Read Online Mail Order Tiger Bride Wars: A Scorchingly Hot BBW Shifter Romance by Dawn Steele - Free Book Online

She couldn’t sleep last night, and so she had tossed and turned and sobbed into her pillow until dawn. Then she fell asleep out of exhaustion. The good thing was she probably lost a lot of pounds with all that activity.
    Then she woke up with a start. Someone was at the opening flap of her tent.
    “Ellen?” It was Cole. “You OK?”
    He called you a fat cow. He was laughing. Making fun of you.
    Ellen’s soul cringed .
    You can’t believe her!
    And yet, it might be true. He might be thinking that exact thing when he saw her. She was fat all right. You can’t deny that .
    “Ellen, are you OK?” he repeated. There was concern in his voice. He was a silhouette in the opening.
    So you stayed. But you can’t stay in this tent forever. You need to pee.
    The man who was preventing her from peeing wasn’t going to move any time soon. Ellen sighed and sat up. She was going to have to face him sooner or later.
    “Can I come in?” Cole said.
    “Sure.” She paused, wrinkling her nose. There was something she had forgotten to say. “Oh, good morning.”
    “Good morning.” He came in. “It’s dark in here. May I turn the lights on?”
    And see her splotchy red face?
    “No. It’ll hurt my, uh, eyes.” Yeah, like she developed photophobia all of a sudden.
    “OK.” 
    He seemed to be able to move in the dark fairly well. Maybe it was because he was a full tiger shifter. He pulled up a chair and sat a little distance away from her bed.
    He said, “Did your sister say anything before she left?”
    “Um, yeah.”
    “What did she say?”
    She was silent for a long while. Then she decided she had nothing to hide.
    “She said . . . she said . . . ” It was difficult to get the words out “ . . . that you laughed at me when you saw me. That you called me – ”
    A lump choked her throat.
    “ – a fat cow.”
    “What?” He was incredulous.
    “I’m sure she said it was a cow. Well, it was a definitely a bovine. If it were a pig, I would have thought of that nursery rhyme, you know. The one that says, ‘To market, to market, to buy a fat pig’. And funnily enough, I can’t remember how the rest of it goes.”
    “Ellen – ”
    “Because, you know, tigers aren’t supposed to be fat. Not even the one in Calvin and Hobbes. It makes no sense for tigers to be fat whatsoever, because they would, like, die.”
    “Ellen , I never called you a – ”
    “ Because they can’t chase after their prey, right? So that makes me a non-survivor. If we were in the jungle, which we are now, I won’t be able to survive. Did you know that I haven’t shifted in, like, forever? I don’t think I’ve shifted since I was thirteen. I can’t even remember how to.”
    She paused.
    He didn’t say anything.
    She went on, “ I’m afraid to shift . . . because I’m afraid that I’d be a fat tiger. Not because my neighbors are haters or because there’s a neighborhood ordinance against shifting . . . but because I was afraid I’d be fat as a tiger too.”
    Another sob welled up in her chest.
    “But I can’t help it. I keep eating . . . and eating . . . and then I feel depressed, and the only thing that makes it go away is the food.”
    She stopped, unable to continue.
    Stupid, stupid, stupid . Why did you have to go and say all those things to him?
    He waited a long time, listening to her soft sniffles. Then he got up and traversed the space between them. It was dark, but not that dark, thanks to the light outside filtering in from under the tent, and she could still see him as a dark shape with texture and nuance. She could definitely hear him breathe and smell his manly musk, undisguised by any artificial scent.
    “Come here,” he said. “Let me hug you.”
    He held his arms out in the dark.
    After just a moment’s hesitation, s he went to them. He was warm and solid and oh-so-comforting. How long has it been since she had been held by a man? She couldn’t remember. But now that she was being held again, it was