Tiger Magic
Page 29

Tiger touched Carly’s lips, liking the amazing softness of them. “In that room, that wasn’t kissing?”
“Well, it was.” Her face went pink, so pretty. “But not sweet kissing.”
“You have different kinds of kissing?”
Ellison made a noise up front. “I am so enjoying this conversation.”
“Like this.”
Carly pursed her lips and touched them to Tiger’s mouth. Tiger liked that, her lips soft and warm, the press light, yet it made his body heat with need.
Carly pulled away. “See, you’re supposed to kiss back. When you don’t move your lips, I think you’re not enjoying it.”
How the hell could she think that? Tiger wanted her, wanted to strip off the shorts and open his jeans and have her right here. Who cared about the cars around them, and Ellison in the driver’s seat? Tiger should be inside Carly, where he belonged.
He hadn’t understood why she hadn’t wanted to take what they were doing to its natural completeness back in the house. She’d said it would be about Ethan, even though Ellison had the man contained downstairs. Carly seemed to think the place they did it was important. Another thing Tiger didn’t understand.
Ethan was nothing. The man was a liar and a fraud, weak and ineffectual. If he’d been a Shifter in the wild, he’d have been dead a long time ago. His existence inside the house or out of it made no difference to Tiger being with Carly.
But it was important to Carly, and so he’d stopped.
Females could be fussy, both Liam and Connor had explained, and the male who wanted one had to learn how to please her. Women could afford to be choosy because males were prevalent in Shifter societies and females were scarce. Males competed with each other for the females, and females sat back and picked the best ones.
Of course, in the old days, before Collars and Shiftertowns, Liam had said, a Shifter male could choose his female by locking her away and having sex with her until she agreed she was his mate and filled his house with cubs.
Either way made no sense to Tiger. Mates were bonded to each other, no need for enticing each other or trapping each other. They were already one.
“I’ll show you.” Carly formed her lips into a pucker again, waiting for Tiger to imitate her.
He pulled his lips into the round shape Carly made, but instead of kissing him, she burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “But you look so funny.”
Tiger relaxed his mouth, liking her laughter so much that her words didn’t sting. He put his hand behind her neck and pulled her down to him.
“Kiss me,” he said.
Her laughter died, her eyes went soft, and Carly touched her lips to his mouth. This time, Tiger shaped his lips to match hers, meeting hers pressure for pressure.
“Oh,” she said, her breath brushing his skin. “That’s nice.”
Much more than nice. Tiger touched his lips to hers again, learning how to add and release the pressure as she did. It wasn’t the same as when he’d tasted the inside of her mouth, but good. Very good.
He slid his hands down Carly’s spine, finding a gap between the waistband of her shorts and her warm back. From there he could dip his fingers inside, brushing the waistband of the panties with the tiny polka dots. Tiger remembered her walking away from Ethan in nothing but her high heels and panties, her legs gorgeous, bare back straight.
He’d already been rock hard from watching her slide off the dress and throw off the bra, and the little wriggle in her hips when she’d walked off in fury had spiraled the mating frenzy through him. Tiger couldn’t help but follow her. He’d told himself he was protecting her, but Tiger knew his reason for going after her had been far more basic.
The skin of her bu**ocks was smooth, hot from the weather and from being enclosed in the shorts. Tiger wanted to push the shorts out of his way, but he couldn’t because it was so tight in this little car. When he got Carly back to Shiftertown, he’d peel the clothes from her and touch her all over.
Carly drew back from the kiss. “What are you doing?”
“Touching you.”
Tiger brought one hand up between them and cupped her breast, easily feeling it through the thin shirt. He lightly pinched her nipple, watching it firm to a point. Carly drew in a little breath, her eyes fixing on him.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she whispered.
“Why not?”
She leaned closer. “It makes me want to do bad things.”
Good. The things wouldn’t be bad though. Sex was never bad with a mate. “Do them with me,” Tiger said, fingers going lower on her bu**ocks.
In the front Ellison reached to the middle of the dashboard. “I’m turning on the radio. Right now.” He pushed buttons until a country song filled the car, a man and a woman singing about kissing each other. Ellison chuckled. “I guess that was just my luck.”
The song seemed to galvanize Carly. She wrapped her arms around him as the strains of the music went on, and kissed his lips again.
Tiger returned the kiss, learning how to match what she did. He tugged at her nipple while their lips met and parted, met again.
Ellison pulled up at a stoplight. A man in a truck next to them looked over, then he started to whoop and honk. Carly lifted her head, her face bright red.
Tiger didn’t care. Let them, as Ellison liked to say, eat their hearts out.
Ellison pulled away through the intersection, and the truck beside them turned off, the man giving a thumbs-up sign as he went.
Carly unwound herself from Tiger, pried his hands from her body, and sat down next to him. “How embarrassing. Sorry, Ellison.”
Ellison was grinning. “Hey, Shifters don’t care. I once came out of a bar to find my back-door neighbor and his human girlfriend going at it, full throttle, on the hood of my pickup. I had to wait ’til they were done. My neighbor said he was being discreet by using my truck instead of a total stranger’s.”
“Nice of him,” Carly said. “So Shifters really don’t care about romantic hotel rooms, rose petals, and champagne?”
“We can,” Ellison answered. “But when the mating frenzy hits, all we need is a surface that doesn’t give too much.”
“Mating frenzy,” Carly repeated. “Connor mentioned that.”
“Every Shifter has it. That crazed need to lock yourself in a room with your mate and go for it as much as and for as long as you can. We don’t come out for days, sometimes.”