Free Her Perfect Mate by Paige Tyler Page A

saw my eyes change? When?”
    “When you latched on to my arm with your nails on the confidence course. They changed for a second,
    but then went back to your natural color so quickly, I wasn’t sure I’d seen right.”
    “I usually only do that at night so I can see better. But they can change whenever I’m stressed. Or
    emotional.” She looked at him sheepishly. “I feel awful about clawing you. It was an instinctive reaction. I
    really am sorry.”
    “Don’t worry about it. They don’t even hurt now,” he said. “Any other feline superpowers I should
    know about?”
    “Well, I’m a lot stronger and faster than a woman should be,” she admitted.
    He grinned. “Yeah, I kind of figured that when we were sparring yesterday. Anything else?”
    “I can heal twice as fast as a normal human. So, while that fall from the rope bridge would have hurt, it
    wouldn’t have killed me.”
    “Damn.” That would be one hell of nice superpower to have in Special Forces. “What else?”
    “I’m more athletic and agile than a regular person.”
    “Right.” He chuckled. “Like that graceful demonstration on the rope bridge this morning.”
    “Not quite.” She blushed. “That was me showing off. When you didn’t freak out after seeing me climb a
    wall, I got a little carried away. I’m not normally that careless. Especially out in the field. So, no worries.”
    Was that her way of telling him she wasn’t going to let what happened to her previous partner happen to
    him? Whatever that was. He should have asked, but right now he was more interested in learning about her
    animal side.
    “Can you turn into a bobcat or lion, or whatever breed your DNA is from?”
    She laughed. “You really do watch too many movies. No, I can’t turn into a bobcat. Or a lion. Or a
    cheetah.”
    He’d been hoping she could. That would have been really cool.
    Ivy pushed her plate away so she could rest her forearms on the counter. “Okay. How come you’re not
    freaking out about all this? About me and what I am.”
    Good question. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Would you believe me if I said I’ve always been a cat
    person?”
    Ivy smiled, giving him a glimpse of perfect white teeth. “Maybe. If I didn’t know you were lying.”
    She was right. He was more of a dog person. But it was either lie or come clean and tell her he’d always
    had a thing for Catwoman. An image popped into his head of Ivy dressed in a shiny leather catsuit complete
    with ears and a long tail. Now he was hard again.
    “You can’t read minds, can you?”
    She laughed. “No.”
    “What about the other shifters at the DCO?” he asked, partly because he was curious and partly because
    he had to do something to get the sexy image of a leather-clad Ivy out of his head or he was going to really
    embarrass himself. “Do they have feline DNA, too?”
    “Some of them. But others have wolf, bear, whatever.”
    “How many of you are there?”
    “Working for the DCO? About a dozen or so.”
    “Have you ever been partners with any of them?”
    She shook her head. “The DCO doesn’t pair shifters with other shifters. They say it’s because their
    studies show pairing a human with a shifter creates the strongest teams, but I’m not sure I buy that. I think
    it’s because they don’t trust two shifters to work together without adult supervision.”
    Or the people in charge were worried one shifter wouldn’t carry out orders to kill the other if he or she
    became compromised. Landon wanted to ask Ivy how she could work for an organization that would rather
    see her dead than have someone know they had people like her on their payroll, but he changed his mind.
    He didn’t want her thinking he was focusing on it. That situation was never going to happen because he
    wasn’t going to let it happen. So there was no reason to talk about it.
    Landon glanced at his watch. As much as he hated to cut the conversation short, he needed to get
    moving if he wanted to