Carnival of Hearts: BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance by Scarlett Rhone Page B

before he looked away again. They disappeared around a corner and Kat was left in that cage, trapped, with a very naked man who could turn into a wolf, and probably would, and would probably eat her, before the night was over.

Chapter 20
    The tamer’s whip would leave permanent scars and Max knew that. No doubt it was designed to, given its silver edge. Though the tamer had only had him for a quarter of an hour before the girl had intervened, Max felt even weaker. Between the wound in his side and now the marks left by the whip, he could barely lift his head. He needed time to heal, to recover, so that when his pack returned to destroy the carnival, he would be ready to join them in the fighting. The girl had just bought him some time, and he was only slightly ashamed of himself for having been rescued by a human girl. Kat; her name was Kat. And he could smell her again, in the cage with him this time. He could feel the human heat coming off her skin even though she’d backed herself up to the other side of the cage from him.
    “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said after a while, when his throat had stopped throbbing from the pain of the whip.
    “Oh, well, that’s comforting,” she muttered.
    “He wouldn’t have left you in here with me if he thought I was physically strong enough to hurt you.”
    She frowned. “I’m not actually sure that’s true.”
    “You’re the Ringmaster’s daughter, but you’re human.”
    He finally felt like he could sit up, so he shoved himself up with his arms and more or less collapsed back against the bars of the cage across from her. She looked at him, as if she expected him to lunge at her, but then he realized she was staring at him. She must have realized it too because she looked quickly away, and he saw color climb into her cheeks. She was blushing. He couldn’t help but smile a little.
    “And you live amongst shifters, but you’re uncomfortable with nudity. I don’t know which is weirder.”
    She lowered her eyes to her lap. “Yes, great, I’m weird. Never heard that before.”
    He found that he couldn’t look away from her profile. “How did you end up in a place like this?”
    “I was abandoned. He found me. He didn’t abandon me.”
    “Why did you stop your tamer from torturing me?”
    She lifted her eyes and looked at him. In the warm lantern lights strung along the lane above the cages, her eyes glimmered, brilliantly emerald.
    “Because I think it’s wrong,” she told him simply. “I think it’s wrong to hurt someone. I hate that shifters fight like this. It’s—it’s—”
    He smiled sharply. “Inhuman. But we’re not human.”
    She sighed. “I was going to say that it’s barbaric. And humans can be barbaric too. It isn’t that you’re not human. It’s that you all care so much about power and not at all about people. My father cares about people; that’s why this place exists. But then you come in, and others like you, and he has to care about power more. And we suffer. And you suffer. And none of it is for anything .”
    Max growled. “It is too for something.”
    “What?” she asked. “What’s it for?”
    “You’re human , you could never understand.” He folded his arms and shifted slightly away from her in his slouch against the side of the cage.
    “Yeah, never heard that one before either.” She shifted away from his as well.
    Exhausted and annoyed by this conversation, Max curled up on the straw again instead of sitting upright. She seemed as uninterested in talking to him as he was in talking to her, and so he decided it was better to sleep and heal than tolerate her. But even when he closed his eyes, he saw her profile illuminated by the lamplight in his mind, and found it impossibly appealing, which only annoyed him more. He’d never been so drawn to a human before. He’d never found one even remotely attractive. He preferred his own kind. The females in his pack were proud and strong and fierce; he had yet to choose