Page 10 of Wedding the Werepanther

“Goodnight, Kayla.” He turns off the light.

I remain quiet and still, too mortified to move, my body hyperaware of how close he is, of how quickly he can cover the fifteen feet between us. Every tiny rustle of his sheets sets my pulse racing. He better get that door up and fast. I have no idea how to survive one night like this, let alone a whole flipping month!

The longer I lie awake, the more one thing becomes painfully clear.

I so verydon’tgot this.

CHAPTER FOUR

Shadow

I thought my months of watching Kayla from afar, stalking her movements around town, and bumping into her as much as possible had been torture.

I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

Attempting to sleep while she’s only fifteen feet away is the very definition of torture.

I lie awake for hours at first, watching Kayla through the open doorway, the faint amount of moonlight slipping around the edges of her curtains easily bright enough for my keen fae vision.

She’s awake at first, but eventually drops off to sleep, becoming even more alluring. The guarded expression eases from her face, leaving it soft and lovely. Her breaths grow deep, punctuated by tiny gasps as a dream takes her.

The soft noises tease me until my cock aches. Goddess, I want to know what she dreams about that makes her sound like that! Is it me?

It better be me.

A huff of laughter escapes me. Who’d have thought? The great warrior who could have any cat sith female he wants reduced to trembling on the edge due to the faintest of sounds from a human witch.

Yet that’s one of the reasons I’m on Earth—I never found a mate among my people. Regaining the ability to shift opened up so many new possibilities. I could mate a shadow fae or one of the other types of shifters. Or any human on Earth, for that matter.

But from the moment I first scented her, I’ve wanted only one. Kayla, my witchy beauty.

She lets out another of those soft moans, and before I realize it, I have a hand wrapped around my straining cock. Interesting things, hands. The opposable thumbs alone make them worth shapeshifting for, let alone all the other things they can do. Having spent my life in my panther form, I still have a lot to learn, but touching myself comes instinctively.

I give one good squeeze, fighting back a grunt of pleasure, and let go. My slow stalk of Kayla made leaps forward today, but I’m hunter enough to know not to press it any further. To win the courtship game, I need to lure my prey, not spook her.

Besides, the hands I want on me are not mine. Goddess, Kayla’s touch on my forearm almost undid me. I never realized my skin could be so sensitive. What will it be like to have her touch me everywhere?

Trying to get comfortable, I roll onto my stomach and bury my face in my pillow. I’m tempted to shift into my panther form and curl into a ball, purring myself to sleep. Yet it’s oddly lonely to do so on Earth without the harmonizing purrs of my packmates surrounding me. And constantly reverting to a panther won’t help with my new task.

I will be famous. I will be the cat sith who braved going to the human realm to learn all the ways of living as a man. The Moon Goddess hid my people in Alarria for three hundred years to protect them from the Dark God, but we were never meant to be closed off from walking the realms, never meant to live without the ability to shift. Cats are magnificent creatures, as anyone can see. Yet cat sith are fae, never meant to be limited to only our panther form.

I will bring back everything my people have lost.

If doing so also allows me to find my mate? As the humans say, it’s a win-win.

And I always play to win.

A couple of hours past dawn, the sun finally shifts enough that brilliant morning sunlight slices across my eyelids, and birdsong fills the air with piercing notes of brightness.

Human houses are nice, and I especially like hot showers and soft beds, but they lack the quiet of a morning tucked into the deep cave of my home den. Cat sith aren’t exactly morning people.

And neither, it seems, is my wife.

An alarm blares from Kayla’s room, and one long arm gropes blindly across the top of the nightstand before slapping her phone screen and turning it off. Kayla mutters, accompanied by the rustle of sheets.

I crack open my eyes and sit up to find she’s pulled the pillow over her head. Curious about what she’ll do next, I wait and watch, a patient hunter, learning my prey.

After several minutes, the alarm chimes, and she once again wakes only enough to turn it off before going back to sleep.