Shifter’s Surrender Read Online Free

mom and Dolen might actually start to act like a couple, which would get her mom out of Kaylie’s hair.
    “Fine. I’ll be home as soon as I can then.”
    “See you soon.”
    Kaylie shut her phone, clipped it back to her waist and shut down her computer for the weekend. With Mrs. S. picking Georgie up, all the animals in the clinic were home. That was something Kaylie loved about working with Rodney. Overnights were very rare, but if a pet needed to stay the night, they were never alone. Rodney, Kaylie, or one of their technicians stayed at the clinic. It was the true, caring atmosphere of a small town she loved.
    After saying goodnight, Kaylie walked across the street to Dolen’s Café. While she waited for Martin Reynolds, Jackie’s husband, to finish her order, Kaylie chatted with a few of the other townspeople at the counter. Everyone she spoke with seemed excited about the game tonight, and Kaylie started to realize just how important the event was to them. Not that Woodcliff had to win, though that would be a bonus, but that the game could raise the morale of the town, and bring them back together as a community, which they needed.
    About five months prior, just before Kaylie had moved home, the town had suffered a violent death of one of their own. A human killed by a shifter. The act had caused both species to become edgy because the murder occurred outside the night of the full moon, when only the strongest of shifters could change form.
    When all was said and done, one of the town’s most influential— albeit widely disliked— shifters, his eldest son, and a native Woodcliff human were found to be involved.
    Other than the influx of tourist dollars due to the ski lodge, Woodcliff’s main source of revenue was the Kolter Lumber Company. Its owner, a shifter and the ousted Alpha of the Woodcliff pack, Frank Kolter, was a schemer, manipulator, and womanizer. When it became known that he’d aided and abetted his eldest son to murder the human, Dave Collins, the townspeople had freaked out. Not only because of Frank’s deviousness, which was legendary and expected, but because of the potential economic impact of losing the Lumber Company.
    As it turned out, the current pack Alpha and mayor of Woodcliff, Dean Kinigos, had stepped in to buy out Frank Kolter’s two remaining sons and take over the Lumber Company. He’d changed the name—it was now the Woodcliff Lumber Company—and hired Kaylie’s sister, Tess, to work there as the CFO. Which was pretty amusing to Kaylie, considering Tess had quit college for a successful modeling career. Then again, Tess, who’d left her career to come back to Woodcliff and care for their mother after a delicate surgery, had gone to college to get an accounting degree. So in hindsight, maybe everything was meant to be.
    Too bad they couldn’t fall into place for Kaylie. Sure, she may have her dream job in her dream place, but she definitely didn’t have her dream man: the shifter Alpha and mayor, Dean Kinigos. Six feet of lean-muscle goodness wrapped in smooth olive skin, bronzed by the sun. Clear emerald green eyes that held more than a hint of steel, passion, and too much wariness.
    If any man needed to be fed, it was Dean. And not food for his body, but food for his soul. And while Kaylie was more than willing to take on that task, Dean seemed to purposely keep his distance from her. In the three years she’d known him, he had never touched her, not even to shake her hand. While Kaylie knew from her studies that wolves, and shifters, were social creatures who liked to touch and tease, Dean seemed to be the exception. Unless, and this was Kaylie’s belief, it was just her.
    While he might want her physically—even he wasn’t quick enough to hide the way his mesmerizing green eyes grew hot and predatory for just a fraction of a second whenever she caught his gaze— he never acted on it. And like anything just out of someone’s reach, that distant quality only made