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

patience of long habit until the big clock on the church tower at the top of the street indicated midnight straight up.
    He stepped around to the back of the restaurant—and she was there, outlined in gold from the outside lights.
    “West?” she said, blinking into the darkness.
    “I’m here.” He stepped out of the shadows, ready for—anything.
    “Okay. How do you want to do this? Follow me, or . . .”
    “I don’t have a car,” he said.
    “You don’t? How’d you get here? Greyhound?”
    He made a noise that could have meant anything. He hated lying, except for survival, and this was not a survival situation. He didn’t want to lie to her.
    “What the hell,” she said. “Hop in.” She indicated a rattletrap VW. He got into the passenger seat, and she fired it up.
    “I live at the top of the hill right behind us,” she said. “In the summer we could walk right up, but now, I’m afraid we’d need a canoe. If canoes could go up, that is.” She turned off the main street and shifted down to climb a steep street. “So where you from?”
    “All over,” he said.
    “What do you do?”
    “Write songs,” he said.
    “Do you sing? Play an instrument?”
    “I sing them, and when I can get some, play any kind of strings. They’re hard to hold onto.”
    “Okay,” she said, and then shot him a quick look that heated him up again, made it hard to think. “I’m done with my third degree. Your turn.”
    He said, “So what are reasons 1-1,456?” McKenzi, McKenzi, McKenzi , he was thinking: was that a sexy name, or did she make it sexy with that power of hers?
    “Reasons what?”
    “That Valentine’s Day sucks,” he said. “You were right on the other side of that divider thing, expressing what I think. I wonder if our reasons are the same.”
    “You want all my reasons why Valentine’s Day totally sucks rocks?”
    “Yep.”
    “It’s fake,” she said.
    “Yep.”
    “And commercial.”
    “Yep.”
    “And sets up totally impossible expectations.” Her voice hitched a half-note higher.
    “No argument here.”
    “And it results in pink aprons that ought to be number one on fashion hit lists,” she said in an airy voice, as if she was determined to keep things easy, but he sensed a river of feeling beneath. “Along with glittery crepe paper, cards with bad art and worse rhymes, annoying commercials, and . . .”
    Her voice had begun to sharpen, as if those emotions were getting their way in spite of her. But she stopped there, and shrugged. Then she pulled up in a parking space above a couple of small rooftops that seemed to belong to cottages, and parked.
    The headlights caught a curtain of silver before she shut them off, and they got out of the car. She didn’t speak as they splashed down rainy steps to the small porch of the nearest cottage. She opened the door—unlocked. This was that kind of town? Amazement washed through him, followed by warmth and regret and then envy, cold as the rain. Did she know what she had?
    Then she turned on the lights, and they looked at one another. Without that ugly pink apron hiding her, she was  . . . poetry in motion, everywhere a generous arc, with an angle here and there as grace notes: the hint of collarbone peeking above the neck of her damp tee, the square pockets of her jeans drawing the eye to the extravagant curve of her hips. He realized he was staring, and shifted his gaze away—
    And stood there in a quiet kind of shock.
    There wasn’t much furniture, and the little he saw seemed old, comfortably shabby, with a TV next to an old-fashioned CD player. It was the inner two walls that drew his eye. Spreading from one to the other was a mural of the little town, divided by its main street, only stylized, with the ocean gleaming between the two slopes, whales dancing under the sun far out to sea. And in the town, everywhere, little animals doing people things. A whole community of them.
    “Wow,” he breathed.
    “You like?” McKenzi’s mouth