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And you're very pretty, he'd said.
Erena pulled her hoodie and shirt over her head and dropped them in the snow. She dropped her bra, next, then took off her boots, jeans, and underwear. Inhaling the sharp wintry night air, she let it fill her lungs. It was so cold, it felt like needles inside and out.
Unable to wait any longer, she let her fox shape take her.
She was smaller like this, and as a girl who liked crisp lines and measurements in her work, the disappearance of so much of her mass during her transformations had been a mystery that always puzzled her. "Magic," Margot would say whenever Erena broached the subject.
Magic wasn't good enough. She wanted explanations, reasons. She wanted things to fit, to make sense.
And as she took off through the trees, she wanted to forget.
Boulders, trunks, and snow-covered bushes passed her in blurs of black and white. The forest was pure and easily understood. She heard a mouse braving the snow-covered ground and she followed it for a while, intrigued. It stopped at a pine cone and began to disassemble it. When an owl swooped overhead, Erena jumped between the owl and the mouse, not even sure why, other than she'd grown attached to the little scritching scratching of the tiny mammal and she wasn't ready to have the soothing sound interrupted by a scream of pain.
The owl flew off, its wing beats nearly silent as they carried the bird away.
The mouse dove into the snow and burrowed deep within, frightened now by Erena's presence. She knocked the pine cone closer to the mouse's hiding spot with her forepaw, then loped away.
Soft footfalls reached her ears, and a newly-familiar scent of sage. Spinning around, she bared her teeth.
A beautiful mountain lion approached, his rich golden fur gleaming in the moonlight. Erena watched him with fascination. She'd never seen such a majestic creature. He was darker than Nina’s mountain lion, and bulkier. Did he seem so majestic because he was male? She didn’t think so—it had to be him. Matt. Jameson's grizzly, Rex's wolf, and Nolan's polar bear were all sights to behold, not to mention Parker's animal, but this mountain lion in front of her took her damn breath away.
His blue-green eyes were locked on hers. She felt pinned in place, unable to run, unable to look away.
He stopped before he reached her, with only a few yards between them. Sitting in the snow, he watched her.
She stared back for the longest moment, feeling the air crackle between them. Go to him, her inner fox urged. She ignored the impulse. She couldn’t trust herself. He was here for a reason—why had he followed her?
As she watched, he lifted a single paw out to the side, brought it back, and then thwap—sent snow through the air to hit her on the snout. The cold slush went up her nose and made her sneeze.
The fuck? She turned and kicked her hind legs, sending a shower of snow back at him. Looking over her shoulder, she huffed out a foxlike bark of laughter at the sight of him dodging her retaliation.
He stood and shook himself off, and she decided to run.
She ran as fast as she could, speeding through the trees, kicking up snow behind her. Rapid running footsteps followed her, and her heart pounded even faster in her chest with the knowledge that he was giving chase. Looping around an old trunk, she dived down into the little hollow where it met the ground.
Matt raced past, too intent on catching up with her to realize that she'd hidden herself away. Laughing, she let her human form take over so she could use her hands to create an epic snowball. She was still warm from her run, and the cold nipped at her skin but didn't penetrate into her bones, not yet.
She'd stopped in the Circle, the clearing where Jameson often held clan meetings. A cairn rose up from the ground, its gray stones decorated with snow. Spaced evenly around the cairn was a circle of Ponderosa pines. It was here that Jake had been banished from the clan. It was here that she'd decided to follow him.
Big mistake, Erena, she thought.
Ignoring the memories, she gathered a ball of snow, knowing Matt would realize soon that he'd been tricked. After packing it into a tight ball, she set it on the cairn.
The mountain lion came back a moment later. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Erena was in her human form. The air around him shimmered and she couldn't see his animal very well, only the general shape as his body shifted and changed. The shimmering light faded and a naked man stood before her.
His human form was just as beautiful as his lion form, with rippling muscles, broad shoulders, and long, muscular legs.
Before she could ogle him any more than she already had—especially the generous, semi-erect cock between his legs—she grabbed her well-crafted snowball and hurled it at his chest.
He moved to block it, but he was taken off-guard and way too slow. Snow exploded over his torso and he swore. "Fuck! Dammit, Erena!"
Rushing toward her, he looked just as impressive and frightening as he had before. Her heart leapt into her throat and she scrambled to the side, hoping to get out of his path. She knocked into the cairn. The stone was freezing cold against her skin.
"Shit, did I scare you?" he asked, stopping suddenly.
She straightened. "No, of course not."
"You looked a little freaked out. If someone hurt you before, and I was coming after you and yelling, I thought maybe..."
Laughing, she pushed his chest with her palm. He took a step away and waited, bare feet in the snow like hers. Like her, he didn't seem to mind the cold.
"I'm not afraid of you," she said. "Not like that."
"Are you afraid of me in some other way?" he asked.
She shook her head, but he stared hard at her. She didn't understand his gaze, she didn't understand why he'd followed her here. If he was with Kayla, he wouldn't be doing something like this.
Maybe he wasn't with Kayla?
It was too much to think about. Erena couldn't process any of it, she couldn't force it to make sense in her head. So she changed the subject.
"Why did you come back to the territory?" Erena asked.
"Because Bronson and Sloan are dicks."
"That can't be the only reason," Erena said.
"It's the reason that matters most. When Sloan and Kayla broke up, we wanted to get her away from there."
She had to know. "And you and Kayla..."
"Aren't together. We're friends." He spoke carefully, slowly, as if afraid of spooking her. Or maybe because he was trying to lie to her with a half-truth—deceitful shifters pulled that kind of shit all the time. Jake had done it to her.
And the chance he might be lying to her pissed her off more than anything else. She wasn't going to fall for that again—not from him, not from anyone. She turned to go.
"Wait," he said, rushing over to stand right in front of her.
She became more aware of their nudity. In the cold, her nipples were hard. At least, she told herself it was the cold, and not the sight of Matt's muscles having that effect on her. He flicked a gaze down to her chest and then seemed to tear it away to stare at her face, looking into her eyes.
"Is there something here?" he asked. "It can't just be me..."
She shook her head. "If you have to ask that question, the answer's probably no, isn't it?"
"Not necessarily," he said, reaching out to touch her cheek. "What do you think?"
His hand on her cheek sent a spark through her body. A strong force pulled through her, drawing her toward him. She couldn't pull away, and she didn't want to. Instead, when he cupped her jaw and bent his face to hers, she accepted his kiss.
His lips were warm, and he tasted like peppermint when he opened his lips slightly and pressed his tongue to hers. She opened for him, her heart thudding with need, her brain struggling to think through the fog of desire.
What was she doing? She barely knew this guy.
Shaking her head, she stepped back, unable to say her thoughts aloud. His touch was hot as a brand and sent sparks through her body.
“You feel this too, right?” he asked.
He wasn’t smiling. Gone was his self-assured smirk, gone was the twinkle in his eye. He was raw, vulnerable.
“Don’t you?” he pressed.
Yes, she felt it too. She felt drawn to him, but no way was she admitting anything. This was the kind of guy who could stomp all over her heart, and she wasn't about to give him the chance.
"I have to go," she said. “We can’t do this again.”
Then she spun around, crouched in the snow, and shifted into her fox. She ran back to her cabin, not even stopping to collect her clothes.