Rebel Wolf (Shifter Falls Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

isn’t a contest, Anna,” he said. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, I shouldn’t have pried. I apologize. I’m on edge.”
    “Apology accepted.”
    He was quiet after that, staring out the window. It was a comfortable silence; Ian wasn’t naturally a talker, it seemed. Anna figured that after a lifetime of roaming alone, capped by a year in prison, silence was probably his usual mode.
    She kept quiet herself, not wanting to push him, thinking over everything he’d told her. But after a while, the silence felt heavy, and when she looked over at him, he was tense in his seat, his gaze straining out the passenger window.
    “Is everything okay?” she asked him.
    He pointed to a sign indicating an exit from the highway. “Turn off here,” he said, his voice curt.
    She signaled and exited. They were on a back road now, a two-lane blacktop that contained nothing but potholes and snow. “We’re not near Shifter Falls yet,” she said.
    “Keep going,” he said, almost sharp. “Up here. Pull over.”
    “Is something wrong?”
    “Just do it.”
    Maybe he was sick or something. Maybe he needed to go to the bathroom and didn’t want to say anything. It was a little strange, but Anna pulled over to the side of the road. They were only minutes from the highway, but in this wilderness they could have been on the edge of the earth, with mountains stretching off before them cloaked in thick trees. The road stretched endlessly away into nothing.
    “What is it?” she said to Ian.
    He looked over at her. His eyes looked silver in the light, his expression serious. “Stay here,” he said, and he got out of the car.

4
    I t didn’t hit her at first, what he was doing. And then it did.
    Ian got out of the car and strode away, into the snow, toward the trees. As he walked, he unbuttoned his coat and dropped it to the ground.
    He was going to shift? Now?
    She turned off the car and got out, sliding through the snow after him. “Ian! What are you doing?”
    He unbuttoned the gray flannel shirt he was wearing and dropped it on top of the coat. Now he only had on a white t-shirt, which he pulled off over his head, dropping it, too. “You said shifters need to run,” he said. “I need to run.”
    “Right now? ”
    “Right now.” He bent to untie his shoes, and Anna stood paralyzed watching him. His bare torso was lined with muscles, thick beneath his golden skin. Across his lower back was a set of scars, four parallels, as if claws had raked him. Probably from the cage fighting. We heal fast, but we scar, he’d said.
    But it was the tattoos that transfixed her. She’d read about pack tattoos in her textbook, but there were no pictures, only a description. Every shifter, the book had said, carried a tattoo of his animal, as well as a mark that indicated his pack if he was an elite member.
    Emblazoned over Ian’s right shoulder and across his shoulder blade was a wolf. It was done in dark ink, depicted in full run, its paws outstretched, its teeth bared. As he moved his arm, the muscles flexed and the wolf moved. It was beautiful and a little frightening at the same time, full of wild anger and unstoppable force. He only bore one other tattoo: on the knob of spine at the base of the back of his neck, a stylized D, small but prominent. The mark of the Donovan pack—the mark that he was a son of the alpha.
    “I don’t understand,” Anna managed to say as she stared at him. “Why now?”
    Ian kicked off his shoes and socks and stood looking her in the eye. “It’s been a year,” he said, carefully undoing his watch and adding it to the pile. “I’m short-tempered. I’m going out of my mind. I’ll be nicer when I’m finished, I promise.”
    “I’m supposed to agree to this when you just tried to run from me at the diner?”
    “I’ll come back,” he said.
    “How the hell do I know that?”
    He stepped closer to her. He was bigger, taller, his chest a wall of muscle. She could see the edges of the wolf