P.S I'm a WOLF! (Paranormal Shifter Romance Book 1) Read online

  From the Space Needle, they went next door to the Chihuly Gardens, and then next door again to the Museum of Pop Culture, where they saw half of a museum filled with rock and roll memorabilia, and half a museum filled with considerable science fiction memorabilia.

  She grew bored with it fairly quickly, and he took her onto the Monorail train that traveled back and forth between the mall downtown and the base of the Space Needle. They left the mall at the other end and strolled together to Pike’s Place Market a few blocks away, and Petra insisted on them having their photograph taken together with the sign in the background.

  “I don’t like having my picture taken, Petra. I’m very careful about not doing that too often at all because I think it’s dangerous to have too much time-sensitive evidence around. What if this place isn’t here in a hundred years and that picture gets out while you and I still look basically the same as we do now? How are we going to explain that?” He frowned at her.

  “Photoshop.” She waved her hand in the air dismissively. “It’s not going to matter. It’s just for fun anyway, so don’t spoil the moment; just indulge me and let me have a good time.”

  “You mean let you have your way?” he asked, trying not to sound too irritated.

  “Now you’re learning!” She beamed, leaning up to kiss his cheek. He groaned quietly and followed her as she headed happily into the market. They shopped a bit, and he carried the bouquet of fresh flowers and the bags of food she’d bought as they made their way to the first Starbucks shop down the road a short way. He bought her coffee there and thought woefully about Janine and her coffee shop. He checked his phone again and saw that there was nothing there, and he ached to know how she was doing and whether he would ever see or hear from her again. It made him miserable to have to sit and wait, not knowing anything at all.

  The rest of the day was much of the same: her enjoying herself immensely, him wishing that he was with Janine instead, while pretending halfway to be having a good time with a woman he wanted nothing at all to do with.

  He took her to some of the shops along the waterfront, and they ate at a nice oriental restaurant in Chinatown, where they were both glad to be using wooden chopsticks and china plates and spoons, rather than metal utensils. Petra studied the dishes and chopsticks and continued on with her endless train of thought.

  “I wonder if they use these because they have a lot of werewolves in China. I heard that they do; you know, they bite men to add them as wolves to their packs, and then they go around like they’re in a gang. It’s like… Chinese werewolf mafias all over their country. I wonder if that’s true. I wonder if that’s why you almost never see a Chinese restaurant with real silver being used.” She droned ever onward, and as he had done all day, Kip just tuned her out. He began to think about all of their years to come and he wondered how on earth he was ever going to learn to deal with her lust and flirtatiousness and her incessant talking. He grimaced thinking that he wouldn’t even consider dating her in a regular situation, such as one in which he wasn’t already in love with another woman and they weren’t engaged. He wouldn’t want to date her even then.

  The afternoon began to grow late, and she pushed him onward, wishing to see much more of the city, but he finally told her no, explaining that he had some business that he had to attend to, and that he would need to take her back to the south house. She pouted, and he noted that she often pouted when she didn’t get her way. It was not an attractive trait in her. He thought about the time to come with her and wondered how much of it was going to be spent in his office, working late, doing anything he could to be away from home and away from her.

  He drove her home as fast as he legally could, looking forward to the moment when he would no longer be in her company. He was grateful that he had missed rush hour traffic, and not soon enough for him, he pulled into the large drive at the south house, which was a mansion only slightly smaller than the main house where Kip and his family lived. His uncle Dimitri sometimes called the south house ‘the cottage’ in a quaint and disdainful way, and the rest of them only rolled their eyes. They nearly never used it, save for company. There had been no reason to use it as they all lived together in the big house.

  “Oh shoot. Well, I guess we’re here.” Petra pushed her lower lip out. He watched her and thought to himself that there were probably many men out in the world who loved to see her do that, but he was not one of them.

  “Enjoy your evening,” he told her, hoping she would leave.

  “Walk me to the door,” she insisted, and he sighed and turned off the car, knowing that he had no choice in the matter. He walked her to the door and she held his arm the whole way because his hands were back in his pants pockets again.

  When they reached the door, she turned to face him. “I had the most wonderful day. Thank you. I can already tell that we’re going to have a fantastic marriage.” She giggled a little and then wrapped her arms around his neck as she leaned against him.

  “I want to see you again soon. We should have been doing this the whole time I’ve been here, and we haven’t. Don’t make me come to see you again. You come here and get me and take me out for some fun. The whole reason that we came three months before the wedding was so that you and I and our families could get to know one another. You haven’t been taking advantage of that, and I definitely want you to take advantage of me.” She gave him a sultry and meaningful look.

  He said nothing, only looking at her, and she smiled then and leaned up, pressing her lips to his. He did not kiss her in return, and she furrowed her brow. “You won’t even kiss me goodnight? Come on, it won’t lead to anything, it’s just a kiss… unless it leads to something, and then I would be so glad to take you upstairs to my room and keep you there all night. What do you say?” she teased him seriously.

  Kip shook his head and finally pulled his hands from his pockets, wrapping them around her forearms as he pulled himself free of her grasp. “I say what I have been saying the entire time. I am old-fashioned, and I don’t want to engage in any kind of romantic intimacy before the unification.”

  She frowned sharply at him. “You mean the marriage.”

  “Call it whatever you want to. I just don’t want to do anything until then,” he spoke simply, so over being with her at that point that he didn’t care if he sounded impolite or not.

  Petra’s eyes narrowed as she took him in. “Are you sure that’s all it is? Mr. Old-Fashioned? There’s not any other reason that you’re avoiding me, is there?”

  “That’s it.” He shrugged as he took a few steps back from her.

  She turned her head slightly as if she was trying to get a read on him and found herself failing at it. “I’m not sure that I believe you, but you’ll be mine in a few weeks anyway, and when you’re mine, I am going to have my way with you all that I want to. I can hardly wait for that, but it will come, and then you’ll be mine.”

  Petra grinned wickedly and let herself into the house, closing the door with a blown kiss to Kip. He didn’t really see it as he was already on his way back to the car, anxious to get away from her and to be anywhere peaceful. He’d had a full and miserable day, and he wanted no part of it lasting any longer than it already had to.

  He got back into the car and heaved a big sigh of relief. He was free of her and he promised himself that there was no way in hell that he was going to spend any more time with her before they absolutely had to be together. He didn’t know what he would do then, but he knew he would figure something out. At that moment, however, he was free of her, and it felt like he could breathe again as he drove along the road from the south house to the main house.

  He was nearly there when his phone buzzed, and his heart nearly leapt out of his chest. He grabbed at it, and then his heart stopped altogether when he saw that it was Janine. She had sent him a text message asking him to come and talk with her. He turned the car around in a split second and sped down the highway toward Seattle and the woman who held his heart in the p
alm of her hands. There was nothing he wanted more than to see her and be with her. It had been torture for him to be away from her and be cut off from communicating with her. He could barely wait to see her, to hold her and kiss her, if she would let him, and so much more, if he could.

  When he arrived, she was already waiting at the door, and she let him in with a half-smile, but still with doubt, confusion, and pain in her eyes. He knew that he had destroyed so much of the trust that she had in her heart for him, and he wanted to promise her that he would do anything in the world to make it up to her.

  Janine let him into her home, and he only came in a few feet, watching her the whole time, studying her to get some kind of idea what she might be thinking or feeling. She seemed much calmer than she had been when he had dropped her off. She smelled sweeter to him, if it was possible, and he wondered if perhaps he had just been so anxious to get to her that he might be mistaken about that. She had a small smile on her face, and that was encouraging to him, though he didn’t want to get too close to her in case he might scare her again, until he knew just where she stood on the issue of him and especially of them.

  She slid her fingers into the front pockets of her jeans and shrugged a little, looking shy as she gazed up at him. “So, you gave me quite a scare,” she began nervously.

  He nodded. “I realize that, and I am so very sorry. I never meant to frighten you, and if I’d been paying attention to the time and the day, I would have had you back to the shore and home before the moon came up, but I was so distracted with you that I just lost track of time. Otherwise, you’d never have seen it, and never have even known about it, if I could have continued to keep it a secret, but at least now you know the truth.”

  Janine raised her brows. “Yeah… I guess I do. A lot of strange things about you make a lot more sense to me now.”

  Kip smiled a little at her as he watched her and waited. He wanted so much for the two of them to be all right, and for them to at least part as friends, so that there would be no regrets on either of their parts.

  “I gave it a lot of thought today.” She laughed ironically and rolled her eyes. “I don’t think that I thought about anything else today, actually. Anyway, it kind of all boils down to this one thing.”

  His heart felt as if it was going to freeze in his chest, and never move again as he waited an eternal moment for her to open herself up to him and let him know how things had fallen between them.

  “I just can’t deny the way that I feel about you. I love you. I want to be with you, whether you are wolfing out or not,” she sighed, giving him an almost hopeful look.

  “You… you still want to be with me?” he asked in astonishment.

  “Yes,” she answered as the smile on her face grew a little wider.

  Everything in Kip felt as if it was bursting free in an instant, and he ran to her, wrapping her tightly in his arms. “Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness. I thought that you weren’t ever going to want me to hold you again or kiss you…” He stopped speaking and closed his mouth over hers, tasting her deeply and slowly, savoring her as if she was the most precious thing in the world.

  She kissed him in return, tentatively at first, but then as the fires of need began to blaze inside of her, she held him tighter and kissed him more urgently. Snowball, who was hiding under the sofa, began to growl and spit ferociously.

  They paused in their makeup kissing, and both of them looked at the sofa with a bemused expression. She laughed then, and it seemed to him to be the most wonderful sound in the world. “I guess I know now why the cat hates you so much.”

  He laughed then too. “It’s true. All cats hate me.”

  Janine shrugged. “Tough luck, Snowball, because he’s not going anywhere. I love him.”

  Kip kissed her again, and together they slow-walked back to her bedroom where they peeled one another’s clothes off, anxious to be with each other again after such a life altering night.

  He laid back with her in her bed, and she loved the feel of his hands and his mouth all over her body. Though he wanted to spend much more time doing everything to her that he knew she loved, including tasting her depths with his powerful tongue, he wanted more than that to be reunified with her, to feel as if the two of them were one again, because they had felt so broken, and he pulled her on top of him, spreading her thighs wide over her groin.

  Holding her hips firmly and gazing up into her eyes, he slowly entered her, feeling every intense moment of it as if it was the very first time all over again, and she gasped and held her hands to his chest, feeling a wave of erotic pleasure as he finally filled her and began to thrust himself up into her.

  Kip slid his hands up her body from her hips to her waist, and then to her breasts, cupping the large mounds in his hands, squeezing them gently and drawing her down closer to him as they began to move together in unison. He moved the tip of his tongue firmly over her hardened nipples, teasing her before taking them each in turn into his mouth and sucking at them, biting tenderly and turning her on until she was rocking over him hard. Then he lifted his hands to her face and brought it to his, his tongue and lips moving together with hers, as they both moaned, and he drove himself further and harder into her, making her cling to him and shudder with an orgasm.

  “There’s my girl…” he murmured. “That’s what I want… come again for me, Janine… come again. I want to feel it from you so much.” His hands slid down her curves again, squeezing, caressing, pulling her tight against him, and she did come again, her body tensing and hot as she cried out.

  He continued to love her, and she came three more times before he let himself finally let go, releasing all of himself into her as his head fell against her breasts, and they panted together, their bodies burning with their pleasure, their skin jeweled in beads of sweat, their hearts racing and blissful.

  “I love you, I love you, I love you,” he murmured as he picked up his head and kissed her mouth softly, laying back against her pillows and holding her close in his arms.

  “I love you too. So much. I’m relieved and so happy that we’re okay. We’re going to be okay,” she replied sleepily, and only a few minutes later, they were both sound asleep.

  Kip woke with the early morning light and went to her bathroom. As he stood at the toilet, he happened to see a box of tampons on the back of it, and realization hit him like a brick wall. He had been having sex with her for two solid months, almost every day, sometimes two or three times in one day, and never once had she had her period.

  His heart began to race, and the blood in his ears rang as it rushed through him like a river. There was no way. It couldn’t be possible, he thought to himself. There was no chance that his sudden fear could be reality.

  He left the bathroom and went to her, his senses more alert than they had ever been as everything in him focused on her with laser beam intensity. The first thing about her that struck him was the wonderful, sweet smell that she had developed partway through their relationship. She hadn’t always had it. He remembered when he had first noticed it, thinking that perhaps she had a new perfume or a lotion that she was using that might be causing it, because he couldn’t possibly imagine what else it might be.

  As he sat there on the bed beside her while she slept peacefully, he breathed it in deeply, and his mind caught, almost as if on a sharp nail. He leaned close to her belly and breathed in deeply again. The scent grew stronger. It smelled better to him than anything else ever had and he stared hard at her abdomen as a lump formed in his throat.

  He listened to her heartbeat, pump… pump…pump… and then he leaned very close to her skin below her belly button and he heard something else. Pump-pump-pump-pump-pump-pump-pump-pump. It was a much faster heartbeat.

  There was no mistaking it. Janine was pregnant.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Shock registered through him as it never had before, and he sat back up and stared at her belly, and then at her sleeping there beside him. He had gotten her pregnant. It
had never occurred to him that it might be possible, solely for the fact that he was a werewolf and she was a human.

  A rush of memories came back to him: her sleeping patterns that had changed. Her eating patterns that had changed, in particular, her newer cravings for raw meat. He had never seen a human eat so much raw meat before, but he had seen female wolves eat plenty of it when they were expecting a litter of pups.

  He panicked for a second, wondering if it was possible that she could have a litter, and he leaned down and listened to the tiny heartbeat within her. With a half breath of relief, he sighed. There was only one extra heartbeat inside of her. One baby.