Free His Purrfect Mate by Georgette St. Clair Page A

quarter mile.
    Outside the house, her heart skipped a beat when she saw a massive panther flanked by a Kodiak bear running straight towards her - and then she scented that the panther was Kenneth, and the bear seemed to be with him.   Kenneth’s limo was parked next to her car. 
    She skidded to a stop, and quickly shifted to panther form.
    She turned back to the house, and saw three massive gray wolves in the foyer, staring at her and Kenneth and the bear.  Apparently they decided that taking on the three of them would be more trouble than it was worth, because they turned and raced back into the house.  A minute later, she saw them running out the back door, and into the woods.
    Chloe glanced over at Kenneth to see what he’d do next. He crouched low, with an angry growl rumbling from his chest, his tail lashing the air furiously, but he didn’t pursue.  The bear, tall as a tree, let out a threatening bellow that split the air, and the lions ran faster, vanishing over the horizon.
    She couldn’t help but notice how beautiful Kenneth was in panther form, eyes glowing a luminous blue, his massive muscles rippling beneath his glossy black fur. When his lips curled back they revealed fangs as white as ivory, and she suppressed a small shudder; she wouldn’t want to be on Kenneth’s bad side.
    Focus, she scolded herself.  Chloe shifted back, grabbing her sweater from the ground and pulling it over her now-naked body. Fortunately, it was a big, thick sweater that hung down to her mid-thigh; she hugged it around herself, shivering.
    Kenneth and the bear also shifted back; Kenneth picked up his shirt from the grou nd and tied it around his waist like a loincloth, and the bear followed suit. Neither of them seemed to feel the cold, or maybe they thought it wasn’t manly to shiver.
    “What the hell?” Chloe demanded. “What are you doing here? I mean, thank you for rescuing me, but why are you here?”
    “I followed you from your house.”
    “Why?”
    “I had a feeling that I should.”
    Well, his feeling had obviously been accurate – unless he was somehow behind all this.  She didn’t want to believe that of him.
    She glanced at the house. “I need to see if my grandmother is in there,” she said.  “She didn’t answer me when I called to her, and I smelled blood.”
    Kenneth nodded. “ I could smell it too, from outside.  We’ll search the house.  Stay behind me.”
    She followed him and the bear shifter inside, catching glimpses of Kenneth’s bare butt as they walked down the halls. It was a magnificent gluteus maximus, round, firm, perfectly sculpted. His legs were thick as tree trunks and well muscled, the legs of a man who spent many hours at the gym every week.
    She tore her mind away from his perfect body. Her grandmother’s house had just been broken into and her grandmother was apparently missing; what was wrong with her, checking out Kenneth’s butt at a time like this?  Kenneth somehow brought out her inner pervert; she couldn’t stop thinking about sex when she was around him, no matter how inappropriate the timing.
    “Grandmother?” she called out.  There was no answer; she’d had a feeling there wouldn’t be.
    She saw Kenneth looking around and knew that he was thinking the same thing that she was thinking: this is the house of a crazy person.
    Thick dust coated most of the surfaces .   Paintings were piled up haphazardly on tabletops, sheets were draped over furniture.  All the mirrors in the house, bizarrely, had sheets taped over them with blue duct tape.
    There were foot prints in the dust, some of them small, most likely her grandmother’s, and then larger ones, possibly from the wolf shifters.
    They raced through the house, through dozens of rooms, calling Sophronia’s name, but she was nowhere to be found. Chloe struggled to keep up with Kenneth, stumbling over rugs and bumping into furniture.  Kenneth kept glancing back to make sure she was still with him.
    The