Page 38 of Match Made In Growl

Maeve was behind the bar, polishing glasses. She looked up when he came in, water streaming off his jacket onto her pine-tarred floor, and her dark eyes narrowed.

"You walked past the café."

"I wanted a drink."

"It's nine in the morning."

"I wanted coffee. With whiskey. In a place that doesn't have Twyla Honeytree asking questions."

Maeve's mouth curved into a smirk as her eyebrow raised. "She's in there, isn't she."

"Who?"

"The archaeologist. The one you left my bar with." Maeve set a mug in front of him and poured coffee, no whiskey. "I have eyes, Criss. And a functioning nose. You two left together smelling like each other's bad decisions."

"We left at the same time. It's not the same thing."

"Keep telling yourself that." She braced her hands on the bar. "Your just another boy who's scared of something he wants. It's a new look for you. I don't hate it."

He wrapped his hands around the mug and said nothing, which Maeve correctly interpreted as confirmation. She had the grace to drop it and move to the other end of the bar.

He sat by the window. From this angle, through the rain-streaked glass, he could see the Griddle & Grind's entrance across the square. He wasn't watching. He was just sitting near a window that happened to face a specific direction.

Twenty minutes later, the café door opened. Steph stepped out into the storm, jacket pulled tight, head ducked against the wind. She turned left toward the inn. Good. She was going back, getting out of this weather, staying safe.

Then Criss caught the shadow of movement beyond her.

Barely visible through the battering rain. A tall shape moving along the opposite side of the square, matching her pace. Dark coat, straight back, the measured stride of someone who didn't hurry regardless of conditions. The rain obscured details but Criss's tiger didn't need details. It knew the scent. Even through wind and water, even at this distance, the animal knew who it was and the absolute gut wrenching feeling something was going to happen.The reaction was pure instinct.

Criss was off the barstool before the thought completed. He hit the tavern door at a run, Maeve's voice sharp behind him, and burst into the storm.

The square was chaos. Wind drove rain in curtains that turned the cobblestones into a shallow river. Steph was halfway to the inn, walking fast, one arm shielding her face. Rydan had stopped on the outside of the square near the old stone fountain, standing motionless in the downpour. His hands were at his sides but his posture had changed. Not the casual authority of a man on a walk. Something rigid.

Criss suddenly stumbled as the ground pitched beneath him. The cobblestones beneath the square buckled upward in a line that ran directly toward Steph, as if something underground was racing beneath the surface. The old fountain cracked down its center with a sound like a gunshot. Water from its basin flooded the already saturated square, and the ward stones embedded in the cobblestones, the ones that had been there since Hollow Oak's founding, flared with a sickly amber light that pulsed in rhythm with the storm.

Steph staggered as the ground shifted under her feet. She caught herself, looked down at the glowing ward stones, and Criss could see the moment her sensitivity registered what was happening. Her face went white.

"Steph! Move!"

She heard him and turned, but not before the ground opened.

Steph's foot caught the edge as the ground tilted and she went down hard, her body sliding toward the gap. She grabbed for the base of a lamppost but the metal was wet, her fingers slipped, and the fissure widened beneath her.

Criss shifted.

Not in the woods. Not in the privacy of the trail between town and the cabin. In the middle of the Hollow Oak town square, in broad daylight during a storm, with shop windows on every side and the café door still open. The shift tore through him with the violent urgency of a body that didn't care about rules, ripped through his clothes, his boots, his jacket, and replaced a six-foot-three man with four hundred pounds of Bengal tiger on rain-slicked cobblestones.

Tiger pride law was unambiguous on this point. Shifting in public view, in the heart of a mixed-species community was a violation of pride decorum. Not Hollow Oak's general guidelines, which were more lenient about shifting in emergency situations and mainly had it in place due to sometimes non-Hollow Oak residents are among them. His were the older, stricter code that governed tiger pride conduct. The code Rydan Ashkar's generation had written. The code that said tiger shifters maintained control in all circumstances, that their animal form was private, that displaying it publicly demonstrated a failure of discipline that reflected on the entire bloodline.

And even if Criss could have had a thought, he knew his tiger didn't give a damn about the code.

He crossed the square in four bounds, claws throwing sparks on the wet stone, and reached Steph as the fissure cracked wider beneath her. His jaws closed on the back of her jacket, canines piercing leather, and he hauled her backward out of the gap with a single wrench of his neck. Her body came free of the collapsing stone and he dragged her across the square to solid ground near the café entrance, where the ward stones were dormant and the cobblestones held.

The fissure stopped spreading. The amber glow in the ward stones died. The fountain settled into its cracked base with a final groan, water still streaming from the split.

Criss shifted back, crouched naked over Steph on the wet cobblestones. Blood ran from a gash on her temple where she'd hit something during the fall. Her eyes were open but unfocused, pupils uneven, and when he said her name she blinked twice without tracking.

"Steph. Look at me."