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  Eric interrupted her thoughts with a low, cautious murmur. “I know you love mint in your lemonade, and spicy food, and you take your coffee with heavy cream, no sugar.”

  Which was no surprise to Vanessa, as he’d been sitting next to her over dozens if not hundreds of lunches.

  “I know you are genuine and kind to Peggy and Trisha at the café when they wait on you, and to every other patron, and always look them in the eye when you speak to them. So they know they are a real person to you. I know nothing makes you smile faster than seeing a dog, playing with its owner or chasing its own tail—which is actually kind of ironic with what we know now, isn’t it? And you love overhearing a morbidly humorous joke.”

  All of which was, granted, a bit less obvious. All that time, he had been paying her some attention.

  “You’d laugh easily if you didn’t censor yourself so much. Your clothes indicate an artistic flair and a taste for sensual fabrics, when you think the occasion will let you get away with it. Nothing much gets past your notice, and most of what you’re thinking passes over your face, if someone bothers to look for the signs.”

  It sounded, strangely enough, truly like Eric Salo had bothered.

  “For a woman who tries to be so guarded, you can’t help being open to the world and open with who you are.”

  Vanessa’s stomach sank inside her. She almost dreaded letting the embers of hope rekindle inside her. The idea that Eric was more than passingly attracted to her was a temptation but one she couldn’t trust at all.

  “Who else could tell you those things about yourself, Vanessa?”

  No one she could think of. Probably not even her brother.

  Aubrey….

  Vanessa pulled her cell phone from her pocket and dialed, then suffered the long seconds listening to another Flight of the Valkyries.

  “Hey, kid. Sorry, I’m snowed under with paperwork. I can’t really—.”

  Vanessa cut her brother off mid-sentence. “Aubrey, I need you to meet me at my place right now.” With her free hand, she rubbed her brow, shielding her expression from Eric as though that would somehow hide the exchange from the shifter sitting beside her.

  The moment of silence at the other end acknowledged that Vanessa never did that, never issued her brother orders or disregarded the importance of his job, despite the fact that he had never shared anything about it. Not even the name of the agency. That fucking low-level static that always plagued his phone crackled still along the connection and her nerves.

  “I have a phonebook-sized stack of forms on my desk this morning, sis. If I’m lucky, I’ll be done by lunchtime,” her brother said, his voice artificially, manifestly unconcerned with her manner. Normalizing the situation, that was what he would have called it in professional terms. “Maybe tonight I can stop by with dim sum from that little place down on—.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Aubrey.”

  Vanessa wasn’t crazy, and now she knew it. She knew about her true nature and what she could do, some of it at least, and that none of it was hallucination or delusion that warranted Vanessa sequestering herself in her little townhouse or her quiet job or her invisible life. Time to find out exactly what her brother did or didn’t know.

  “Dinner plans can wait, Aubrey, but the Panthera won’t. It has been made clear to me this morning that they want to meet—.”

  “Vanessa.” Her brother’s voice was short and sharp, a tone he had very seldom used on her, and not since they were kids and she’d been acting out after they’d lost their parents and moved in with their honorary aunt and uncle. Jeez, she had to wonder now how much of what Aubrey had told her to believe about their lives was pure fiction. “I’ll be at your place in thirty minutes.”

  He knew. Fucking hell. Aubrey knew. He knew. He knew.

  As much as she’d told herself she wanted to know the truth, Vanessa sat numbed by the enormity of the realization as Eric circled the block around her townhouse. She presumed he was trying to make sure that Agency or those Fenris Wolves, whatever they were, hadn’t tracked her down. Distracted by the questions swirling in her head and the sense of betrayal that had burrowed into her chest, Vanessa didn’t wait for the Mustang to come to a complete stop. The car was still rolling, just a bit, when she opened the door and stumbled out into a whole new world from the one she’d known a week before or even earlier that morning.

  There was that little recognition now in the back of her mind that the reason she could step out of a moving vehicle without losing her footing was because she wasn’t human. Not having much of a life or a boyfriend, being bored and unfulfilled at her job, having a boss who was weirdly overbearing and overly intimate at the same time, being treated like she was younger and less intelligent than she was because of people’s biases against plus-size women…. The last few days had rendered these concerns utterly irrelevant.

  Compared to the fact that she now knew shifters and government extermination teams existed. Compared to learning she was a latent werecat herself, destined never to turn but all the more prized for it, for her genetics. Compared to seeing Eric Salo turn into a larger than life werewolf and still wanting him more than any man she’d ever met.

  Why wasn’t Vanessa scared of Eric? Why hadn’t it terrified her, mentally and emotionally scarred her, to see him turn? Perhaps the shifter side latent in her was what left her enthralled rather than repelled by his transformation.

  And maybe she was just fucking out of her head to be so hung up on a man like him—too gorgeous, too guarded, too confusing.

  At the bottom of her townhouse steps, Eric caught up to Vanessa and took her by the hand. “Hey, come on, I know this isn’t easy, but—.”

  “This?” she repeated, pulling her hand away not so much in anger as in irritation. Salo felt too close to her just then and Vanessa too open and bare to him. His hand on her skin, his warmth, just his nearness was like someone touching an open wound. Vanessa stomped her way up the steps saying, “I don’t know what this is. This Panthera and their concept of their kind. This idea of females being first among equals, but dished out with a heavy dose of guilt and responsibility that sure feels like manipulation.”

  She felt Eric’s weight on the steps and the oh-so-Americana wooden porch behind her as she threw open the front door.

  “You don’t lock your door?” he barked incredulously, the warming concern in his voice roughened by that growly disapproval.

  For her part, Vanessa was still apathetic about having forgotten to lock her front door. Probably her backdoor, too. Locks in her life never felt like they were there to keep things out near as much as they shut things in—Vanessa, specifically. Bare-assed, sleepwalking, chubby little latent lion shifter Vanessa.

  “Hey,” Eric said again when Vanessa didn’t answer him with apologies or assurances that she wouldn’t forget again. He didn’t have to take her by the arm or the hand to get her to turn to him, turn on him.

  “All the men around me are so concerned with where I am and what I do and am I safe and who is or isn’t a danger to me. Dr. Koller wants to climb right into my head so he can tell me what to think and how to feel and make sure I’m not attracted to anyone but him.” Vanessa rolled her eyes as Eric’s fists clenched and he gritted his teeth at the mention of her boss and the psychologist’s mind games. Salo had no cause to be possessive over someone he refused to claim.

  “Aubrey wants me to think I need to hide from this big bad world that doesn’t care about me like he does,” she went on. “Only now I’ve got to wonder if protecting me is really about hiding him.”

  Salo opened his mouth as though he had some thought he wanted to impart on that idea, but Vanessa’s finger poking him hard in the chest cut off the impulse and raised his brow instead. “And then there’s the inconstant Mr. Salo, who can’t make up his mind on the many different options he has for getting rid of me. Does he ignore me until I just lose interest and wander off? Does he put his foot down and command me to go? Or does he h
and me off to some hot, similarly blond, vaguely Greek patriarchal type for the Panthera’s werecat breeding program?”

  “That’s not what I’m doing,” Eric snapped. Those linebacker shoulders and that massive fucking chest expanded as he straightened and puffed up in offense. “If either Pietr or that Zaide asshole tries to touch you or make you do anything you don’t want to do—.”

  “What about the things I do want to do?” With Eric taken aback for a moment, and with Vanessa herself filled again with all the liberating, empowering possibilities of being a werecat, she used a surge of inhuman strength to shove Salo hard several steps back, toward the blue-and-white striped couch placed along the wall just inside the front door. Like all the furniture Aubrey had helped her pick out, it was just so French country cottage, so absurdly cheerful and light, to make her little townhouse seem less like her prison. Wondering just how sturdy that sofa really was and just how strong she really was, Vanessa put more oomph behind the next push, which sent Eric tripping backward into the seat.

  “Vanessa,” he started to snarl, only to grunt and suck in a strangled breath as she came down atop him straddling his lap. Instinctively, his hands took hold of her hips, fingers curling around toward her plump ass and digging just a bit into her flesh.

  “Which is it, Mr. Salo?” the woman demanded as she planted her hands on his shoulders and tried to pin his back against the couch. She suspected, werecat or not, that it was mostly his shock allowing her to get away with doing so. “You want to be the only one touching me, or you want to be rid of me? Make up your mind.”

  Those green eyes darkened behind Salo’s lowered brow as he grimaced. “You don’t understand, Vanessa.”

  “And since no one wants to explain what is really going on or their true motives to me, I’ll have to figure things out for myself,” she told Eric before settling herself down harder on his lap, against the bulge that rose in his jeans in an instant. “So what does that mean?” she growled in time with the rumble building in the back of his throat. She let her mouth skim his skin, teeth scraping gently along the vibration of his deep, breathy snarl. “Are you attracted to the little chubby girl after all?”

  The wolf shifter seized Vanessa by the arms with bruising strength and hoisted her several inches up off his lap. “That was never the question. Of course I’m attracted to you, but there’s more at issue than whether I want to fuck you until you can remember anyone’s name but mine.”

  And didn’t that thought just send a stab of aching heat up through Vanessa’s body like Eric had just thrust that raging hard-on up her pussy?

  Prevented from grinding down on the man, Vanessa pushed herself forward so Eric would feel her stiffened nipples through her top, and so she would feel herself pressed to that firm wall of muscle made of his taut, flexed pecs. The werewolf sucked in another snarling breath that said a lot more than his words had. It was all Vanessa could do not to melt against him.

  “Is that what you want?” she asked, leaning harder into him. “You want to make me forget anyone else even exists? Like those sexy blond lions? You want to fuck me like they want to breed me?”

  Salo turned the tables in a hot second, pinning Vanessa on her back on the couch and knocking the breath out of her with the bulk of his hulking form on top of her. “I’m trying,” he said in an infuriated rasp, “to consider more than the pleasures of the moment. There are consequences.”

  Vanessa again derailed Eric’s efforts to check the amorous lioness, this time by wrapping her legs around him, squeezing his waist with her round but muscular thighs and bouncing herself lightly against the denim-clad ridge of his erection. She could have sworn she felt it throbbing right through their clothing, but that might have been her twitching clitoris, the tightening walls of her sex, the contraction of everything inside her at once in a profound expression of need.

  “Consequences?” She purred against Salo’s jaw. “Only consequence I’ve seen is how fucking frustrated we leave each other.”

  As he couldn’t dislodge Vanessa’s legs without letting go of her arms, Eric had to satisfy himself with stretching them above her head and holding her hands trapped against the cushion. “You have a lot to learn, little girl. There are dangers to being a shifter and responsibilities and fucking politics. There are issues you can’t even imagine to mating, even within shifter species, let alone a werewolf taking a werelion for his own.”

  Lifting her head enough to nuzzle her flushed cheek against his, Vanessa asked, “Is that what this is, Eric Salo? Are we mating? Are you taking me for your own? That’s a nicer idea than all that werelion breeding talk.”

  After venting a grunt of clear exasperation, Eric reared back from Vanessa, then dipped his face back over hers to speak with his lips brushing hers. “Yes, it is,” he reluctantly agreed. “Not that you can really say that for certain after having met only two male werelions for a half an hour in a coffee shop.” Which meant, she noted distantly, that the dark-haired man must have been a werecat species other than lion. “You haven’t seen the ranch they maintain in the foothills southeast of town or Pietr strutting around surrounded by the Panthera council in all its glory. You haven’t had to deal yet with your own mating instinct screaming at you when your hormones have peaked and—.”

  “No?” Vanessa asked, further interrupting with an extra rough bounce against Eric’s solid, bullish hips and jutting cock.

  “And when an especially fertile male werelion responds to your body’s need,” Eric finished in a husky rush of breath.

  Finally, this made Vanessa pause and blink up at Salo. “So, what are you saying? If I spend a day with Pietr and Zaide and bask in their leonine pheromones, I’m suddenly going to be presenting my hindquarters like a cat in heat and begging to be bred by them? I’m going to want them more than the man I’ve been trying to get to flirt with me for months?”

  The mask of gloom that passed over Eric Salo’s broad, sculpted features flattened his expression—except for the gleam of despair in those green eyes. For a moment, the Nordic Adonis, the fiercely untouchable wolf shifter, was a sad… boy with fear and shame softening the terrible strength of his face. But fear of what? Of… rejection?

  Vanessa nipped Eric’s full lower lip, then slowly and sensually scrapped her bared teeth along the strong line of her clean-shaven jaw. And he actually held still for it, like he was just as caught up as she was in the palpable sexual tension bristling between them like electricity.

  “You think I’d really want some werelion stranger more than I wanted you when we were dancing together that night? Or when you were chasing me? Or over all those days sitting so close and still so far apart at that lunch counter?”

  “Don’t, Vanessa,” Eric groaned, eyelids sinking down halfway and then closed. The look of lazy pleasure, hedonistic bliss, broke only for the momentary tension of hunger in his gritted teeth and the tautness of his cheeks.

  “I can’t imagine it,” Vanessa whispered, her lips brushing his skin under his jaw, along his throat again as Eric swallowed hard. “Wanting Pietr or Zaide more than I want you just because my hormones match theirs? Feeling their purr against my lips instead of your growl? Smooth voices and soft words undressing me instead of a wild wolf baring me with real hunger?”

  She knew what she was doing, what her words were doing to Eric, and what he was likely to do to her if she kept talking and taunting despite his tightening grip on her wrists and the strain flexing every muscle from his banded biceps and pecs to his thick thighs and rock-hard abs. “On my hands and knees,” she muttered so low that Eric would have had to really concentrate to hear her, “to be bred by Pietr and Zaide instead of mated by you.”

  Vanessa squirmed up under Eric as she painted this picture of his hunger denied, of other males taking her. That same synergy that had bristled between them in waves of tingling desire when they’d danced washed over them again now, warm and intoxicating.

  The snarl cycling up through Eric’s chest and throat
culminated in the wolf shifter suddenly straightening up to his knees, yanking Vanessa up with him. Then it was face forward into the cushions for the latent lioness, with the big bad wolf holding her down. His teeth and hot breath sent shivers down her spine from the nape of her neck. His long, hard cock, pressed along the generous curve of her ass, burned hot even through two layers of denim. It was not lost on Vanessa, not at all, that male wolves took their females from behind, like this.

  “You are playing with dangerous animals, little girl,” Salo warned before lavishing rough, gnawing, nipping kisses all along the back of her neck and down one shoulder, blouse tugged aside. “You have no idea.”

  “Then you better teach me,” she urged in challenge, “before I go getting myself into trouble with a shifter who can’t resist me as easily as you do.”

  Salo’s response was to hold her still by his teeth in her shoulder, just shy of breaking the skin. The mixture of sharp pain and pleasure with world-spinning vertigo was…not normal, Vanessa could tell even as she shuddered and fought to think clearly. It was like she could feel Eric’s thoughts and intentions, his struggle with his carnal need, right through his skin and hers, through that hold he had on her with rising canines in her shoulder. This method of immobilizing her was significant, to be sure, and downright primal.

  Only after long moments of frantic heartbeats and many deep breaths did Eric manage to draw back his fangs, his wolf. “If a wolf shifter takes the blood of the female he’s fucking…,” he grated with effort against Vanessa’s ear. “If he’s inside her, tied up with her, when he bites her and marks her as his, she is his. They are mated.”

  Mated. The term obviously carried a great deal more meaning than Webster’s Dictionary would have conveyed and more than “bred” had earlier that morning during their tension-fraught conversation with Pietr.

  Eric continued, his forehead furrowed as he laid it against her nape, his words a fog of hot breath along her spine. “But mated isn’t just a matter of desire or even affection. Mated is a connection even a shifter can’t predict or explain. With so few female shifters, most males will never mate. Never. Most don’t bother hoping. We’ll die in battle to avoid losing our souls to the wilding that eventually steals our human forms, when we’ve been beasts too long. When we’ve shifted too many times.”