Bear Valley Valentine: Valentine's Day Paranormal Romance Read Online Free PDF

relationships with other people. He didn’t seem like a particularly shy man, so what gave? “What happened to you?”
    He huffed a breath as a muscle twitched under his eyes. She fought the urge to touch it and calm the stress there. His eye color seemed to blaze even brighter, but it had to be a trick of the setting sun that ghosted the horizon.
    “Maybe you should go,” he gritted out.
    “Or,” she said boldly, “you could invite me to stay for dinner and make up for standing me up for our coffee date.”
    “It wasn’t a date.”
    The words stung like a slap to the face. Gasping at the pain, she drew back. “It was to me.” She spun on her heel and stomped toward her car with as much dignity as she could muster, sopping wet and likely with a serious set of eyeliner-smeared raccoon eyes.
    “Wait,” he drawled.
    When she turned around to lay into him, he stood there, looking so lost and uncertain, the words clogged her throat. He ran his hands roughly through his short, black hair. “Will you stay for dinner? With me?”
    Straightening her spine, she said, “I’d love to.” Her socks made undignified sloshing sounds in her boots as she marched past him and up the front porch stairs.
    Hadley had expected a typical bachelor pad. Old grease-stained pizza boxes and dirty clothes littering the floor. Perhaps a musty smell and muddy boots tossed haphazardly by the door. What she saw when Colin leaned over her and opened the door to his home was as unexpected as raindrops on a sunny day. His cabin was small, but immaculate. A coatrack adorned a small entryway, which opened up to a living area with a couch and a recliner. A flat screen television had been mounted on the wall above a stone fireplace, and the kitchen sat ready for someone to cook in it across the den. She walked slowly past a hallway that seemed to lead to a bathroom and a single bedroom, and yelped when a streak of motion ran across the toe of her boot.
    “That’s Boomerang,” Colin said, watching her like he was studying her reaction to his home. “The cat’s all feral, but he comes in through that make-shift doggy opening on the back door there, see?” He pointed. “He likes to take his meals inside like he’s fancy, but still won’t let me touch him. He just likes to tear around the house like he’s bat-shit crazy at three in the morning to drive me nuts.”
    A patchy-furred calico cat hunched in the corner of the room and offered her a feral hiss as she walked by. “Boomerang is a girl.”
    “What?” he asked.
    “She’s a calico. See her mottled fur? All calicos are girls. It’s in their genetics to be female.”
    He frowned and ran a hand down his beard like his mind had just been blown. “No wonder she’s always pissed off. I’ve been calling her a him from the day she dropped her first rat at my doorstep.”
    “Ew. Why would she do that?”
    Colin gave her an empty smile. “Because she’s begging sanctuary in the territory of a predator.”
    His words made no sense, but maybe that’s what happened when a man spent too much time out in the woods. Perhaps he imagined himself a predator. She wouldn’t be rude and point out there were a whole heap of predators more adept to defending territory than some blunt-nailed human.
    But when she turned around and noticed those unnatural eyes on her, the way the ash and water and sweat had streaked his face and made it fearsome looking, the way his thick muscles pressed against the damp fabric of his sweater, a shiver rattled up her spine.
    If it were a competition between him and one of the soft men down the mountain in Buffalo, he’d win top predator with little effort.

Chapter Three
    Hadley burrowed into the oversized navy-colored sweater Colin had tossed her before he disappeared into the bathroom to shower. It smelled like him, crisp and masculine, with undertones of metal and ash. He’d probably worked in this shirt before, and the thought brought a pool of warmth to her