Read Wanted By The Cowboy Tiger (Heroes of Shifter Creek 3) for Free Online Page B

time. “Sure you did, darlin’.”
    Sharee shivered. He had begun calling her “darling” the very first day she had started to work for him, over two years back, and he had not stopped since. The word rolled off his tongue like sin.
    “What did you think?” he asked as he took a seat on the bright red armchair.
    Sharee really wished he would go put on some clothes; it was hard to keep track of a conversation with him lounging about half naked.
    “I thought it was very dark,” she said honestly. “Maybe a little too much.”
    Tristan arched a dark eyebrow. “Too dark?”
    Sharee hesitated. Tristan was generally good with constructive criticism, but even after two years, she was still mindful of not crossing the line.
    “Go on, darlin’,” he said. “You know I can take it.”
    She knew. She took a deep breath and resolved to get all of her thoughts out. “Tristan, this is the third main character you kill off in a year. Don’t you think it might be a little too much?”
    Tristan Jacobsen was a prolific writer. His latest series centering on werewolves was going at a particularly steady pace. Like anything else that came out of his pen, it was selling by the thousands. No one could write horror like Tristan. He was generally viewed as Stephen King’s heir…even by Stephen King himself. There was something gripping and real about the way Tristan wrote about the things that go bump in the night, something ancestral that spoke to the reader.
    But no matter how dark those terrors might be, his books always contained a message of hope in the end. Not so much lately. Lately, his books had gotten scarier, darker, of a darkness that left no escape. It certainly left no way out for the protagonists.
    “I mean,” Sharee continued when Tristan did not react, “how do you expect people to get attached to your protagonists if you keep offing them at the end?”
    “Eric Stratham is not dead.”
    “He lost his battle with his were nature and went dark side,” Sharee argued. “He might as well be.”
    Tristan shrugged.
    Sharee stared at him. “Tristan, I mean it,” she said, as gently as she could. “People need redemption. They need hope. It’s why they love your books so much, because you always gave them that no matter how terrifying the rest of the story was.”
    “Yeah, well,” Tristan stretched his arms above his head, yawning hugely, “redemption and hope aren’t always in the cards.”
    “Fair enough,” Sharee admitted. “But do they really need to not be in the cards for three books in a row?”
    Tristan huffed, exasperated. “Look, if they don’t like it, they can read something else.” He got to his feet and walked out of the studio, presumably in search of clothes.
    Sharee stared after him, stunned. “I’m just saying,” she called out. “This is a series. You may want to consider leaving some of the characters alive for your next book!”
    “I’ll think about it!” Tristan called back, in the absent tone of someone who most definitely was not going to think about it. At all.
    * * *

Tristan emerged twenty minutes later carrying two steaming mugs. He handed her one wordlessly, and Sharee accepted the coffee for what it was—a peace offering to placate the fretting assistant within her. Admittedly, she should have been the one brining him coffee, but over time, roles had become somewhat blurry.
    He was dressed simply, in a pair of faded blue jeans and a long-sleeved black T-shirt that hugged his body in all the right places. Sharee couldn’t help but let her gaze linger. Boy, but he was a sight! She snapped out of it quickly and looked away before he could notice the appreciation shining in her eyes. She took a long sip of black coffee, relishing the warmth of the liquid in this gray Oregon morning.
    “Sabrina called while you were getting dressed.”
    Sharee delivered the information casually, but she felt a pang of irrational jealousy whenever the woman renewed her attempts at