Page 6 of Targeted By Fate
While the guy tapped at the computer, I thought about how my brothers would react if they could see me. I wasn’t the Boaz they’d known all their lives, the one who followed the rules and chastised others who broke them, as all of my brothers did! I’d be the butt of their joke when they found out.
Clutching the key card, we took the elevator, and I locked the door behind us when we entered our room. I placed the cat, my mate, on the mattress that was covered with a plump duvet.
“It’s okay, no one will hurt you here. You can shift.”
Nothing. A big fat nothing.
He doesn’t like us.
How can you say that? We’re adorable. So adorable we’d just dispatched a shifter in a bloody battle.
I needed a shower because the coat I’d shrugged on before getting out of the car was covered with dried blood. But if I said I was going to shower, my mate might think I expected him to join me.
Shit, what a mess.
“Would you prefer I went into the corridor or the bathroom?” I grabbed a fluffy white robe. “You can put this on if you’re shy.” It hadn’t occurred to me to look for his clothes in the alley.
The cat padded to the robe and curled up on top. My jaw dropped. What if… what if this wasn’t my mate and he was just… I gulped. Just a cat.
He scents as our mate.
Thoughts ricocheted through my head. Gods, maybe the scent didn’t belong to the cat but someone who had petted it or the owner. My mate might be crying himself to sleep over his lost kitty.
“Can you give me a sign? One tail flick for yes you’re a shifter and two for no?”
Damn, I was losing it. If he wasn’t a shifter, he wouldn’t understand what I was saying. I considered phoning Maynard, but my phone was where? In the alley? No, I'd picked it up. It was in the car.
The cat closed his eyes, and I took one last look at him before closing the bathroom door and showering off the blood. When I came out, the feline was asleep, purring softly.
He’s lonely, I’m sure of it. My beast was urging me to comfort our maybe mate, so I removed my robe and gave him his fur.
My brothers would taunt me for the rest of my life if they found out I slept with an alley cat who I thought was my mate.
4
KEANE
I couldn’t shift. I tried. Gods, how much I tried. But no matter what I did, I was unable to take my skin. It was frustrating, but more than that, I could see that it was distressing this man. This man who was my mate. And more than anything, I longed to comfort him.
He was mine, and it was my job to make his life better, not more difficult.
I couldn’t scent that he was my mate, obviously, because my nose didn’t work. But my cat recognized him, repeating over and over again that he was ours. I trusted him on this.
As terrified as I should’ve been, having a wolf who’d just murdered people carry me while he was still covered in blood, put me in the front seat of his car, and take me to some random location, I wasn’t. Not a single ounce of fear flowed through me.
If anything, I felt safer than I ever had before.
I hated the distress I could feel rolling off of him when he kept telling me I could shift and that it would be okay. He felt guilty, like he was responsible for me staying in this form, like he believed I was scared of him and it was a protective move on my part. He had no way of knowing that his presence comforted me.
The day had been long before I even went into that alley, and now I was exhausted. I was also so very confused. Adding to all of that was my being stressed the fuck out about not being able to shift. But I would trust this man with anything, including my safety, which made no sense… until I listened to my cat and accepted that he was ours. And now that I had, I curled up in a ball.
I fell asleep while he was in the shower, and when I woke up, his wolf was wrapped around me. I wanted to lean in and rub against him, to gather his scent. I might not be able to enjoy it, but my cat insisted we needed to be sure others would sense that he was mine and back off. Not that there were currently any “others” around. Fair to say I was already pretty possessive of him. I stayed still, afraid that if I moved, if I woke him, he’d shift and try to get me to do the same. And I knew I wasn’t able to, at least not until I got some sleep.
So instead of stressing more, I let myself fall back asleep.
The next time I woke, he had taken his skin, still wrapped around me, but very much human. Moving as little as possible, I took him in, trying to memorize every inch of his body.
This was my mate. He was mine.
