She settled on her haunches as he approached her, wondering what he’d do. He sat down in front of her and lifted a paw. Gravely, he touched it to her shoulder.
Tag, Stella thought.
And then suddenly he was gone.
Stella gave chase immediately. Her lynx growled in her chest, and she could feel the blood rushing in her veins, her breath coming fast, her paws thumping on the forest floor. Where was he?
She couldn't see him—he vanished into the shadows of the underbrush like he didn't exist at all—but she'd caught his scent. It was an earthy, seductive smell, something that suggested faraway forests and masculine energy. She inhaled and followed it.
Finally, she caught a flash of blackness against a patch of sunlight, and ran flat-out to catch it. He was gone by the time she got to the clearing where she'd seen him, but the scent lingered, and she raced along the path it marked.
There—scaling a ledge, straight up a rock face like it was a set of stairs. Stella dashed forward and leapt with all of her strength, catching the ledge with her claws and leaping again to land right beside him.
Gotcha, she thought with satisfaction. She didn't want to spare a paw from holding onto the rock face, so she leaned in and touched her nose to his shoulder. Tag, she thought, inhaling some more of that overwhelming scent.
He turned to face her, his eyes flickering over her body—checking see if she was all right? After a second, though, he kept going up, then paused and looked at her.
Clearly, she was meant to follow.
She scaled the rock after him. Not quite as fast, with her smaller limbs, but steady. Every few seconds he’d look back, and he slowed down after a bit to let her catch up.
When they both hauled themselves over the cliff edge, he flopped down in a patch of sunlight. It looked like tag was over, which was fine with Stella, because she was starting to get a little tired. She didn’t run like this every day.
Stella curled up next to him, enjoying the endless flexibility of her lynx’s body. Her eyes drifted closed. She was completely safe here—from Todd, from predators, from curious hikers, from anyone. Nate was right next to her, and she had no doubt that he’d see any threat miles before it actually arrived.
She could feel the body heat rising from his fur. That gorgeous scent curled around her, and she breathed in deep and closed her eyes.
***
Nate
Nate stayed absolutely still as Stella’s breathing evened out. He didn’t want to move and risk waking her. Not when he was fairly certain she’d had a sleepless night last night—and it probably wasn’t the only one in the last month.
When he was sure she was truly asleep, he stretched and turned to look at her, curled into a little ball next to him. He wanted to nose at her fur, wash her tufted ears, soothe her sleep, but he refrained.
Why not? his panther wanted to know. She smells so good.
And she did, but that was no excuse. He was on guard, and he was sure she’d been so quick to fall asleep because she knew he was there.
And that wasn’t even considering the fact that they had a professional relationship, and people in professional relationships didn’t wash each other’s ears. Even shifters.
Could this—this animalistic draw that he felt for Stella just be because they were both shifters? He hardly ever dated shifter women.
But it wasn’t like he never saw them. And he usually steered clear of them, in fact. He never wanted the woman—or Nate’s panther—to get the wrong idea and think that he was looking for a pack. Or a mate. Every so often, one of them would have an intriguing scent, but it was never something he had trouble ignoring.
But Stella...
This was a whole new side of her that he was seeing, out here. Not the honest vulnerability of their conversations, and not the carefully airy mask she projected around other people.
No, this was the person Nate suspected was underneath all of that. The person Stella meant when she talked about how she loved her freedom and scorned regrets. The person who could run wild through the mountains without a thought to anything but which tree she’d leap to next.
Her shifter form wasn’t anything he’d expected, either. He remembered first meeting her, and thinking that she was like a bird, all delicate and graceful, alighting on a seat as though it was a perch.
But the lynx fit her, too. Small and wild, able to get up to the tallest tree branch, scale the sheerest wall. Vulnerable, but not helpless. And beautiful—that tawny fur, those topaz eyes, the way she’d slipped through the tree branches like she was walking on solid ground.
He smiled inwardly, thinking of their game of tag. It had been a long, long time since he’d played like that. If he ever had. The rough-and-tumble games with his buddies back when he was a young Marine had been very different from this. He hadn’t been able to do more than softly touch his paw to her fur—and then he’d gotten that cool, delicate bump of her nose against his shoulder in return.
He’d have been able to catch her quick if he hadn’t been a bit concerned about bowing some of the smaller trees under his greater weight—he hadn’t wanted to accidentally knock her to the ground. But chasing her had been fun, and he’d almost regretting ending it.