Free A Werewolf's Valentine: BBW Wolf Shifter Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

I’m glad to see you, but could you not bang the door?”
    “It bangs itself,” he said with an impatient shrug at this triviality. “Aunt Doris says, can you come over?” Rolf turned from her to West.
    He turned from Rolf to McKenzi, then back again. “Sure. Let me finish my breakfast first, okay?”
    Rolf brightened with the sort of smile McKenzi hadn’t seen since he was a kid of ten, and only rarely then.
    He let the door bang—again—as he ran off. McKenzi turned to West, remembering that he had never actually answered her sideways-question about dealing with her family. “Are you okay with this?”
    He paused in buttering a scone and set his knife and fork down carefully, as if placement of them was a matter of national security, then met her gaze, his own questioning. “If you are,” he said.
    That surprised her. But then everything in the past couple of days had been a surprise. “I’m good,” she said, reaching inside herself and finding that that was the truth. “And hey, if they get to be too much, we can always come back here and lock the door.”
    His lips curved, and he said in that low, rough, panty-melting voice, “I was kinda hoping we could do that anyway.”
    Heat flashed right through her. Wow. But now was not the time. She took a deep breath to banish it. “Okay. While you eat those scones, I’ll give you a rundown on who’s who. Starting with Grandma Enkel, who escaped from East Germany with Great-Aunt Gretel back in the bad old Iron Curtain days, leaving behind my great-uncle, who was a bat. They shifted to cat form, and walked over the border during a blizzard . . .”
    She was glad she’d taken the time to introduce them when they walked up to the ranch house just before noon, and found them all sitting in a row on the couch, like a panel of Olympic judges. But the second West walked in the door, McKenzi was relieved to see them all smile. Even Uncle Lee, though it was a typically sad, bloodhound sort of smile.
    McKenzi saw her family giving each other glances, and could feel their invisible cat tails twitching at the ends, the fur ridging over their backs. Not that they were mad—far from it—but she could see at a glance that she wasn’t the only one feeling like she’d just set her paws into newly sprayed water.
    “Okay,” she said. “This is West, who travels around as a musician. He’s also a wolf shifter, and he understands about keeping the town’s secret. So we can skip the third degree, right?”
    Her mom said, “We just wanted to know where he’s from?”
    McKenzi felt the unasked question hovering in the air: and where he’s going?
    Before anyone could say anything awkward, she blurted, “He writes songs about his travel. West, maybe you’d like to sing one?”
    Rolf turned toward Uncle Lee. “Dad, you should play, too.”
    “We now have two instruments. I brought a guitar,” McKenzi said.
    West’s expression didn’t change much—McKenzi had learned by now that he was habitually too wary for that—but the tension went out of him as he smiled at Uncle Lee. “I’d be happy to jam with you.”
    Uncle Lee’s expression was closer to a real smile than McKenzi had seen for a long time. By the time McKenzi had fetched the banjo and guitar and the two guys had gotten them tuned again, the sky was clouding up for another band of rain. Her mom set a fire going in the fireplace, and from the smell, Grandma set about making her famous Apfelstrudel as West and Uncle Lee made the transition from the twang-twang of testing single strings to strumming chords.
    Uncle Lee said, “You know any Jimmy Rodgers, or Bill Monroe?”
    West said, “I like to jam—I’m pretty good at that—but songs, I don’t know anyone’s but my own.”
    Uncle Lee said, “You sing what you want. I’ll just feel my way. It’s been a while.”
    West dipped his chin in a nod, and began to play, and then to sing.
    Uncle Lee listened at first, then began tentatively, then with more