Her Lycan Lover by Susan Arden Page B

incantations she could walk in between the realms of existence, gliding through a shimmering doorway that opened to her.
    Today, she reconfigured her physical being in the time it took Quinn to blink. A sweep of his lashes and she was gone. From being pressed up against him, she’d slipped into an offshoot of the ley highway, and moved what seemed like a few inches. Then back through a ley energy portal. A doorway of sorts. Puff. It was as though she’d morphed across the room, and stood in front of the wet bar.
    A look of shock spread across his face instead of hers. She’d slipped from his grip without so much as a twitch of her muscle. It was volition and she’d not conjured to relocate a body in space in years while a witness was around. Well, except for yesterday. Twice in less than twenty-four hours. Shit!
    Pressing her hands to her forehead, she wiped her fingers over her brows. Jeez, she had not needed to use her powers for her personal use until this moment when she thought she would succumb to Quinn’s advances. Her body radiated from the energetic reconfiguration. She chanced a speedy glance down her body to verify she’d gotten it right. Nothing backward, missing, or an additional appendages coming through a portal. Sherry wiggled her fingers just a slight assurance that things were working as she remembered.
    Then she heard. “What the fuck?”
    Oh yeah, it was about to rain down buckets of disbelief. “Please. Hear me out.”
    “What in the world are you capable of Sher?” Quinn took a step toward her with his palms facing up. “I’ve never had a woman want to escape from my embrace to the point of dissolving into thin air. What the hell just happened?”
    “It wasn’t dissolving. What I mean is I didn’t dissolve. Merely transferred my physical presence. From one reality into another, and then back. Time and space aren’t rigid. It’s physics… not fantasy.”
    “Physics, my arse,” he swore. “You and I need to talk. I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know you and I have more to discuss than financial reports and who’s on first base at some bachelor party. Is this what you do when you’re off from work?”
    “Don’t get excited. I haven’t done anything like that in years. If you discount yesterday.” She waved her hands at the confusion blanketing his face. “Look, it just happened. Please, Quinn, can we just forget it. I promise it won’t happen again. You’re overreacting and considering you’re a shifter, that’s rather provincial wouldn’t you say?”
    “Oh so, it’s okay for you to bend the rules. I should have known you weren’t as tight-laced as you pretend. I do respond to a simple ‘no’ from a lady.” Glowering, he picked up his mug of coffee and took a long slow sip, eyeing her over the rim. After shaking his head, he moved from his position at her desk. “Here, take your seat back. I don’t want to force you into another disappearing act.”
    The tension had ratcheted way up between them. She considered for a moment how unusual her little stunt was on a scale of one to ten. If he were a regular guy, one hundred and ten. But he was Lycan for Christ’s sake and off the charts on many issues. Still, what she did kinda rocked. Was it an eleven in his world? More likely a twelve. No wonder Quinn stared at her without blinking.
    She arched a brow. “Don’t you do something of the sort? I mean shifting is pretty much the same.”
    “Doll, vanishing into thin air is hardly the same. Now you see me, now you don’t. No. Sherry. Guess again.”
    It wasn’t exactly disappearing. Not that she couldn’t. But that was downright crass. Bodies changing from human to primal form was no different than a welt rising and falling in her mind. Shifters’ contorting forms were accepted on certain limited terms by humans. That was one reason why the Downtown Den existed, giving all sorts of shapeshifters a place to go when their urge to hunt and mate became