Desperately Seeking Shapeshifter Read Online Free PDF Page B

wished he didn’t have such an unreadable face. He looked like he was scowling all the time.
    When I got inside, he shut the door behind me, and we were enveloped in darkness. Though my wolf-vision was pretty good, my eyes took a few minutes to adjust to the low light.
    One of Ramsey’s gigantor hands landed on my shoulder. Another hand slid around my waist, catching me before I could fall backward into the woodpile that the Russells stored here.
    Ramsey’s voice was a low growl in the darkness. “You jump every time I touch you. If this is going to be believable, you need to quit acting so frightened of me. I won’t hurt you.”
    I blinked up at him in surprise, the hard angles of his face coming into shape in the low light. “Oh. I’m not scared of you.”
    Well, I kind of was. But mostly in the way I was scared of all men, all shifters, and pretty much everything else.
    Ramsey’s eyes reflected green in the lowlight. “Then why do you jump when I touch you?”
    “Well, first of all,” I began, reaching for a chipper tone, “I don’t know if you noticed, but you’re kinda big and I’m kinda small. Your hands are seriously the size of baseball mitts.”
    He was silent.
    “And second of all,” I rushed ahead, “I had an abusive boyfriend in the past. He was the one who bit me.” The words hurried out of me at trainwreck speed. “So when someone grabs me by surprise, I’m not thinking there’s a problem with them, I’m just mentally used to it being him. So don’t take it personally. Any guy that touches me would make me react like that, so I really don’t like to be grabbed because it sets off my wolf in addition to the bad memories, which are kind of tied to the ex-boyfriend. So, um. Don’t take it personally.”
    He said nothing.
    “I don’t even realize I’m doing it, so you’re just going to have to be patient with me. If you grab me,I’m going to jump. That’s just the way it is. I still jump when my sister grabs me, too.”
    Still silent. Jeez, I wished he would say something.
    “Hands,” Ramsey said suddenly, breaking the one-sided silence.
    “Beg pardon?”
    He held a hand out in front of me in the near darkness. “Give me your hand.”
    Tingles of panic shot through me, but I forced myself to quell them. After a moment, I put my hand in his and tried not to look at how small it was in comparison to his. My whole hand was practically the size of his palm. If he hit me, it would hurt a lot more than when Roy . . .
    “We’re going to hold hands,” Ramsey told me. “All the time. If I’m already touching you, you won’t jump. It will make us look like a couple.”
    Oh. I looked down at my hand in his, still laying atop his flat palm. “That’s actually a pretty good idea.”
    His hand clasped over mine, feeling obscenely warm. Most shifters had a higher natural body heat than humans, but Ramsey was practically a furnace. Holding his hand was strangely comforting, even if it did force us to stand in close proximity. The scent of him was heavy in my nostrils—not unpleasant as far as shifter smells went. Wolves always smelled like wet dog to me, so he’d certainly gotten the raw end of the deal.
    “You will have to remember that we are a couple in love,” he told me gruffly.
    I snorted. “You need to remember that, too. When I kiss you, you need to kiss me back.”
    Silence. I could almost hear the scowl on his face.
    “I will try,” he grudgingly said.
    “If you keep scowling all the time when I kiss you, we might have to practice kissing, too,” I said in a light voice.
    He said nothing.
    Okay, he clearly had no sense of humor.
    When the silence stretched on, I began to feel awkward. My hand was still clasped in his, and Ramsey stood extremely close to me in the darkness. Was he waiting for me to speak? To leave?
    “Is that everything?” I ventured after a few more moments.
    “You should have told Beau that you can’t shift.”
    The oddly gentle statement threw