Without warning, Cole’s large, sexy frame rushed toward her, and he grabbed a handful of her sweatshirt. Slowly, he leaned forward and brought his mouth to hers. Licking at the seam of her lips, he used his thumb to massage the bend of her neck. “Open,” he said through a soft, rattling growl that hit Andi right in her treasure box between her thighs.

  He didn’t have to ask twice.

  Andi opened her mouth and let go of a trembling breath, but before she could recover from his tender caress, Cole’s lips came crashing onto hers with a force that almost brought her to her knees.

  Low, needy sounds escaped her throat as she wrapped her arms around his neck to pull him closer.

  God, he tasted so good.

  Cole’s hands roamed her body, and she didn’t give a shit if his blood stained her clothes. She wanted him. Needed him. And he was giving her everything. He sucked her busted bottom lip into his mouth, and the steady pull was enough to send electric shocks straight to her core.

  With a pained groan, Cole pulled away from her and looked down into Andi’s eyes.

  They both panted as if they’d just finished the race of their lives, but his burning gaze made her pause. The deep blue she adored so much was gone, and in their place were bright, amber-colored orbs glaring back at her.

  Someone with good sense would have run from a big, feral man who looked at them like this, but not Andi.

  They didn’t know each other well, but she knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would never hurt her.

  “Andi,” he breathed, wrapping his muscular arms around his waist as if trying to hold his body together. “You’re my mate. And you bit me.”

  The headiness that made her want to do him right here on the lawn skittered from her thoughts. Maybe she’d imagined it. She hoped to high Heaven that she hadn’t, but it couldn’t be right. Was he really hers?

  “Are you mine?” she asked, pressing her body into Cole’s. He hunched in on himself and grunted in pain, but that didn’t stop her from getting closer. “Cole. Are you mine?”

  He nodded and pulled off his shirt. The way his muscles rolled beneath his skin almost made her lose track of her thoughts.

  Scraping the heels of his shoes against the gravel to pull them off, Cole took a step back from her and unbuttoned his pants.

  “And I’m yours?” she asked, taking another step toward him.

  He nodded and groaned as the sound of bones popping filled the air. The more he retreated from her, the more she advanced on him. She couldn’t let him get away. Not without knowing the truth.

  “Cole. I’m your mate?”

  He stood before her now, completely naked, body moving in unnatural ways as his beast fought to break free of its human shell. She put up her hand to block his man-bits from her sight. He wasn’t stripping to show her the goods. It was out of necessity, and looking at his fully naked body felt like an intrusion.

  Andi knew how this worked.

  Cole was a Ghost shifter. A fallen angel cursed to walk the earth, first as an animal for millions of years, and then confined to a human body until a mate would set him free. A bite from his mate would liberate the saber-tooth cat that had been sleeping deep inside of him for centuries.

  And it was her.

  Andi moved toward him as his body bent and roiled.

  “Stay back,” Cole gritted out. “The… the first shift is powerful. Don’t want you to get hurt.”

  She was going to blow a freaking gasket if he kept moving away. So, in her typical defiant style, Andi ran to Cole and wrapped her arms around his waist. The turbulence of his first Change after so long without it halted immediately.

  His bones stopped grinding, his muscles stopped rolling beneath his tight skin. Everything just stopped when she touched him.

  “Cole,” she whispered into his ear, rushing her words so he could complete his torturous transformation. “You’d never hurt me. I know you wouldn’t. I just wanted to say that I’m so happy you’re mine.” She pulled away and looked into his eyes, and the amazement he felt was evident. “I’ll be here waiting when you get back.”

  Chapter 4

  Well, this was one way to ease Andi into the fact that she was his mate. For the last week, Cole spent way too much time thinking of ways to tell her the truth; and of ways he could tell Cass that her sister was his mate. Cass was different these days, and he didn’t think she’d take too kindly to him being with her sister.

  Cole wished he was wrong. Something churned deep inside Cass that none of them were prepared to handle. Cole felt it. Deep in his bones, he knew that the sweet, compassionate, benevolent Cass was disappearing. None of them knew if this was normal for a human. She was the third in a very unique Alpha Triad, and this was untested territory.

  Human shifters were mortals, not fallen angel/prehistoric beast hybrids like the Ghosts.

  Had Cass been mated and bitten by a regular shifter, regardless of her place in a triad, she would make it through just fine. But the Ghosts weren’t regular shifters.

  Cass was different from Riley and Emma. They’d been turned into saber-tooth cats, but they weren’t equal parts Alpha and Omega to the strongest, deadliest shifters known to mankind.

  The clan would figure it out. They had to. Cole and the rest of his people, sans Jax and Damon, discussed it a few times. Cole knew without a doubt that he and his family hadn’t been brought this far just to fail. That didn’t stop his mind from wandering back to the idea that Cass might try to kill him once she learned about him and her sister.

  But right now, the way Andi looked at him let Cole know that any pain he had to endure would all be worth it. She didn’t panic or worry about what he was or what this meant for them. Andi was happy. It could be the liquor telling her this was a fantastic idea, but Cole knew better. Andi’s discovery of who they were to each other was the one he’d dreamed of.

  Amazement clouded her eyes as she watched him now, his muscles, bones, and tendons shifting and reforming right in front of her. Fuck it all, he wanted to yell out in pain, but damn if he would do anything that would scare her.

  So, Cole ground his teeth together as his ribs broke and lengthened in his chest. He closed his eyes to keep from seeing the piercing, snow-white claws erupt from beneath his nailbeds. In his head, he focused on the feel of Andi’s soft body pressing against his a few moments ago. The thought took away from the discomfort as prickling fur tore through is skin. What must she be thinking of him as she watched the slow agony of his shift?

  She could have run by now. Andi could have told him that she couldn’t stand to watch his body change, but she didn’t.

  This was the moment his beast had been waiting for. Finding his mate had been one of the best moments in his life, and finally setting his saber-tooth free came in second. This was liberating. He needed this.

  Another group of Andi’s high-pitched sneeze-attacks filled the air. Cole opened his eyes to see her beautiful face buried in the bend of her arm. She looked up at him, but couldn’t seem to focus past the tears filling her eyes. She wasn’t crying, but the constant barrage of sneezing and sniffles had taken her over.

  She was magnificent.

  Despite the dribble of blood staining her chin from her busted lip, the brittle yellow blade of grass stuck in her hair, and her weeping nose, she was absolutely stunning. She kept pulling her sweatshirt down to cover her thighs, and the only thing that kept Cole’s mind from focusing on the physical torment of his change was the thought of burying his cock deep inside her sweet smelling pussy.

  As if clearing away a fog, Andi shook her head and then started looking around her. “Tissue, she murmured. “My purse.” She spat again, making a funny tewey-tewey sound as if that would clear away the debris from her busted lip.

  While she was distracted, Cole took a handful of steps away from her. When the shift finally severed his human form and made him a full-on predator, he didn’t want her anywhere near him.

  A smattering of cracks and groans filled the space in front of Cass’s house. Cole’s form shredded, and after a moment of chaos and anguish, a towering saber-tooth exploded from his body. He swayed side to side, waiting for his mind to catch up to the confusion that hadn’t ripped apart his body in countless millennia.

  The heaviness of his sabers hanging from his mouth was a welcomed feeling. Orange fur with brown and black spots covered his powerful body. He ached from the force of the change, but dear God of all, he’d missed this. His dagger-like nails curved into the dirt, and the whiskers next to his nose bounced up and down as he bobbed his head.

  The honking sound of Andi blowing her nose echoed through the quiet neighborhood. Somewhere in the wooded area a few streets over, a bat flapped its wings as it landed on a tree limb. A rabbit hopping behind Cass’s house paused as it halted its late-night trek. Someone across the street flushed a toilet, and the running of water through metal pipes coupled with their whispers of, ‘Don’t want to wake the baby.’

  Cole could hear everything.

  He shook his head and looked up at Andi, who now sat cross-legged on the lawn. She pulled out another tissue, wiped her eyes, and then rubbed it across her nose.

  “I’ve been reduced to a fucking mouth breather,” she said, scolding herself. She looked up at him and sniffed. “You look pretty damn proud of yourself.” With her eyebrows knitted together, a small smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “Does it feel awesome to have shifted for the first time in, like, centuries?”

  Cole sat down on his hind legs, grunted, and nodded his massive head. More than you can imagine, he thought.

  After shoving the used tissue into a small pocket in the side of her purse, she stood up from the ground and took a few tentative steps toward him. “You’re huge,” she whispered, reaching her hand toward him.

  He sat perfectly still, not wanting to make a mistake and hurt her with his sabers or claws. In this form and this size, even the smallest of mistakes could be detrimental to the thin paper of human skin.

  Andi inched closer and rubbed her fingers through his fur. After warming up with a few well-placed pets to his head and behind his ear as if he were a dog, she threw her arms around his neck and squeezed. A purring noise emanated from his chest as she stroked her hands along the side of his head.

  She inhaled and then pulled back to look at him. “You still smell like you, but just a little different. Now, you smell a little like dirt, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. It reminds me of my grandparent’s backyard when I was a kid. They had large pine trees on their property, and sometimes the air would be filled with the scent of pine. After it rained, I would go collect mud and make mud pies and mud cakes. It was brown and had streaks of red in it from the natural clay in the area. That’s what you smell like.” She huffed a contented sigh and shrugged her shoulders up to her ears. “Okay. I need to pee now, so I’m going to go inside and do that. And rinse my lip with peroxide. Will you come back to me once you’ve finished getting to know the world again in this form?”

  Careful not to graze her arm with his saber, he nodded and stood up. Andi’s head lifted as he towered over her. His woman was amazing. In the past hour, she’d shown him a side of herself he never knew existed. Andi had graced him with part of her heart. Maybe she hadn’t meant to, or perhaps the drinks still coursed through her veins and made her giddy. It didn’t matter. When she woke up sober, they would talk and figure things out.

  Cole watched as she picked up her purse and his discarded clothes on the way to the front door. She dug around the bottom of her bag and then made a triumphant noise as she pulled out the keys. With a glance back at him, she went inside and closed the door.

  He listened for a few moments as she walked around the house, laughing to herself about having ‘hot sexy sex’ with him sometime in the near future. If that’s what she wanted, he would give her as much of him as she could handle.

  As he moved to take a step toward the woods a few streets over, the sound of running water sprang to life in the house. His inebriated mate was about to take a shower. Hell, even his beast demanded that he sit still in the shadows of the house and make sure she didn’t fall and hurt herself. Even sober people fell in the shower.

  So, instead of walking away to feel the soft earth and tendrils of tree vines beneath his paws, he moved to the side of the house, sat down, and listened.

  Andi sang inside the shower, loudly belting out an old Billie Holiday song about falling in love with someone’s eyes. And then she rapped Push It by Salt-N-Peppa, mixing up the lyrics but giggling to herself once she realized it. By the third song, Cole had no desire to run. He just wanted to listen to his mate be herself while she thought no one was around to catch her behave so freely.

  But he had to leave. Taking this time away from his beast would bring on consequences he had no desire to find out about. It had been patient, understanding that the safety of their mate meant more than a walk through the woods. Now, his animal needed to run.

  Carefully, he meandered through backyards and side alleyways, trying to stay out of sight. It was past one in the morning, and he would be able to hear if anyone walked near him. New Rose was accepting of shifters, but seeing a saber-tooth cat walk passed your window might raise some concerns.

  Making his way toward the woodlands where he could stretch his legs and test his speed, he took in all the smells of the moonlit night. Rain was due in the forecast tomorrow, and he could scent the moisture in the air like freshly fallen leaves on an untouched pond. He could feel the heaviness in the atmosphere, a smooth lotion-like warmth saturating the molecules of air all around him. No matter the season, rain was rain and always tickled the senses the same.

  A cool breeze danced across his fur, and Cole closed his eyes and lifted his nose to be taken in by it. God, this felt so good. He and his animal had always been in sync. His desire to be put down had nothing to do with the loss of control of his beast. Until recently.

  Hell.

  He’d forgotten about that.

  For well over a year, he’d considered being put under by the Coven of the Fallen. A century-long nap was precisely what he needed to continue living. He’d grown bored of the world and the way humans were utterly screwing up the planet. It made him angry. Over the centuries, Cole watched the rise and fall of civilizations and the ruination of wildlife, but never had he witnessed it on this scale. It was almost as if someone was doing it on purpose.

  For him, things had changed in a matter of moments. Andi touching him last week and had roused his animal. And tonight, she’d awakened a part of him that was primal. He wanted to protect her. Needed to keep her safe.

  Don’t forget about Remus and the Rogue pack, genius, his stupid brain said.

  Fuck. How could he bring Andi into this mess? Maybe getting put down would be better for him. Most importantly, it would be better for her. She’d be safe. She’d find someone else to love.

  A low growl vibrated in his throat, his saber-tooth issuing a warning. Andi’s mine, too, it seemed to say. Threaten to take us away from the woman who gave us a reason, and I’ll drive your ass crazy until the day you die.

  Cole shook his head, warding away the selfish thoughts, and broke into a run as he crested the sparsely packed woods. Towering Red Maple and Black Oak trees loomed over him, welcoming him into the darkness to keep onlookers from watching him gallop around like an elephant.

  He rolled around in the dead leaves, freshly grown grass, and low-sitting bushes, enjoying the feel of everything around him. When he’d run until his legs threatened to give out and his lungs burned in his chest, he moved toward the lazy stream that only made itself known in the spring and hung around until early winter. He drank until his stomach ached from the cold liquid, but his throat welcomed the full, satisfying laps.

  Long before he saw the shifter, he heard the loud echoes of massive paws hitting the forest floor. Cole sat on his hind legs and waited until the shifter came into view. The polar bear startled hard upon seeing him, and in a low and gruff sound, Cole laughed and scraped his paw along the bank of the stream.

  Whoever it was, nodded its head in a silent welcome, and Cole did the same. The large, off-white bear came up to the stream across from him, lowered its blockhead, and drank just as greedily as he had.

  There was no competition between them to see who was bigger and better. Instead, a silent conversation flowed between them, receiving the other warmly as the stars passed them in the clear, night sky. When the bear tired of sitting, it splashed water at Cole, waved its paw like a short swinging pendulum, and walked back the way it came.

  Yeah. The sun would be coming up in less than an hour, and Cole wanted to get back to his mate before she woke up.

  He walked back the way he came, scaring a family of deer as he crossed a row of park benches. Damned creatures really did freeze. He toyed with the idea of running toward them, just to watch them scatter, but a car door closed in the distance.

  People were getting ready to start their day, and the last thing everyone in New Rose needed to be talking about was a Ghost shifter frightening the hell out of everyone first thing in the morning.

  Chapter 5

  Andi woke to the aroma of dark coffee and bacon. For a brief moment, she thought Laurel had come back so they could talk, but the low grumble of a man humming downstairs let her know who was waiting for her.

  Cole. Her mate.

  Amid the slight headache from too much alcohol, everything that happened last night, from her calling that guy Eyebrow Boy to his face to letting Cole watch her cry, came roaring back to her. She didn’t know which one to be more embarrassed by, the tears or the inebriation. The latter sounded better.

  Part of her wanted to storm downstairs and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing here without her invitation, but the innermost pieces of her heart and soul that longed for someone to call her own slapped her upside the head and told her to stop being stupid. At the thought of ejecting Cole from her life, the low-grade headache that barely made itself known since she’d awakened throbbed to a full-on migraine.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17