Read Promising Peter (Bad Boy Alphas) (Shrew & Company Book 6) for Free Online Page B

intelligence cranked on a low simmer. Her responses were slower, but when she made them, they were sure. Every important question had to be filtered through both parts of her brain—the woman part and the bear. Then she had to mentally sift through the feedback and meld the components into something cohesive and cogent.
    “You think I should be afraid of you,” she said. “But I’m not. At least, not in the ways you probably expect. You’re not going to let anything bad happen to me.”
    “If I happen to you, that would be something bad.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “I am who I am, Andrea. My reputation is well earned, and though I may go looking for fewer fights than I used to, I certainly stumble into more than my fair share. I’ve got blood on my hands and plenty of dark spots on my soul.”
    “You make yourself sound like Satan in disguise.”
    “Sullying the virtue of an angel.”
    “I’m no angel.”
    “Aren’t you?” He squeezed her wrists and looked back over his shoulder again.
    His question caught her up short.
    She could put her foot down and demand he treat her like the vixen she most certainly wasn’t, but they’d both know her aggressiveness would be false. She’d be trying too hard to be something she wasn’t. Her best strategy was still to get him to accept her as she was. And he had to have had a pretty good grasp of that to start with, or he wouldn’t have abducted her.
    “Aren’t you?” he repeated softly.
    “Sometimes, I wish I weren’t,” she whispered. “I wish hurting people when I need to was an easier thing. The Shrews have been trying to teach me to fight and how to be on the offensive when I need to be, but I just don’t have the knack. I’m slow to speak and even slower to react. Most of the time, I’m a sitting duck. Dana had a keycard system installed outside the office. She said the system was part of the agency’s overall security plan, but I know she moved up the installation timeline because of me. She made accessing the business harder for clients because I can’t handle myself at the front desk.”
    “She could fire you if she wanted to. She’s a very practical woman. You’re still employed because she needs you there.”
    “That’s what Sarah keeps telling me, but that doesn’t make believing what they say any easier. Anyway, I am what I am, and I can’t help what I want.”
    “What do you want?”
    “Right now, I want you. You brought me here. Whether your inner bear compelled you or the human part of your brain had some say in the matter makes no difference to me. We’re here and alone, and…if you want me, you can have me.”
    At the slight movement of his spine, she looked up to see him shaking his head. “I can’t have you, Andrea.”
    Her body crumpled against him as if someone had cut the marionette strings holding her up.
    He quickly threw an arm around her and pressed her to his back. He wasn’t going to let her fall, apparently.
    “I can’t have you,” he repeated, “but I want you. Both parts of me. Therein lies the conflict.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    She was breaking his goddamned heart.
    Peter hadn’t been speaking completely in jest when he’d said Andrea was an angel. She was certainly the closest to one he’d ever get to see on Earth, and if he so much as looked at her with the heat that had been consuming him for nearly a year, the guilt that followed overwhelmed.
    Still, he stepped out of his pants, pulled her around to the front of his body, and held her tight. She practically melted against him. She wasn’t the stiff, frightened woman she should have been. That underlying scent of fear was still there, but he considered what she’d said. Her fear was something she always carried around and not caused specifically by him.
    The bear in him wanted to find some way to siphon off her worries so she was carefree and happy—so she could eat a fucking sandwich from start to end without stopping. But that should have been some