Maggie's Wolves, Part One: A BBW Shifter Romance (Red Mountain Pack Book 1) Read Free

a puzzle he couldn’t quite piece together. She thought about offering something to drink, or shelter for the night, but she didn’t trust herself not to attack him as soon as he let down his guard. She wanted to be his friend and get to know his pack. She wanted to finally meet other people like her. Maybe… Maybe when his pack moved here, they’d let her run with them sometimes. She needed to stop thinking about licking the strong column of his neck and biting his chin. She needed to stop wondering about how many layers of clothes he had on underneath his coat and how long it would take to get him out of them.
    Finally, he cleared his throat. “You’re not with a pack now, are you?”
    She hesitated a moment and then shook her head.
    “If you had trouble with your last pack and that’s why you decided to do this, I can help you.”
    “Help me?”
    He flashed that disarming smile again. “Yeah, well, maybe help’s not the best word, but you should know you have options. My pack would welcome you if you don’t have anywhere else to go.”
    She wrapped her arms around her stomach as another wave of hunger broke over her, not as sharp as it had been earlier, but deeper and more insistent. It made it difficult to try to sort out what he was saying, but he was looking at her like he was waiting for an answer. “I thought I would have time to get up here and back before the storm rolled in,” she said. “But my car wouldn’t start and then I started to feel sick.”
    “Sick?”
    She touched her face which seemed to be way too hot, especially with the blast of cold air he’d let into the cabin. “A fever. I’ve never been sick before. Maybe you could… Do you know of any doctors who treat people like us?”
    He took a step toward her, raising his hand like he meant to touch her, but then he let it drop to his side. “What pack were you born to?”
    “I don’t have a pack,” she admitted. “My parents died when I was twelve. Their truck hit a patch of ice driving down this mountain and went right through the guardrail. My aunt raised me but she wasn’t…she was different from us.”
    “Gone human.”
    She nodded. That was as good a description as any. “She died last year. There’s no one else.”
    “You’re not sick.” He looked away from her, at the rumpled blankets on the bed and at the window above it, already beginning to frost over. When his gaze returned to her, he studied her face intently. “Do you truly not understand what’s happening?”
    “I’m sick.”
    He shook his head, his expression softening. “Not sick. You’re in heat.”
    She stared at him in horror for a long moment, her cheeks blazing with humiliation.
    “Heat,” she said. “Like a dog.”
    He frowned fiercely. “Like a fertile female shifter.”
    Fertile. God. “You’re saying that this is just—what? Hormones gone awry? That this feeling will pass?”
    “It will pass.”
    She swallowed against the tightness in her throat. She’d never been with a man, and she wasn’t exactly sure how to even begin seducing one. She didn’t even know if she wanted to seduce this stranger. Okay, that was a lie. She wanted to rip his clothes off and use them to tie him to the bed. But that didn’t mean it was the right thing to do. It didn’t mean that he would want the same thing. And as much as she wanted to ride him into tomorrow, she wanted to talk to him too. To ask him about other shifters and all the things her parents would have told her if they’d survived. She didn’t want to scare him off.
    “Will you tell me more? The weather is bad and you’re welcome here. I would be glad if you stayed. Glad of anything you can tell me about our kind. I’ve never talked to anyone who understood what it’s like. You don’t have to…” God, this was embarrassing. She crossed her arms over her chest, but that only made things worse, dragging the fabric against her nipples and making them ache. She forced herself to