Page 18 of Match Made In Growl

CRISS

Criss woke to cold sheets and the distinct absence of a woman who'd been wrapped around him six hours ago.

He lay still for a moment, one arm stretched across the empty side of the bed, staring at the cabin ceiling where early light cut pale lines through the curtain gaps. The pillow next to his still held the faint impression of her head. The sheets smelled like her, that green botanical scent layered under something warmer that he could taste making his tiger a problem.

Not angry. Not exactly restless. More like a wire pulled so tight it hummed, every sense oriented toward the door she'd walked out of. The animal wanted to follow. Not in the lazy, half-interested way it reacted to other women, the mild stirring that said nice, move on. This was different. This was the tiger pressing against the inside of his ribs with a singular focus that Criss had never felt before and did not appreciate.

He sat up, scrubbed both hands over his face, and told his tiger to shut up.

It didn't.

The cabin was small, one bedroom, a bathroom barely wide enough to turn around in, and a front room with a woodstove and a chair and not much else. Kieran had built it years ago as a guest quarters beside the main house he shared with Freya, tucked under a stand of pines about thirty feet from their back porch. Functional, clean, and utterly devoid of personality, which had suited Criss fine for two months because he'd never planned to stay long enough to hang a picture.

He pulled on jeans and a t-shirt and stood in the middle of the bedroom, looking at the sheets. There was no note. No number scrawled on the nightstand. No indication that Stephanie Ward considered last night anything other than exactly what she'd framed it as: a transaction completed, move on.

And that should have been fine. Criss was the king of one-night stands. He'd perfected the art of waking up alone and feeling nothing but mild satisfaction and the pleasant ache of a good time. This was his wheelhouse. This was what he did.

So why was he standing here like an idiot staring at a dent in a pillow?

He stripped the bed. That was step one. Remove the evidence, eliminate the scent, reset the space. He bundled the sheets into the corner and opened the windows to let the morning air flush the cabin clean. Pine and damp earth poured in, cutting through the traces of her that clung to every surface, and his tiger practically snarled at the dilution.

"She left," Criss said out loud to the empty room.

He felt his tiger want to remedy that with every fiber of its being, but Criss had been overriding animal instinct with sheer stubbornness for twenty-eight years and he wasn't about to stop now.

He crossed the yard to the main house at seven-thirty, following the smell of coffee and cinnamon, which meant Freya had been baking. The main house was everything the guest cabin wasn't: warm, lived-in, full of copper pots and hanging herb bundles and the evidence of two people who'd built a life together with intention. Freya's apothecary work bled into every room, jars of dried lavender on the windowsill, a mortar and pestle on the kitchen counter next to the coffee maker, seedlings lined up along the south-facing windows in neat rows.

Kieran was at the kitchen table with the Hollow Oak Gazette spread in front of him and a mug the size of a small bucket cradled in both hands. He looked up when Criss came through the back door, and his nostrils flared once, subtle, the involuntary scenting of a mated shifter whose senses ran sharper than most.

"Morning," Criss said, heading straight for the coffee.

"Morning."

The coffee was strong enough to dissolve a spoon, which meant Kieran had made it and Freya hadn't intervened yet. Criss poured a mug and leaned against the counter, taking a long sip and letting the caffeine hit his bloodstream before he had to deal with whatever was coming.

"Freya at the shop already?"

"Since six. She's prepping for the weekend workshop." Kieran turned a page of the Gazette with deliberate calm. "You look tired."

"Late night."

"At Maeve's?"

"Started there."

Kieran set the paper down. Not dramatically. Just a quiet fold and a placement beside his mug that cleared the space between them of distraction. It was a Kieran move, understated and impossible to ignore.

"You smell like someone," Kieran said.

"I smell like coffee and regret, same as every morning."

"Under that."

"We're not doing this again."

"We're doing it because you walked into my kitchen wearing last night on your skin and expecting me not to notice." Kieran's voice was even, patient, knowing that pushing Criss directly was useless but flanking him worked if you were persistent enough. "Who is she?"

Criss took another sip of coffee. The smart play was deflection. A joke, a redirect, the conversational equivalent of a smoke bomb. He had a dozen ready, loaded and aimed, and any one of them would buy him enough space to change the subject.