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

continue. “You don’t have to have sex with me.”
    “I don’t know if you understand what you’re asking.” He inhaled, scenting the air. “If I’m not mistaken, this just started.”
    She blushed. “Today.”
    “Heat lasts about a week, sometimes longer. Your instinct to mate will only grow stronger and, frankly, walking through a raging blizzard sounds more appealing than having a quiet conversation with a shifter in heat.”
    Her heart sank. “I understand if you’re not interested.”
    “Interested?” A flicker of amusement crossed his hard face. “I’ll stay long enough to tell you what you need to know about the heat, and then… Well, then you can make a decision on whether you really want me to stay.”
    He unzipped his coat and set it on the hearth. His gear was good quality, but well-used like he spent a lot of time outside. She watched him move about the small space, taking up every inch of it. His flannel shirt clung to his broad back and he had the nicest ass she thought she’d ever had the opportunity to ogle. She wanted to touch him. To peel off the rest of his clothes and press her mouth to his skin. She wanted to know the weight of his body as he held her down and— She jerked her thoughts away from that fantasy when he sat down to take off his boots and their gazes briefly locked. The corners of his mouth curled up at the edges and his eyes crinkled. There was a shadow of wolflight in their depths, but that might have been an effect of the firelight. He couldn’t possibly know what she’d been thinking.
    Turning away, she sat down in her nest of blankets on the bed, curling her legs under her. The movement made her hyper-aware of how aroused she was. Having him here seemed to make everything worse. Her clothes felt too tight. Her nipples ached and her clit throbbed every time she looked at him. She fidgeted, trying to get comfortable, but it was a lost cause.
    Her guest didn’t seem to have the same problem. He sat very still, watching her get settled, his body tense as a coiled spring but completely under his control.
    She cleared her throat. “Do you want coffee? I can make you something to eat.”
    “It’s probably best if I don’t linger.”
    “Right. With the storm, I imagine you want to get home.”
    “Right,” he agreed, the corner of his mouth turning up again. “Because of the storm. You can shift?”
    “Normally I can,” she said. “But not right now. Is that a side effect of the heat?”
    “You could say that. There aren’t many women who can shift. There always were more men than women born among our kind. This is your first heat.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because you’re not mated, and you still smell like a shifter. A female only comes into heat when she’s ready to mate. When her body is ready to bear a shifter child. She has a choice then, like you have a choice now. Your heat will pass whether you have sex or not.”
    Her initial reaction was relief, but something in his expression told her there was more to it. “But…”
    “But there are consequences to whatever decision you make. In the past, when a woman reached her first heat, she would mate with as many men as she wanted to claim and then leave with them to form her own pack. If she wished to remain in the pack of her birth, she would let her heat pass and become sterile. She could still have sex. She could even bear a human child if she wished, but she would never carry a shifter baby. And she would never again be able to shift into her wolf form. Sometimes, when the older alpha female dies, it triggers the sterile females of the pack to go into heat again, but that won’t happen with you.”
    Because she didn’t have a pack. She understood that part, but the rest of what he’d said… She couldn’t have understood him correctly. “When you say mate, you mean she has sex with the whole pack?”
    “The alpha female has sex with all of the male members of her pack. Any child born