A Werewolf's Valentine: BBW Wolf Shifter Paranormal Romance Read Free Page A

that Upson Downs’ pickings were actually getting kind of slim. Most of the guys her age had paired off, and she wasn’t attracted to the just-hitting-college set. Too many of them she’d babysat.
    “I get off at midnight,” she said suddenly.
    His head tipped slightly, and his eyes seemed to darken, or maybe it was a trick of the light. “Is that an invitation?” he asked. “Just making sure.” He spoke low, in that smoky voice that made her thighs squeeze together.
    Hey, if it turned out he was a perv or an axe-murderer, she could shift to her cat self and be out the window in a flash. Of course that would leave him in her room, but Sheriff Odom could take care of that.
    “I’ve got a deck of cards,” she whispered.

 
     
     
    Two
     
    West
     
    When he was especially cold and hungry, there were nights when West didn’t care if he lived or died.
    Once daylight arrived, and he’d managed to scavenge a meal and curl up somewhere in relative safety long enough for a sleep, he refused to give in to whoever had catapulted him from his vaguely remembered pack into a world of loneliness and hurt. There were days, especially when he’d gone too long without food, when the only thought that kept him going was this: if he punched his ticket, They would win.
    After a lifetime’s futile search for his pack, he still didn’t know who They were. But with every cell of his body, he didn’t want Them to win.
    And once in a while, survival had benefits, even if they never lasted. Like today.
    Two days ago, he’d been in wolf form, sniffing around a promising trash can beside an old shed. An old woman with dark skin and hair more silver than his had come outside her isolated house, slipping and sliding in the mud as she struggled to fetch fire logs from the shed. He’d shifted out of his wolf, put on his clothes, and walked up to her, saying, “I’ll sing for a meal.”
    She’d peered at him, asked him to repeat himself, then said, “I’m too deaf to hear singing. But if you’ll stack me this firewood up on the porch wheres I can reach it, I’ll share my dinner with you.”
    He’d done better than that, carrying a week’s logs up onto her dry porch, then splitting the bigger pieces down with the axe he found in the shed. While he worked, she told him that her son couldn’t get up the road because it had washed out, and she wasn’t getting any spryer, but at eighty-seven, she was lucky to be on her pins. As he worked he listened to the slow cadence of her words, hearing the musical drawl of Kentucky, the harsher consonants of a childhood in the Dust Bowl, and the clipped sentences of a woman who had worked with her hands all her long life.
    By the time they’d sat down at her little table, with canned corned beef and hash scrupulously split down the middle, he’d had her song forming in his head. When he’d scraped the last bits off the plate, she’d surprised him by offering him a wrinkled twenty.
    “Take it,” she said, with quiet dignity. “You did an honest day’s work, and you should get an honest day’s pay.”
    He’d thanked her, tucked the twenty into his jeans, then left the house. Beyond the shed he’d rolled his clothes up, shifted, and began his run north.
    And so here he was two days later, having just now enjoyed that rarity, a hot meal, and a brown-eyed woman with a thousand possible melodies twining around her curves and lilting in her voice, hit him right between the eyes with “Strip poker.”
    He expected any moment to wake up and find himself curled in some cave, wet and crawling with fleas, because he did not believe in miracles. But he kept sitting there, and talking to her, and hoping she’d come back so he could memorize another detail about her for the thrumming melody he could feel forming down deep in his gut.
    Then sure enough, reality clipped over in squeaky shoes after McKenzi went away for the third time. It was the gray-haired boss lady, who said, “Can McKenzi get