The Alpha's Mate Read Online Free PDF

through the front door of a large wooden house. He left his car parked outside and she could not see an attached garage. She was supposed to just be picking up her license, but given the progress of the night so far...She suppressed a shiver and felt a thrill of heat stab through her. But he made no move to touch her, simply gesturing for her to sit in the kitchen while he walked further into the house. She looked around.
    Despite the rustic lodge feel she got from the outside, the interior boasted none of the traits she would have expected. The walls were flat and covered in drywall rather than exposed wood, the paint a subtle yellow just slightly too bright to be considered beige. The kitchen flowed into the living room in an open floor plan. A hall off the kitchen met a staircase and she thought she saw two doors beyond it. A large print of wolves howling hung on the wall over the couch. And opposite that sat a humongous TV and an impressive collection of movies.
    A large island sat in the middle of the kitchen. Or rather, the chef's fantasy come to life. Kelly could boil noodles and heat up sauce with the best of them, but nearly a decade of grad school had provided her with ingenuity with her ingredients, not her technique.
    Max walked back into the room wearing a different tight black t-shirt and sat opposite her at the large rectangular table.
    This was a lot of house for one man. She hoped he didn't have a wife and kids hiding somewhere. That would make this whole thing super awkward.
    "There's something I need to tell you," he said, staring at her face but not meeting her eyes. Kelly knew it, he had a whole family and they were about to walk in. He was a serial adulterer and got off on getting caught. Or his wife got off on catching him. Something like that.
    That was the scary tone of voice, the kind a doctor used right before delivering a bad prognosis. "Listen," Kelly said, "It's been fun, but I understand that this is totally casual, you know."
    He set his hand on the table with a bang and started at the sound. "Cas--No, never mind, we'll talk about that later." He balled up his fist and remained silent, opening his mouth to talk twice before closing it again. Kelly sat there awkwardly. After rapping his knuckles against the wood of the table he finally said, "I'm a werewolf."
    Kelly laughed. What other response could she give? "Really? I thought you were a vampire," she replied. But her smile faded when she saw that he wasn't laughing, wasn't even amused. Instead his face was shrouded with a seriousness so dire a worried shiver snaked its way down her spine.
    "Vampires aren't real." Of course he would say that. "Okay, I said this wrong, can I start again?"
    In this moment Kelly was abjectly aware that her car sat in a parking lot miles away and she had no way home other than this man sitting in front of her. This man who very possibly thought it was completely normal to howl at the moon. "Sure," she choked out.
    "Werewolves are real," he plowed along.
    "And you are one?" She tried to keep most of the sarcasm out. It didn't work. "If you didn't want to see me again, you could have just mailed the license to me. You don't need to feed me some crazy story."
    Max pushed his chair back from the table and stood. The chair teetered precariously on two feet before righting itself. He took three deep breaths, closed his eyes, and hunched over. The air seemed to shimmer around his shoulders and something under his skin rippled. Kelly leaned forward, fascinated. This wasn't some twinge of a muscle. The human body simply couldn't do what Max's body did. The light seemed to contract around him until he disappeared for half a second and in his place appeared a huge wolf.
    An impossibly large wolf of at least 200 pounds if she had to guess.
    Kelly stayed as still as she could. She had gone crazy, clearly. There was no way in hell that a 200 pound gray wolf stood across the table from her in the middle of some guy's kitchen.