Page 16 of Her Purr-fect Christmas Mate

Mordecai’s face settled into its usual arrogant lines as he nodded a greeting to the other man. It was as familiar as pulling on his jacket.Withouta cat in the pocket.

Uneasiness nipped at his heels as he headed for the stairs. If he’d only then pulled on his usual expression…What expression was I making before now?

Hope.

It felt dangerous.

5

Peony

Peony’snosewastwitching.

Thesmells.

Food and alcohol and floor polish and pine needles andpeople. So many people. So manysmellypeople. People who smelled of body wash and cologne and perfume and things they’d eaten earlier that day. And things they’d stepped in. Things they’d brushed past.

It was too much. Her eyes were watering. This had to be normal, right? For her animal. Not for her. She didn’t know how she was meant to deal with the overload of sensory information.

Fight them!

And now her inner cat wanted her to fight the smells. Inner cat? Outer cat? It was too confusing. Why had she wanted to be here so much?

The Hypatia. Remember?

The Hypatia. Her prologue-job. Her prologue-apartment.

Except her prologue had just finished, hadn’t it?

So why was she here, really?

Because her other option was seeing Mordecai leave.

Or not leave.

If he’d stayed, and she’d managed to shift back…

Her heart thudded. It was all too much, and coming here was seeming like more and more of a mistake.Anothermistake.

She concentrated, trying to narrow down her senses. The smell of peppermint and nutmeg and alcohol. The auditory torture of whatever Christmas carol had been sacrificed to create the noise blasting around them. The warmth of Mordecai’s body through his jacket lining and, beneath the other smells and sounds but no less powerful, his masculine scent and the steady thrum of his heartbeat. The rumble in his chest when he spoke out loud or, more frequently, grumbled under his breath. The—

No. No no no. My super shifter senses are meant todistractme from thinking about him. Not make him the only thing I can think about.

Because thinking about him had almost made her shift, back at the apartment. There had been a moment, as she clung with her new needle-sharp claws to the front of his jacket, when she’d thoughtWhat if I was grabbing him with my hands, instead,and things had gotten… fuzzy.

Why had she stopped?

Why did I kiss him in the first place?

It was too late, anyway. If she thought about him too hard now? Here? Out in public?

“We’re here. Are you sure about this? We can still leave.”

Of course he wanted to leave. She’d used the matebond to threaten him into coming here and handing control of the Hypatia back to the board.

She couldn’t let him leave before she’d gotten what she wanted.

Even if every second she spent accidentally noticing how good Mordecai smelled or how he was so warm that it wouldn’t even matter if she didn’t have any clothes on when she shifted back, because—

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