Free To Catch a Wolf (BBW Werewolf Shifter Romance) by Lynn Red Page A

said. “I know all about that one.”
    She laughed, which loosened me up some. “Listen,” she said, continuing, “I know this is hard. I know it is. I know what it’s like to be in love with someone and have to keep from full on for whatever reason. It’s terrible.”
    “Well I’m just stuck,” I said. “If I stay here, I’ll cause problems – Erik says that the whole town will riot in the streets it comes out that he marks a pureblood human to be his mate. The playing around, I guess, is just fine. But if it’s official, that’s apparently the end of the world.” I took a long breath. “Or I leave, and I don’t want to leave but I guess I have to.”
    “You give up too quickly,” Jamie said. “How bad do you want this?”
    “What? What do you mean?” I asked. “I want him worse than anything. This place is my home now. I don’t want any part of going back to all those bad memories.”
    That was the first time I said it out loud. I mean, I’d thought the same thing plenty of times before, but saying it made it feel more real, somehow. I didn’t want Ohio, I didn’t want my creepy uncle, or my nasty sister in law, or any of them. My place was Jamesburg, among all these completely improbable creatures that no one else on earth knew to exist. In a backward, funny way, it all made sense.
    The weird, curvy girl with the blue hair and the slightly wonky outlook on the world moves halfway across the country to the only place even more cartoonish than she is, and she falls right into place.
    “What do I need to do?” I asked. I sat up straight, steel in my nerves. “I’ll do anything to make these people trust me, if that’s what it takes. I’ll do anything to stay here, to be with him. But,” I stopped for a second, considering my words. “That’s not it. That’s not all. I want to be with him, but there’s more. I want to do it for me, you know?”
    A smile crept across Jamie’s face.
    I kept on before she could interrupt. “I’ve never had a home, not really. I had my shitty Uncle Ted and Ohio, and I guess some friends in college, but I’ve never had a place before. It might sound really weird, but I feel like this is home to me now.”
    Without noticing what I was doing, I had taken all the folders out of my little box and put them back in my desk. Jamie watched with great interest as I pulled one of the photos out and showed it to her. “He was awful, Jamie,” I said.
    “What did he do to you? This is Ted, right? The uncle?”
    I nodded. “He raised me, yeah. Raised me, made me feel like hell every second of every day. I was never good enough for him. Wasn’t religious enough, wasn’t fit enough, wasn’t smart enough. It wore me down.”
    “That kind of thing would wear anyone down, even a vampire bat,” Jamie said. “But you know who doesn’t think any of those things about you?”
    “Erik?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
    “Erik,” Jamie said.

-7-
    ––––––––
    E rik was early to the office the next day. Like really early.
    It was just past six when I looked up from the papers I had spread out on my desk at the sound of his giant road hog motorcycle shutting off outside.
    I got up, a little surprised, and crossed my very small office to the window. Erik’s eyes were so sunken and black-ringed that even with his tanned face, they were readily apparent. I watched him for a second, until he looked up and gave me the world’s most half-hearted smile when I saw me in the window.
    He looked like he wanted to say something, so I pushed open the window, hoping he would.
    Instead, he just looked to the ground and walked through the door.
    The last few days had been some of the hardest I’d ever dealt with, and I knew the hard times weren’t over.
    I could understand. Erik needed to keep the council happy, or he might end up run out of town or dead. But at the same time, I wished more than anything for him to realize that I wasn’t some kind of dangerous