A Polar Bear Christmas by Emilia Hartley

Author:Emilia Hartley [Hartley, Emilia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-12-13T06:00:00+00:00

***

Holly burst into laughter when Claus finally walked out of the restaurant. She held her stomach, bent over double at how hard she was laughing. The look on Elise’s face when he grabbed her had been priceless. No one would ever get her a better Christmas present.

“We should get out of here before she returns,” Holly managed to say. “It should take her a while to come after us.”

Claus gave her a questioning look, and she held herself upright.

“Be proud of me. I wanted to put a steak knife through her tire, but I didn’t. Instead I used Dad’s roadside kit to take off one of her tires. I highly doubt Elise knows how to put it back on herself.”

Claus grunted. “Did you abstain from stabbing her tire or did you realize you didn’t have the strength to do it?”

“Wow. How rude of you to assume my humanity means weakness.” Okay, the truth was she hadn’t been able to get the dull knife through the thick rubber, but she wasn’t going to admit that to him. Had the knife been any sharper, it would have worked.

Her parents also would have forced her to pay for a new tire. Therefore, it was a good thing the knife had been useless.

She let Claus take the wheel. When they returned to the manor, lights were still on in the dining room, but they avoided the front door altogether. Inside her tiny apartment, the air smelled of peppermint, coffee, and musky man. She found the scent exhilarating, even if she wasn’t a shifter. It tightened her stomach and warmed her core.

The only problem was that Claus had stopped offering sex. The day before had been non-stop offers. It’d been clear that he’d been interested. Then, she’d tripped up and declared their relationship real. Since then, Claus had retreated.

Dinner had been awkward at first. He’d been distant, his mind obviously somewhere else. She couldn’t read him as well as she would have liked. He could have been mad that she jammed snow into his ear. He could have been regretting his decision to pretend-date her.

Elise’s dramatic entrance had saved her from the failing date. It sparked something within him that she’d watched fade. She wondered if she should let it fade again. If that was the right thing to do. They weren’t meant forever. She wasn’t going to find a mate in him. It was clear that Holly’s place had never been as part of the shifter community.

It had rejected her the moment she was brought into this world.

“Now you’ve gone all silent,” Claus commented. He slapped her ass as he passed on his way to the fridge.

She jumped, her face heating. “Is that what it takes to make you frisky again? Tormenting my family?”

He threw a glance over his shoulder while opening the freezer. Holly shook her head and reclaimed her spot on the futon, wrapping her blanket around her. They hadn’t had a chance to eat much of the food they’d ordered, and her stomach still growled.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.