“My place it is, then.” He offered her his arm and she took it without hesitation.
“You’re not worried about being alone with me?”
She let out a very unladylike snort that Ramon couldn’t help but find endearing.
“Please,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I eat little bitty birdies like you for breakfast.”
Ramon threw his head back and laughed. “Really? We’re doing the cat and bird jokes already?”
She giggled. “I thought I’d sneak one in there, beat you to it.”
“Smart move.”
Their easy banter continued during the drive to Ramon’s house and there were no gaps in the conversation. It was as if they’d known each other their entire lives, instead of only meeting for the first time the night before. That was the mate bond at work. It had to be. Ramon had known lots of newly mated couples of course, so he’d known what to expect, but knowing it and experiencing it firsthand were two different things entirely. Words would never have been able to explain how intense the feeling of being complete was, just from being in her presence.
After Ramon had let them into his house, he gave Saffy a quick tour of the place.
“It’s a beautiful house,” she said.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
She raised her brow and flashed her teeth in a grin. “You were there last night. I’m a cat shifter, remember?”
“Right, how could I forget?”
Most of the big cat species were solitary creatures, so shifters, much like their animal counterparts, moved out of the family home as soon as humanly possible. Hawks were pretty much the same way. Ramon hadn’t been able to wait to get a place of his own. But lions were different. In the wild, lion prides lived together in big familial groups and lion shifters were the same. It was extremely rare to find an unmated lion shifter living alone unless they’d been expelled from the pride and were forced to leave their parent’s house.
“Must be hell on the dating life,” Ramon remarked, then regretted it almost immediately. “Uh, never mind, don’t answer that.”
He didn’t want to think about his mate’s dating life before she met him. All shifter species, even hawks, were incredibly territorial and could be overly possessive. His bird was already ruffling its feathers at the thought of their mate with another man, and he wasn’t doing much better. Of course she’d had relationships before she met him. That was normal. He just preferred not to think about it.
Saffy smiled. “Aww, look at you all jealous. It’s cute.”
“Cute?” he spluttered.
At six foot four, cute was not an adjective that was normally applied to him. The muscle and the SWAT weaponry helped with that.
Saffy grinned. “Would you have preferred strong, sexy, and manly?”
“Most definitely.”
He flexed a bicep and cut her a wink, and was rewarded with a giggle.
“You’re those things too,” she said, giving him a full body scan.
“Are you checking me out?”
“Yes.”
“And?” he prompted shamelessly. “Do you like what you see?”
“What do you think?”
“I think,” he said, his voice dropping an octave. “I’d like to hear you say it.”
“There’s nothing about you I don’t like,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
Her gaze met his and Ramon caught the heat in her eyes. The smile left his lips, and his pants felt a little bit tighter around the groin area. He thought he should ask if she was ready to order pizza because he wanted to make sure that he looked after his mate properly and that included making sure she ate well, but the look in her eyes told him she was hungry for something other than food.
