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

work. Well, ‘helping’ was very technical, and she certainly hoped she was ‘helping’ by contributing to the digging, though she suspected she showered more sand onto her co-diggers than the growing pile outside the pit.
    Still, it was one extra shovel, and she felt real proud that her arms hurt at the end of every day. OK . . . arms, back, shoulders, chest, thighs . . .
    When she wasn’t digging, she was reading up on ancient shifter civilizations and what to look out for in archeology. She wasn’t doing it because this was her husband-to-be. In fact, he didn’t even broach the subject of marriage since.
    Maybe he had forgotten about it.
    But this time, she told herself sternly that it wasn’t going to affect her. She was just going to go with the flow.
    Yeah, baby! I’m a paper boat on a river!
    She was much happier this way. There were no expectations because she didn’t allow herself to have any expectations. And when you weren’t expecting anything from Cole Devereaux, he could be real fun.
    He was absolutely taken by his work, for starters. She could tell the passion he had for it by the way he spoke.
    He told her, “I must have been a kid of around four or five. My parents took me to Chesapeake Bay one summer. I was digging behind the bungalow we rented, and I found an arrowhead.”
    “That must have been real exciting to a kid.”
    “It was to me. I also found a used condom next to it, but the arrowhead was the most exciting thing I’ve ever found. From then on, I went digging everywhere. I dug in my backyard. I dug in the neighbors’ backyard. Like a gopher, I wasn’t too popular. But I found lots of stuff. Coins. Shards of pottery. Arrowheads.
    “ I kept them all in my little ‘museum’. Most kids had a playroom. I converted mine to a museum of artifacts and made little labels for everything I had, including full Wikipedia explanations for what they were and where they were found. I actually charged my friends an entrance fee for my museum.”
    “Really? And did they pay up?”
    “ Only when I threw in some enlarged photos of boobs.”
    “Do you still have that museum?”
    “Sadly, my parents moved to a penthouse, and they didn’t want me to bring all that junk, as they called it. So I rented a storage place and I’ve kept everything there since.” He smiled. “Maybe I’ll show it to you one day.”
    One day? So there was a ‘one day’ future with her in it?
    She smiled happily back.
    No expectations.
    No regrets .
    That was going to be her motto from now on.
     
    *
     
    At meal times, they dined together or with the men. The food was simple. Between her improved eating habits and the hard shoveling, she found her clothes getting loose. Pity I don’t have a weighing scale along. I must have lost weight .
    But she wasn’t even obsessed about her weight anymore, even though she was losing more and more millimeters off her waistline.
    That night, the moon was particularly sharp. The air was cooler than normal, and there was a tingle in the wind which brought out the color in her cheeks. She felt more energetic than she had in a long time. She wondered if part of it was because she had shed the burden of her toxic sister.
    After a simple dinner of corn mush and beans with the digging team, Cole said, “Do you want to take a walk?”
    “Sure. But isn’t it going to get , like, really dark?”
    “Not with the moon this way.” He grinned. “Since when did we ever have to worry about it being dark?”
    She knew what he meant, but she didn’t have his tiger senses. She was really diluted down the bloodlines, and she suspected her senses were not very different from a normal human’s.
    “ Uh, should I bring a flashlight?”
    His eyes crinkled with amusement. “You’re afraid you’d trip.”
    “No.”
    “You sure?”
    “Uh . . . no. I mean, I’m not sure I wouldn’t trip . . . not that I’m not sure I wouldn’t need a flashlight. Uh . . . ” Now she was getting all