “The change happened at first only at night. I couldn’t do it on my own until one summer I’d run to my favorite hiding place in the garden, and I was lying in the sun, and . . . I just tightened my tummy and did this thing with my spine, and there I was. And so it’s been ever since.”
She slid her foot along his leg, as if she found his touch reassuring. “As for Great-Granny, after I turned about twelve, she kept asking if everything was all right, if I felt any different. I always told her yes, because I thought she was talking about the divorces, or periods and all that, and between school and all my well-meaning relatives I had enough data on that to write a book. By the time the change actually happened, she had already passed. Do you think it’s possible she really was a pony? But if she was, how come we aren’t all ponies?”
Dennis shrugged. “Depends on the family. My dad’s a cougar. Mick’s a bear. His dad wasn’t a shifter, but his grandfather’s a bear, and his grandmother an otter. JP’s family tend to be either dragons or nothing.”
Mindy listened intently, her expressive eyes so wide he could see his reflection in them. He could sense her trembling with the importance of this conversation, and he knew it was the sense of belonging that she had been missing. Especially a dog, whose deepest instincts long for a pack.
“A poodle.” He brushed a damp curl off her forehead. “I can’t tell you how adorable that is!”
Then he gasped as she blurred, and there was a small brown dog bobbing in the bathtub. He laughed out loud as she gave him a look from those soulful dark amber eyes. Then she got her feet under her, leaped to the side of the tub, and shook all over—showering the entire bathroom, including his face.
Still laughing, he said, “Change back, and help me get out of this bandage. We can tape a square of gauze over it, and then it is your turn for some fun.”
She was instantly a woman again, blinking water from her eyelashes, her body glistening with drops.
“Get on that bed, Mork. This is gonna take a while—starting with your toes.”
***
He took his time.
How could she ever have gotten this lucky? She closed her eyes as he began slowly massaging her feet. Though his right hand hadn’t gripping power yet, he could still use his nails, lightly scoring her skin, and then caressing with his thumb as his left worked at her muscles, smoothing out tension she hadn’t been aware of, until her muscles felt unstrung as a bolt of silk.
Fire coiled in her core as he began working up her legs, first with kisses, and then with those sensitive, knowledgeable hands, but when he reached her thighs, he shifted his weight and started at the top of her head, running his fingers through her hair as he worked lovingly over her scalp.
She shivered with craving, unable to stop making noises. But from the way his lips curved, he liked those noises very much and so she abandoned herself to pleasure as he kissed his way down her face, taking the time to thoroughly plunder and possess her mouth until she was keening with want.
Then her brain blitzed into yawning hunger when he took her breasts in his hands, teasing, caressing, laving with his tongue, and destroying every wit in her head with long, slow, lingering sucks.
Her belly was trembling by the time he had kissed his way down to the tops of her thighs. Slowly he drew them wider apart, and at the first soft kiss at the top of her mound she came with a sweet cascade of ringing pulses, but he kept kissing, and licking each fold, working ever inward until he found her clit—and shot her straight to the sun.
She tumbled in freefall, her entire body trembling, and she lay boneless, delirious with satiation, but oh, he still wasn’t done. He licked and teased and nipped, and the heat was back, spiraling upward, and as he widened her again and slid his cock into her soaked, ready opening, they climbed together, fast and hard, harder. There was no regret of yesterday, no question about tomorrow, just this, now, as he made her his, and she worked him ever deeper into her to claim him as hers.
And they exploded together, floating down out of the sky to lie there with their limbs entwined.
***
When he woke next, the golden rays slanted in: afternoon. He smiled sleepily, knowing that eventually he was going to have to think about real life. His bank account was empty, and though Sloane probably had some kind of budget, it was bound not to be much. He had to be thinking about his next step.
Maybe it was time to man up and take a salaried job. Yeah, he’d hate it, but maybe he’d get used to it. Millions of others did. The yoke would be worth it if every day he could get off the commuter treadmill and dump the tie and suit for the magic of Sex by Mindy.
He knew what his dad would probably say, that compromise was part of being an adult. He’d had his fun. It was time to get a grownup job. Settle down.
Everything would work out if they did it together. For the rest of his life.
He reached with his right hand, aware that the pain was scarcely even there—to find the bed empty.
He sat up, looking around.
“Shit, no.” He wasn’t even aware he’d spoken when he saw the bedroom neat, all sign of Mindy gone.
He walked into the bathroom, finding it, too, sparkling clean—except for a note in JP’s stationery taped to the mirror.
Dennis: I once let words escape that I never thought I’d speak, because I didn’t believe in them: ‘trust me.’
But now I’m saying them again. Trust me.
I’ve got some stuff to take care of, and I’ll explain everything when we meet.
I love you
Mindy
Chapter Fourteen
It was more than a few days—in fact, more than twice the time they’d known one another. Dennis kept her note folded in his wallet, and as the days wore on, he took it out to look at it. Touch where her hand had touched.
He didn’t even know where she lived. Oh, he could find out if he wanted to. He was certain Agent Sloane already knew, or could locate Mindy through his tech whizzes. But trust had to be all or nothing, and he knew that he, too, had had issues with trust and relationships. So here was the first step, taking her at her word.
By the next day he’d finished healing, all but the occasional twinge. Having received a phone call that JP and Jan were on their way back to Los Angeles from London, he packed up his stuff, cleaned up the guest room and the kitchen.
When his old friend and his fiancée arrived, the three went out to dinner, and though Dennis hadn’t meant to talk about Mindy, somehow after a couple glasses of first-rate merlot, it all came tumbling out.
He knew that Mick would not have been able to resist teasing him, after years of Dennis scorning and protesting against mates, steady dating, settling down, and the like. But JP only looked at Dennis out of those steady black eyes of his, beneath which the fire dragon sometimes glinted, and said, simply, “I’m glad you found her.”
Jan said in her beautiful voice, “She wounds wonderful. I’d love to meet her when you’re ready.”
The two were tired after their long flight, and though there was plenty of space in the house—the master bedroom lay at the opposite end from the guest rooms—Dennis decided that he should go visit his dad while he still had the loan of the Lexus from Agent Sloane.
He had a quiet, peaceful late night drive. Sanluce was quiet as ever. When he shambled out of his boyhood room the next morning, his dad greeted him as if they’d seen one another the day before, instead of more than a year ago.
Later that day, his dad barbequed some steaks for them as Dennis once again unloaded pretty much everything, including the Torvaldsen episode, as he knew
his dad would enjoy hearing about a bit of action. And no one had a tighter buttoned lip.
“Nice work,” his dad said at the end.
“Which part?”
“Everything. Including your Mindy. Sounds like you two make quite a team. When she comes back, bring her up. I’d like to meet her. You could introduce her to your Uncle Thomas. Take her for a run. Be good for her if she has never had a pack.”
Dennis spoke the words he’d not thought he could, because he couldn’t help the surge of doubts—had she changed her mind, was he really good enough for Mindy—late at night. “Do you think she will?”
Dad grunted as he flipped the steaks. “She’s your mate.”
Dennis let out his breath. “This is new territory for me.”
His dad gave a short nod. “Be good for you.”
“I don’t know if the suit, tie, and cubicle will be good for me, but if that’s what she wants, maybe it’s time. All I know is, my life has to have her in it.”
Another grunt. “Wait and see.”
Dennis looked at his dad with some exasperation. “What does that mean? You don’t think I mean it?”
Dad glanced over his shoulder. “Of course you do. You’ve always been a straight-shooter. You’ve been making decisions about what will be best for her—maybe she’s doing the same. And if she listened to you, well, wait and see.”
Dennis headed south the next day, and as JP and Jan had hit the freeway to return to Sanluce, he drove back to the Hollywood Hills house to finish up with Agent Sloane, now that he was totally back on his feet.
Between them, they worked out reports that suppressed anything having to do with shifters—and reduced Mindy to an unnamed informant—but would stand up in any court in the world. Torvaldsen wasn’t going anywhere except to a deep, dark cell somewhere tucked under the Arctic Circle.