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Yes!
CHAPTER 13
Who’s on Top?
Yordan had never had a lover per se. He’d had hookups, of course—with women as well as men—but he never stuck around long enough to move it into a real relationship. The closest he’d come was a friends-with-benefits arrangement a decade ago with a girl who was now married with three kids. And since he thought office romances were a terrible idea—and he was always working—that left him thinking he would be alone for the rest of his life.
Instead, he and his boss were now lovers. He ought to be appalled, but instead, he felt a bone-deep contentment that startled him. When he was with McNabb, he felt seen. As if Kit—his lover’s name was Kit—saw things in him he didn’t even know were there. And if Kit saw that, then he saw the messy stuff too, and that made everything okay.
Yordan wasn’t stupid. He still thought office romances were a terrible idea, but damn it, if he could feel this safe with another soul, he didn’t care who it was with. He was going to hang on and do whatever it took to keep them together.
He stroked a hand down Kit’s flank, loving the way he stretched into the gesture. Like a damned cat, he thought with a smile. Yordan leaned in.
“Purr for me, kitty cat,” he whispered.
“I think I already did,” Kit answered. Then he shot a look at Yordan. “So did you.”
Yes, he had. Yordan pressed a kiss to the Scotsman’s shoulder. “You’ve told me everything? About your bet with Coffee?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“So why haven’t you shifted? Go wolf.”
He watched Kit’s eyes widen with understanding. His expression flitted between hope and fear with a healthy side of worry.
“Don’t think about it, just shift. You’ll never know until—” His voice cut off. Kit was already glowing as he initiated the change. The air turned cold, and Yordan rolled out of bed. Last thing he needed was a full-grown wolf landing on top of him while he was a naked human. Scratches in the wrong place hurt! By the time he was on his feet beside the bed, Kit had fully manifested as…
“Meow.”
…a disappointed kitten who dropped his head on his paws and looked as depressed as his floppy ears.
Okay, so that didn’t work.
“Did we miss anything? This had to be Coffee, right? There’s no other reason you suddenly went kitten…right?”
Kit looked up and nodded. Then he dropped his head back on his paws.
Fuck.
“When I was in school, I learned Spanish. Did pretty well at it.” Yordan was thinking out loud, trying to twist his mind around something that wasn’t filled with massive disappointment. “Then I tried to learn Chinese. Don’t ask me why. It had something to do with those martial arts films.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it was a hell of a lot harder than I thought it’d be. Not just because it’s a totally different kind of language with all those tonal things, but because my brain was English and Other. Whenever I went to a language that wasn’t English, I ended up in Spanish. Then I had to consciously shift to Chinese.”
The kitten huffed out a breath. Kit didn’t even lift his head.
“Don’t you get it? When you change to a wolf, are you really thinking wolf? Or are you just thinking ‘change’?”
Kit lifted his head slowly, cocking it to the side. It was freaking adorable, and Yordan really wanted to scratch the puss under the chin. But he refrained.
“Remember when I said, ‘Don’t think’? What if you thought about going wolf? Like, actually becoming a wolf. All the little bits about being canine…”
He stopped talking because the temperature was dropping again, and the Scottish Fold kitten was surrounded in a golden glow.
Yordan held his breath. Kit probably did too.
And then, right in the center of the bed, stood a full-grown gray wolf. The creature was huge, his jaw was large, and he was abruptly dancing around and yipping like a puppy. Or a very happy Scotsman turned wolf.
Yordan threw himself enthusiastically into the joy. Nothing compared to moments like this where man and wolf could play together in absolute delight. If he were an insta-shift wolf, he would have joined Kit in canine play, but this was equally great. They played for a time until both of them dropped onto the floor in happy exhaustion.
And then Yordan sobered.
