Page 39 of Shifter's Homecoming

26 - A First Kiss

Trent followed his mate inside. Once they got there, his stomach grumbled loudly. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate, and he hadn’t seen his mate eat anything since he’d arrived. There was no kitchen in the “clinic”.

She heard it and shot him a look. “I don’t have anything you’ll eat,” she said. “No meat at all.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he told her, but his body disagreed. “Ah, Troy can bring me something,” he said, testing her response. She seemed agreeable enough, and so he called his brother.

Troy showed up in twenty minutes, tossed a bag at him from the door, and left just as quickly. He scented of forest and female, and Trent didn’t want him to stay anyway, so he did not say a word.

Trent sat in a chair and watched his mate work, moving with grace between her desk and a counter, a pen always in her hand, with another either behind her ear, or in one of the pockets of her lab coat.

Trent opened the package. It was some sort of cold sandwich, filled with a meat that Trent at first did not recognize, but then he placed it as smoked bison. Trent bit into the sandwich, smiling when the extra mayo hit his tongue.

His food must have made her hungry. She went to a small refrigerator in the corner and took out an apple and a bowl of something that looked like oatmeal. She ate it quickly at her desk and went right back to work.

She moved from one counter to another, and Rhen-help-him, she looked sexy in her lab coat and flat shoes. He could imagine her in less, or in something tight or flowing, or in nothing at all. Wouldn’t that be a sight? He yearned to know her body. It physically hurt him that he did not, and he had to put his sandwich aside.

She sat at her desk again, then slipped off her shoes, revealing smooth, sexy feet. Trent involuntarily growled, then tried to cover it with a cough.

Rowan frowned. She had not been fooled. She shook her head slightly and her body tensed. She got up too quickly, and her elbow caught a row of beakers and dashed them to the ground. They broke with a loud crash.

Trent was up and moving immediately. Shards of broken glass littered her bare feet and the floor around her.

“Don’t move,” he said. He crunched right over the broken glass in his boots and picked his mate up, moving her down the row and setting her back down, pulling in her sweet scent for a moment before he scrounged up a broom and went back to clean up.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said weakly.

Trent continued to clean up but took advantage of the moment. “Why did the deer want in that fence?” he asked, mostly wanting to get her talking to him. “There was water all around he could have drank from.”

She didn’t respond for a bit and he had time to wonder if this was something he already should know, but then she answered him.

“The chemicals I use smell sweet to animals.”

“You use chemicals in that pool of water?” he said, looking at her.

She stalled answering, turning away from him slightly. He didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so he changed the subject.

“Have you tried sprinklers? That will keep them away,” he said. He finished cleaning up the glass, then he snatched up her vial from where he’d seen it fall. He pocketed it and turned to her.

She was watching him, eyes narrowed, expression puzzled. “Sprinklers?”

Trent tried not to give himself away. Would there really be no such thing as sprinklers here in this world that did have electricity and cars? He thought back quickly to the drive in and realized he had seen no lawns at all in town, only rocks and dirt or overgrown fields in front of houses. But he had seen something on the fields and fields of corn. “Irrigation,” he said, hoping the word could stand.

She thought about it for a second, then nodded slowly. “Right, I could mount an emitter horizontally…” She grabbed a notebook and started writing, then stopped and gave him an appraising look. “Since when do you care about deer?”

Trent looked down. “I’ve changed, Rowan,” he finally said. It was true.

He ran a hand over his face. The stubble was itchy. “Can I shave?” he asked her.

“Check the bathroom,” she said. “Your old razors might be in the closet.”

Trent found them. He painstakingly shaved, strangely jealous of the other Trent that these razors really belonged to, the other Trent whodidknow Rowan’s body. Trent could not think about that for long. He focused on the task at hand, only nicking himself once this time.

Trent left the tiny bathroom. Her eyes met his immediately, and he could see wistfulness in her expression.

“Why?” she said.

“Why what?”

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