Baiting The Trap For Love

Dorri tensed her haunches at the faint squeak of the cat door being forced open. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out that was how the delectable little balls of blue fluff were getting in. Lexor had had the cat door installed right after he’d bought the coffee shop and outfitted it with a little hydraulic motor that was radio controlled. He wore a collar outfitted with an embedded radio tag while in cat form that would trigger the door to open. This kept the premises relatively secure while eliminating the need to stash a spare key somewhere. Life as a shifter invariably meant returning home in the fur from time to time. Dorri very much liked this system Lexor had set up. Marissa had given her a collar with radio tag embedded in it, too.

While the state-of-the-art cat door meant never being locked out while locking out most life forms, it had one flaw. It could be force just wide enough for the smurfs to get into the coffee shop. Dorri had learned to listen for the tell-tail squeak of the door being forced. It might have been more effective to simply tell Marissa the door needed to be adjusted but she like hunting the silly things for her new human friend. It was something she could do well and it kept her occupied while she spied on the Yakooza.

The coffee shop and the human girl who ran it had been a god-send, literally. Marissa’s wolfen mate was… unusual, but he wasn’t so bad, either. Dorri came from a patriarchal society, so seeing a male wolf bow down eagerly to his human mate took a lot of getting used to. Life in the coffee shop, on the other hand, had been very easy to get used to. She stayed in cat form most of the time, skulking around, keeping away pests and playing pet for the customers. As a divine guardian, she didn’t smell like a shifter so the shifters who patronized Java Joe’s didn’t think anything of talking normally around her. To her delight, a good many of Kahn’s organization came here regularly for Marissa’s Indian coffee, chia tea and wide assortment of home-made biscuits.

The cat door squeaked again, letting her know that it had returned to its fully closed position. Everyone who was coming in was in. Time to spring her trap.

Slowly she worked her way forward, slinking on her belly across the slate tile floor of the back kitchen. Her long, snow white fur made it difficult to blend in with the shadows, but she relished the added difficulty. It had been so very long since the last time her hunting skills had been needed to this extent that any excuse to hone them was good. The fact that she’d have a nice snack of blueberry fluff as her reward was a good excuse, too!

She sensed movement just around the corner and sprang, the muscles of her huntress’s body releasing stored tension with the precision of a well-aimed weapon. One bound, two, three—then she was on her prey.

A muffled curse rang through the darkened kitchen as she bounced off her target. Dorri skid to a halt, sliding along the slate floor more than she had intended to. She too spun around and prepared for another pounce. There before her was a good-sized sphinx cat. He was twice the size of a normal cat with dark gray points fading into the paler gray of his body. Around his neck was a black, silver studded pet collar. Alas, no smurfs, she realized; only a pissed-off Egyptian. As she watched, he began shifting into his human form.

“Goddamit female,” Lexor spat out angrily as soon as he’d shifted enough to speak. “What in the name of Osiris do you think you are doing?”

Dorri allowed a very appreciative smile cross her feline face. Despite his claim of being fully adjusted to the modern Western culture, she knew he would never show his naked human form to just anyone, especially not to a female. And what a lovely form it was, too. Despite Marissa’s words to the contrary, Lexor was anything but hairless, scrawny or a runt. Smooth golden skin covered his toned, athletic body, unmarred by age. Beautifully wrought cicatrization, or ornamental sacrificial scarring, marked the cheeks of his butt, making the already attractive asset even more erotically pleasing to look at.

“I was hunting,” Dorri purred, her voice sounding rough, both from her speaking in her animal form and from her deep purring. Lexor shot her a disgusted look then bent down, picking her up by the scruff of her neck—no doubt to make her feel small.

“I thought I had told you to stop hunting things that were off-limits!” he rebuked sharply. Dorri flashed to her own human form. She let her naked body slide down his, still purring her pleasure.

“I didn’t realize you were off-limits, eshgham,” she murmured against his lips.