Of course he was good-looking. The Madsens turned out lookers, boys and girls, and he reminded her a bit of Cassidy Madsen, who’d come through last year with his wife Pearl and their adorable nephew. They were both tall men with a kind of easy grace to them, and both had light hair, though Turner had more of a honey-blond cast to his. Where Cassidy was sturdy from his work on the ranch, Turner was thinner, whipcordrather than bulk, and she appreciated the eye-candy in a distant way as they watched to see if the unicorn would charge again.
Then he turned, eyes like a sky about to storm, and something reached into her heart andsqueezed.
She had been in love before. She was thirty-four years old, of course she had been in love before. She’d gotten the butterflies, the lighter than air flutters, the almost panicked need to see someone, the broken feeling when it was over. This was something different. This was something physical, something that grounded her in the earth even as it sent her spiraling into the sky. She covered her mouth, and, under her bare fingers, she was startled to find a smile spreading across her face. Her eyes stung with tears, and the feeling that flooded through her, rising like a tide with the beat of her heart, was an intense feeling of relief and pleasure.
“Oh,hi,”she managed, and then, God above help her, he smiled.
Tuner Cole was already good-looking—when he smiled, it was just unfair. Without thinking, she reached for his face, because it occurred to her how wonderful it would be to touch his mouth, how his lips would feel under her fingertips. She pulled back at the last minute, because that wasinsane—but, whatever she had, he had it too, because he looked momentarily disappointed.
She started to say something, shook her head, tried again, and finally gave up. When she stumbled coming down the porch steps toward him, he was there in a heartbeat, catching her as easy as could be, and settling her on her feet.
“Hey, it’s okay. It’s okay. I’m here.”
It nearly made her break down into tears of relief, and that reaction startled her, shocked her so much that she pulled back out of his arms.
“You are! You are, and... and. Oh, God. I’m just. I can’t, that is—”
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said urgently, stepping back so he wasn’t on top of her. “Look, you know all about shifters, right? Macy was the one who sent you, and you know she’s married to Luca, right? And there’s this thing—”
“Fated mates!”
Ilona meant to say it at a normal volume like a normal person, but it came out as a desperate cry. Over Turner’s shoulder, the unicorn lifted her head up momentarily, and then went back to licking the paper that had contained the sausage.
“Fated mates,” she said more rationally as Turner stared at her. “I know. That’s Macy and Luca, it’s a shifter thing. Eyes meet, and, bam, it’s love.”
Turner chewed his lip, giving her a worried look. She stifled the urge to smooth the wrinkle between his eyes, his distress a needle dragging along her skin. Oh, it was already starting, and she fought down another surge of panic.
“It’s what we make of it,” he started, and, when she laughed a little incredulously, he continued, voice firmer. “It really is. Yeah, it means that if we’re lucky, we have some damn good odds of having one hell of a time together, but it’s not gonna make either of us do anything we don’t one hundred percent want to do, okay? I promise.”
“Really?” It came out smaller than she thought it would. What Macy had described as a deliriously happy fall, Ilona hadseen as something more than a little frightening. Ilona realized that that had probably been fueling at least a little of her panic.
“Yeah. I promise. You are not going to do one damn thing with me that you don’t want to do, okay?” He hesitated. “Do you believe me? Take a sec. Think about it.”
She did as he asked, and, somewhat to her surprise, she found that she believed him.
“I do. That helps. Um. So we don’t have to do anything right now?”
“Not unless you want to. But. Can I ask something?”
“Sure.”
“Are you married?”
It startled a laugh out of her, a real one.
“No!”
“Or engaged, boyfriend, girlfriend, anything like that?”
“No, not at all. How about you?”
“Nope. Well, that’s a relief. That look on your face, I was wondering if things were fixing to get real complicated.”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. I just don’t—” Ilona cut herself off because standing on a cold porch while watching a unicorn snort angrily at a piece of greasy paper was no way to start talking about exes and commitment issues. “Look, you said I could do what I liked, right?”
“Always,” he said. She would have suspected that he was making fun of her if he hadn’t looked so sincere.
“I just. I need to.”
