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That she didn’t want to made her better to him. The woman who sat across from him didn’t need sexy clothes to pump herself up because she was already beautiful.
By the way she spoke, Michael got the feeling that her beauty wasn’t only skin-deep. Inside and out, she was a stunning individual.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “I’m not really from around here. It’s kind of a coincidence I’m here tonight.”
“Really? Let me guess, your friend dragged you here?’
“That’s so true. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
There was silence for a short while. Michael watched as she fidgeted and tried not to be awkward, but he also saw that she kept sneaking looks in his direction, as if it were forbidden to look at him.
Her furtive glances lit him on fire. The tiger in him begged him to lay claims on her and make everyone in the bar know that she was his. Damn. He needed to shift, but he couldn’t do it right now. By the end of the night, he was going to have to go for a long prowl in the woods to shake the wilderness out of his soul. The tiger had never been so vocal before, and Michael found himself unprepared.
As far as he knew, the woman across from him was a human. Without her own tiger telling her that they were fated mates, how was he supposed to win her over?
Romance wasn’t exactly his forte.
“I’m glad for coincidence, then,” he said with a smile, trying to make a move. Her cheeks went red right away, and she looked at her lap to dodge his gaze.
Was that the wrong thing to say? Michael felt like an idiot.
Dating had never been on his radar. The tiger clan he’d left back in his hometown was too hostile for him to ever consider it a good idea. With the scarcity of albino tigers, mates were rare, and there was more than one instance where members of his clan had fought each other to the death over a woman.
Michael wasn’t interested in killing anyone. If that was the price of love, he wasn’t interested.
But now that he’d left, looking for opportunities outside of the small, insular community he’d grown up in, love was back on the table.
Better yet, love was sitting across from him.
“How long are you in town for?” Michael asked, desperate to know a little more about her. If she was leaving, he had no doubt that he would follow her. He’d left his home once to chase better things, and he’d do it again in a heartbeat. Jason was his roommate, but he was sure that it wouldn’t be long before he found someone to take his place. The two of them weren’t very social, but Jason had enough connections that it wouldn’t take him long to fill the void Michael had left.
It felt crazy, but Michael knew it was the right thing to do.
Now that he had felt the connection, he wouldn’t give it up for anything.
“Oh, um, well… That’s kind of up
in the air.” She shrugged. “I’m kind of here for work. Kind of.”
The way she said it made him think that work was a thinly veiled excuse for coming out to Cub’s Cove. There was a mystery behind her eyes, a kind of sadness that tore his heart right in two, and Michael wanted to get to the bottom of it.
He never wanted her to feel sad, not if he could help it. “What kind of work?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m a writer.” Her anxious laugh followed. “I write stuff. Books, you know? Books with words.”
He found her nervousness kind of cute. “I like to read books, too. Books with words.”
They traded laughs and the tension between them melted away.
In the booth behind them, Jason and the woman in the lace dress were talking, and by the sounds of their conversation, things were getting heated. It looked like now that Michael was off of her menu, she was settling for the next best thing. Jason wasn’t a bad looking guy—he just needed to learn how to dress himself better.
“I’m sorry you have to hear that.” There was no way that his date hadn’t heard his best friend’s very vulgar conversation, and it made Michael feel uncomfortable. “That’s Jason. I’m his friend, and I promise, he’s not usually like that. He’s housetrained, I swear.”
She laughed at his joke. Michael saw her eyes sparkled with mirth. She was sincere. Many times people laughed just to be polite but their eyes betrayed their emotion. His chest ached for her, and the urge to shift became unbearable. He was sure if he wasn’t careful, his tiger would come out right there.
What a sight that’d be.
